Maynard's Midas Touch

James Maynard '65 built a billion-dollar business by
satisfying America's appetite for good food served right


By Suzanne Wood
Photos by Forrest Croce

At first glance, the slender gentleman in the navy blazer with salt and pepper hair looks like many of the business people and office workers spilling out of their cars at lunch time and into the buffet lines at the Golden Corral restaurant in Raleigh. Like everyone else he waits in line to pay for his meal before carrying his tray into the dining area. Then it starts. “Hello, Mr. Maynard,” says a waitress. “How are you, Mr. Maynard,” says a manager. More restaurant employees call out greetings when the gentleman visits the cold buffet and later when he finds a table. It makes one wonder whether this “Mr. Maynard” is some local luminary or perhaps one of the restaurant’s lunchtime regulars.

In a way, James Maynard ’65 is both. As co-founder and chairman of the company that runs the Golden Corral restaurant chain, Maynard has become an institution in the American restaurant industry. Known for his financial acumen, Maynard’s deal-making savvy and vision helped transform a single steakhouse in Fayetteville into a chain of nearly 500 restaurants with annual sales of more than $1 billion. Golden Corral now is No. 1 in the family-style buffet restaurant industry with a 40 percent share of the ­market. Success on such a scale often brings invitations to some pretty exclusive places, but most days Maynard still makes the short drive from Golden Corral’s headquarters to the company-owned restaurant on Glenwood Avenue, near Crabtree Valley Mall, where he chats warmly with the staff and keeps in touch with customers.

Not that he has to be this hands-on. As chairman and majority owner of Investors Management Corp., the holding company that owns Golden Corral, Maynard, 65, has about 200 people at headquarters who keep things running smoothly, not to mention the 13,000 who cook, serve, run cash registers and clean up at the restaurants. It’s just hard to change a work ethic that’s been more than 50 years in the making.

“I truly have the best of worlds,” he says. “I can get up and decide to travel or do something with my family, or I can come to the office. But I usually work every day.”

He’s been working nearly every workday—and, when he was younger, weekends too—since he first started helping his dad, Benn, with his contracting business in Jacksonville. One of his first weekend ­assignments as a teenager was to visit his dad’s customers and collect the receivables, which taught him a valuable lesson in cash flow, salesmanship and negotiation. Those skills later would all prove invaluable when he and a partner were trying to open their first restaurant in the early 1970s.


Learning Life and People

Maynard was still working for his dad when he entered East Carolina University in 1959. Benn Maynard had contracted to do the mechanical work on Jones Residence Hall. In fact, Maynard worked so much that it took him almost six years to graduate.
But he still managed to enjoy his major—psychology—and thinks it has benefited him as much as a business degree.

“I thought it would be interesting, and I found it was interesting, although my primary ambition was to get in my four years and go to work. Later I realized how much I had learned,” recalls Maynard. “Dr. Clinton Prewett, who ran the psychology department, really made an impression on me as far as how to get along in life and how to understand people. As it turns out now, this is a people business—we find talented people and try to work well with them.”

When he wasn’t working on construction sites or other odd jobs, Maynard was courting, and then being a young husband, to Connie Mizelle Maynard ’62, an elementary education major. Maynard says meeting her was the best thing to happen to him at ECU—or anywhere else, for that matter. The two met at the campus soda shop where Connie worked. The couple, which recently celebrated their 45th anniversary, have two children. Daughter Easter Maynard, 34, is a former social worker, full-time mom to 2-year-old Lila and a literacy advocate. She is married to John Parker. Son Quinton, 26, is a financial analyst who recently joined the company’s real estate and finance division.

Working from New York, he scouts potential sites for future Golden Corrals.“I don’t expect (Quinton) to have a long career here, but because I think it’s a good opportunity for him to learn that side of the business I said, ‘Give it a year,’” recalls Maynard. “I’ve really tried hard to let both of my children find their own way while always assuring them that they were welcome to come to work here. Otherwise I think it’s too much pressure on your kids.”

Even though his daughter has chosen her own path and his son’s tenure with the company may be brief, Maynard is still surrounded by many associates who’ve known him so long that they’re practically family. His executive assistant, Doris Baldwin, has been with him for 29 years. And the executive suite and management ranks at Golden Corral could almost qualify as an ECU alumni chapter. Gene Aman ’65, the holding company’s vice president, has known Maynard for nearly 50 years. Irwin Roberts, another vice president, also is an ECU alum, as is Louis W. Sewell Jr., who sits on the board after having worked at Golden Corral until his retirement. Further down the organizational chart are several younger managers who fly the purple and gold flag. And of the first six investors who took a chance on Maynard and his first partner, the late Bill Carl, four were ECU alumni (including Sewell and Aman). Other ECU ties include Maynard’s sister, Llew Jean White ’65, her husband, George ’65, and Connie’s sister, Mary Latham Waters ’66 and her husband, Harold ’66.

“One of the great things about ECU is that we were all from eastern North Carolina. It was pretty easy to be friends because of the ties we all had. I like the idea that eastern North Carolina is the focal point of all these relationships. One of the great things about this business is doing it with friends who become business associates or partners, and then there are the business associates or co-workers who become friends. I see the company as a great place to build a future. Land, buildings—those are just the necessary tools. The real deal is to find people who love serving others. We have a motto here that goes ‘If you have the attitude, you can train the skills’”

Another friend and ECU alumnus is Raleigh developer Roddy Jones ’58. Jones had the opportunity to work with Golden Corral as it kept growing and needing land. Today, he and Maynard are good friends.

“I think he’s a visionary,” says Jones. “He sees things before they happen. For instance, he decided to change the company’s concept (in the late ‘80s) because he thought that people would quit eating steaks. Under their new family-buffet model, which requires bigger stores and a bigger menu, they’ve become even more profitable. That’s hard to do.”


How It all Started

Back in the steak-happy heyday of the early ’70s, Maynard had vision but not much else. Specifically, he needed money, which he and partner Bill Carl discovered was not readily handed over to two young men with little business experience. Maynard and Carl met when they both worked for Burroughs Corp. in Palm Beach, Fla. The two friends knew they wanted to start a business together, so they set out to acquire a franchise in one of the growing family-style restaurant chains. Their lack of capital and restaurant experience, however, did not exactly impress the companies to which they applied; they were turned down by every major franchisor. So like the puffy yeast rolls for which Golden Corral would eventually become famous, Maynard and Carl created a restaurant from scratch. A friend in the steakhouse business agreed to teach Carl the restaurant side of things, and Maynard, familiar with running a construction business, took on the financier and developer roles. He raised $20,000 from family and friends—including a few ECU alumni—and borrowed $20,000 from the bank. Still, they were short of what they needed to get their own steakhouse off the ground.

In an early display of his deal-making acuity, Maynard invested all his stockholders’ money in Carolina Wholesale Florist, a small public company that had capital but no earnings. He then persuaded the floral company to partner in the Golden Corral venture, with the understanding that Investors Management Corp. would take control of the floral company, sell the assets and use the proceeds to get the restaurant started. Two years and $50,000 later, the first restaurant finally opened Jan. 3, 1973, on Bragg Boulevard in Fayetteville as a family-style steakhouse. Golden Corral was profitable the first month. But the golden touch did not seem to reach the second and third restaurants which opened nine and eighteen months later.

“By the time we opened our second restaurant in 1973, the price of beef had nearly tripled. To make matters worse, President Nixon froze the price of cattle, and the supply of steaks available to restaurants totally dried up,” says Maynard. “It nearly broke us. We literally could not buy sirloin for our restaurants. We had to go to Canada to buy a truckload of beef, use what we needed, and sell what we couldn’t use to others. We survived by the skin of our teeth.” It also helped that Maynard’s father, Benn, was the contractor who built restaurants No. 2 through 50, freeing Maynard from construction-related worries and allowing the two to work together once again.

But the company did survive and slowly came to thrive. “The success we’ve had is the outcome of hard work and James’ persistence, ability to overcome adversity, and his keen financial and analytical skills,” says Ted Fowler, president and CEO of Golden Corral Corp., who joined the company when it had just 20 locations. “He really has a growth orientation. Plus, to know James is to like him. He can treat people from a truck driver to a mayor as if they are distinct, unique human beings. When you’re with James, you feel like you’ve got his full attention.”

Maynard’s college friend and early investor, Gene Aman, also points to Maynard’s complement of business skills and solid character traits as being crucial to the company’s success. “He’s committed to seeing things through. He doesn’t have a driving desire for money. People are more important to him than money. He believes in God, and he believes that if you say you’ll do something, you’ll do it.”


Valuing education

One of the things Maynard has committed to do over the years is helping educational causes. Part of the reason he lends his support to education is as a tribute to Connie, who taught second grade for six years. And then there’s this: “We have this great heritage of turning out great educators at ECU. I don’t think there’s anything more important than helping children get a good education.”

Maynard and his wife have funded several scholarships at ECU, including one in memory of his brother, Benn, an accomplished musician who died from rheumatic fever when he was 16 and James was 13. The scholarship benefits promising music majors at ECU who attended Jacksonville High School, Maynard’s alma mater. Another scholarship honors Connie’s mother, Jeannette. Maynard also started a program at Elizabeth City State University that offers scholarships to young men who agree to teach in public schools in northeastern North Carolina. He also donates his time to education, having served on the ECU Board of Trustees from 1980-1989.

Then there’s the ChildTrust Foundation, which Maynard’s company established in 2003 with an initial grant of $3.5 million. The ChildTrust Foundation supports literacy programs and has already made more than $300,000 in grants to educational organizations in North Carolina. Eventually, grant opportunities will be available to organizations wherever Golden Corral has a franchise. And in 1987, the Golden Corral Corp. established the Connie M. Maynard Education Fund, which provides interest-free college loans to Golden Corral employees. Now run and funded by the company, the fund has distributed more than $1 million to its workers nationwide.

Last year, the N.C. Hospitality Education Foundation—which is run by the N.C. Restaurant Association—named Maynard its first-ever recipient of the Excellence in Education award. It’s just one of many ­honors and awards that are listed on his resume. He won’t bring them up himself, but if asked he says one of the honors he’s most proud of is induction into the Order of the Long Leaf Pine, which Gov. Mike Easley presided over in 2003. It’s one of the highest civilian honors awarded by the State of North Carolina.


The Man Behind the Menu

These days, though, his biggest honor is being called “grandpa.” Pictures of his granddaughter, Lila—whom he calls “the light of our lives”—adorn his office. She and her parents live only a mile away from the Maynard home, so James and Connie can spoil her anytime the fancy strikes. “I like to take her to the restaurant and give her vegetables and watch her eat them,” Maynard says with a grin. There are other tokens of Maynard’s family in his office, including a large portrait of a young Easter and Quinton with their border-collie mix, Sparkle.

Family pictures occupy prominent places in his office, as does a painting of wild ponies on a sand dune. At first the painting seems like just a nice decorative touch, but it turns out to have a family association, too. When Maynard was a boy he begged his father for a horse so often that his dad relented and paid $10 for a wild pony that had been rounded up from Shackleford Island, where a herd of the sturdy, fuzzy ponies has thrived for generations. Armed with boyish enthusiasm and a home-study course on horsemanship that he had ordered through the mail, Maynard was able to turn “Tony” into his trusty steed, riding him through the neighborhoods of Jacksonville until was old enough to get his driver’s license. At that point, Tony was “regifted” to another horse-crazy young boy. The scene depicted in the painting is very much like the view that Maynard has when he looks out the window of his vacation home in Beaufort, where the family often relaxes and recharges.

Maynard may enjoy his seaside fishing, boating and water skiing weekends and ­vacations, but he’s not yet ready to transition into a permanent life of leisure. He’s got plenty to keep him busy and future-oriented, including Golden Corral expansion plans that include adding several new units this year and overseeing his investment firm, Maynard Capital Partners, which is managed by Gene Aman. “I don’t see James retiring anytime soon,” says Aman. “He enjoys the process too much.

If and when he does retire, there’s a good chance you’ll still find James Maynard going through the lunch buffet at the Golden Corral on Glenwood Avenue on any given weekday. He will be the one all the servers know by name.


A James Maynard/Golden Corral Smorgasbord
His companies: Investors Management Corp., parent company of Golden Corral Corp; Maynard Capital Partners, a venture capital firm.
Company headquarters: Raleigh
Number of Golden Corral units in 2005: 470 in 40 states.
Golden Corral sales in 2005: $1.43 billion (estimated). The chain serves about 2.8 million customers each week.
Key business successes: Surviving the recession of the early 1970s; transforming Golden Corral in the late 1980s-early 1990s from a steakhouse to a buffet-style restaurant with a variety of healthy hot and cold foods.
Key ECU affiliations/awards: Board of Trustees, 1980-89; benefactor of four scholarships; 1980 Outstanding Alumnus of the Year
Key restaurant industry honors: 1981 Restaurateur of the Year, N.C. Restaurant Association; 1993 Thad Eure Jr. Hospitality Industry Award, N.C. Restaurant Association; 2005 Excellence in Education Award, N.C. Restaurant Association; 2005 Educational Foundation College of Diplomats Award, National Restaurant Association.
Key business/civic award: The Newcomen Society Award for Outstanding Business Leadership, 2002 (shared with Ted Fowler, president and CEO of Golden Corral Corp.); Order of the Long Leaf Pine, Gov. Mike Easley/State of North Carolina, 2003.
Quotable quote: “We have a belief that you will be rewarded in direct proportion to the service and value you provide others.”

Return to magazine index