AEW’s Mike Mansury Reveals Why He Left WWE, Being Heir Apparent To Kevin Dunn

New AEW Senior Vice President and Co-Executive Producer Mike Mansury was recently a guest on The Sessions with Renee Paquette. Mansury discussed what led to him leaving WWE after working there for eleven years. Read on for the details:

On how intense his schedule had become: “I’d gotten to a certain point in my career there where I wasn’t really being developed any further. My schedule was pretty wild at the time. Those last six months before I left WWE, I would do RAW on Mondays. Tuesday I would fly from wherever we were in the world to LA to go do backstage; take a red-eye from LA on Tuesday night to Orlando. Sleep on the plane. Go do NXT, which at that point had gone live on USA. Work office hours on Thursday; I would fly back to New York with HHH on Wednesday night, get home about 2-230. Thursday was prepping for everything to come after, Friday we would do Smackdown. Saturday would be a down-day, and Sunday… at that point it felt like we had a PPV every other week. It was a lot. I didn’t mind it.”

On being heir apparent to Kevin Dunn: “It was always inferred, I think at some point even formalized, that should anything have happened or if he decided to retire, I was going to be the successor to Kevin Dunn on the TV side. At that point, I was self-aware enough to know that I couldn’t do it. Not in the sense that I couldn’t do the shows. I could do RAW and Smackdown in my sleep. PPVs, no problem. I’d shown them that I could do it. It’s moreso the business end of it, the non-TV side of what that role is. There’s more to what Kevin does than just sit in a truck and line-produce RAW, Smackdown, whatever show it is.”

On his career ending up on hold based on Kevin Dunn: “I’d grown tired of hearing “we can’t figure out what do with you until we know what Kevin’s future is.” My review was always, you’re doing a great job, you’re killing it, but we don’t really know what to do until we get an understanding of what Kevin’s future is.”

On realizing he needed take on a new challenge: “I knew that there was more that I was capable of, but I had already excelled at everything they had allowed me to do at that point. It would have been nice to have been able to spread my wings a little bit and take on a new challenge. Once I realized I was in the lane I was in, and the path to the destination wasn’t really going to change or progress that much, I knew it was time to make a change.”

On the night he told management he was done: “I think it was the first RAW of March, we were in Brooklyn. The manager at the time was sitting next to me in the B-unit. It was a local show, a lot of folks had come in. I said hey, I’d like to talk to you and Katy this week. I’m tapped out, I’m done.”

If you use any of the above quotations, please credit The Sessions h/t 411mania for the transcription.