A lot of MonaVie distributors seem to tout the fact that Inc. magazine named MonaVie it’s #1 choice in Food and Beverage and 18th overall. A few things should be noted about this list:

• It’s a list of privately held companies – You won’t see Coca-Cola, Pepsi, ConAgra foods or other giants on the list. What are the other nine companies in the top 10? I’m glad you asked: GourmetGiftBaskets.com, SmartPrice Sales & Marketing, Innovative Foods, The Snack Factory, SoDel Concepts, LesserEvil Brand Snack, Mary’s Gone Crackers, Plenus Group, Oskar Blues Brewery. Congrats if you’ve heard of any of those. It’s not exactly an All-Star line-up of the top food companies in America.
• It’s a “Fastest Growing” list – From the You can read more on that in the methodology, it’s clear that they are measuring growth. It’s easy to start out small and grow. It’s hard to sustain that growth over the long term.
• It ranks revenue – Want to make this list? Simply give away $5 bills for 1 dollar. You can easily book $1 billion in revenue, but you’ll lose $4 billion dollars. Is that a top business? I don’t think so.
• It doesn’t verify the numbers that a company reports – There’s no independent accounting firm verifying the revenue numbers are actually correct. It’s all self-reported. A company could easily give different numbers than the actual truth.
• Perfect timing for MonaVie – The methodology says it’s a measure of revenue growth from 2005 to 2008 – which just happens to be a convenient time range for MonaVie. If the company picked 2003 or just took the last year into effect, you’d see MonaVie drop quite a bit from the list.
• It’s not important to most companies – From the methodology link above, “A number of companies had growth high enough to make the Inc. 500, the top 500 of the Inc. 5000, but did not complete the revenue verification portion of the application process in time for Inc. magazine’s deadline.” If it was important to companies, you’d think they’d complete the paperwork right? And if they did, it’s possible that MonaVie could have dropped.
• It’s something the company has to apply to Inc. for – There could have been numerous other companies that are… well perhaps too busy running their company to care about applying to Inc. Magazine for this.

And the most important reason why this award means nothing? Call it the LHR effect. Who is LHR? Read the NBC Dateline story here. Specifically you want to focus on page 4 of the article. A company called LHR, also named to Inc. 500 list, is a debt collection company. Representatives of the company were told to lie by the company if necessary to make the sale. One representative claimed to be a military liaison and that the person was going to kicked out of the military if they didn’t pay.

Here is a direct quote from that story:

Tina Erdley: The FDCPA regulates what we say on the phone.
Dateline: But she says following the law is optional.
Tina Erdley: But once you get on the phone and are actually talking to somebody, you kinda say what you need to say.

Hmm, one can’t imagine that a MonaVie distributor would ever “say what you need to say” to make a sale once they are in a meeting. Perhaps this is why so many distributors say that drinking MonaVie is equal to eating 13 fruits, has the protein of an egg, helped their cancer or autism.

Update 2: Inc. Magazine further advocates that getting involved in Multi-level Marketing business is a bad idea.