[BusinessWeek] – November 16, 2009 – MonaVie Founder, Chairman, and CEO Dallin A. Larsen won the top honors in the Emerging category at this year’s national Ernst & Young national Entrepreneur Of The Year® Awards, November 14, 2009. This is an event that BusinessWeek reports is “the Oscars for Business.” In the news magazine publication’s coverage of the black tie awards gala, Business Week says MonaVie has demonstrated “stunning growth” since Larsen founded the company in 2005. Read more about Larsen and MonaVie in the article “Meet the Entrepreneurs of the Year,” found in the “Success Stories” section of BusinessWeek.com.
Dallin Larsen
Monavie
Emerging Category Winner
MonaVie, a Salt Lake City-based producer of a nutritional drink made from the Brazilian açai berry and 18 other fruits, has demonstrated stunning growth since Dallin Larsen founded it in 2005. The company brought in $854 million in revenue in 2008, says the 50-year-old Larsen. But don’t look for MonaVie on store shelves. The company uses a “network selling” or “multilevel marketing” sales structure, like Amway’s or Mary Kay Cosmetic’s, where customers are actually independent distributors recruited to sell to friends and neighbors. Critics say this structure often misrepresents how much people will make and puts too much focus on signing up new salespeople. Larsen instead paints it as the most effective way to sell a product that needs a story or explanation behind it. He says more than 1 million people have signed up for MonaVie, which goes for about $40 a bottle, and the company has hundreds of thousands of active sellers. About 75% of them are actually buying MonaVie for personal use, he says, but others are making a small extra income and a select few are bringing in big bucks. “I never say this is get rich quick. It’s not. This is hard work,” he says. Some açai marketers credit the juice with miracle properties like anti-aging or weight-loss, but Larsen claims his product is simply an effective way to get antioxidants. “As a company, we don’t make any claims that this product treats, cures, or mitigates disease.”
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