MonaVie and Inc. Magazine’s 500

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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.

Originally posted 2010-01-09 18:45:10.

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Posted by MonaVie Scam on July 23, 2010 in MonaVie & Inc Magazine. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

2 Responses to “MonaVie and Inc. Magazine’s 500”

Jim Melloan Says:
January 28th, 2010 at 1:35 pm
Most of the points you make about the Inc. 500 and MonaVie are fair, but as the project manager for the Inc. 500 list I’d like to set the record straight on verification. It is not true that we do not verify the numbers that companies report. Companies must submit verification documents to make the list. They may submit corporate tax forms for the years in question, audits, or our own Revenue Certification Form, which must be signed by the CEO and by a CPA or other accredited person. The idea here is that if information comes to light that a company has provided us with false information, and they have submitted a form with the signature of a CPA or someone with similar credentials, we can inform the state accrediting entity about that person’s actions. True that people can still lie to us, as they can lie to the IRS and auditors, but not at all true that we don’t make a reasonable effort to verify the numbers.
–Jim Melloan
Project Manager, Inc. 500|5000
Inc. magazine
MonaVie Scam Says:
January 28th, 2010 at 2:07 pm
Thanks for the clarification, Mr. Melloan. I didn’t see how that verification was outlined in the methodology. I figured that you’d take on signed documents as you suggest, but I wanted to make the distinction that you don’t actually go in an perform an audit… nor do you seem to require an a very established auditor verify the numbers. I don’t suggest that you should, but just what you said in the end, “people can still lie to us.”

I think that in some places (like this one or this one), I’ve shown that MonaVie has a history of not telling the truth. On another level the Consumerist even wrote a story about how they tried to shut me… and I do is ask questions that they don’t want asked.

MonaVie distributors are spreading the word around the Internet that they are Inc. Magazine’s #1 Food and Beverage and point to this link: http://www.inc.com/inc5000/2009/lists/top-industry-food—beverage.html. It would greatly helpful to consumers if you clarified that page with some of the bullet points mentioned here, so it’s not considered an endorsement from Inc. Magazine as to the value the products there.

I would like to add that a couple of months ago, I did subscribe to your magazine and I quite enjoy it. (It was a great price on Amazon.com, and I couldn’t resist it.)