Really interesting story about the guy who invented and promoted the little 5-Hour Energy drinks you now see everywhere.
From Forbes:
The Mystery Monk Making Billions With 5-Hour EnergyI love this guy! Classic entrepreneur. A long (three page) article and a fun read.
In one corner of Manoj Bhargava�s office is a cemetery of sorts. It�s a Formica bookcase, its shelves lined with hundreds of garishly colored screw-top plastic bottles not much taller than shot glasses. Front and center is a Cadillac-red bottle of 5-Hour Energy, the two-ounce caffeine and vitamin elixir that purports to keep you alert without crashing. In eight years 5-Hour has gone from nowhere to $1 billion in retail sales. Truckers swear by it. So do the traders in Oliver Stone�s 2010 sequel to Wall Street. So do hungover �students. It�s $3 a bottle, and it has made Bhargava a fortune.
His company, Living Essentials, is the biggest player by far in the �energy-shot market, and not because 5-Hour is so delicious. Chalky cough syrup is more like it. The reason Bhargava has won is that he plays tough. Sitting in that cemetery are a dozen or so neon copycats with names like 6-Hour Power and 8-Hour Energy. Each has been sued, bullied or kicked off the market by Living Essentials� lawyers. In front of each are little placards with a skull and crossbones drawn in felt-tip pen. Bhargava points at the gravestone of one of his late competitors and says with a chuckle, �Rest in peace.�
The privately held Living Essentials doesn�t report revenue or profits, but a source with knowledge of its financials says the company grossed north of $600 million last year on that $1 billion at retail. The source says the company netted about $300 million. Checkout scan data from research firm SymphonyIRI say that 5-Hour has 90% of the energy-shot market. Its closest competitor, NVE Pharmaceuticals� Stacker brand, has just over 3%.
Yet Bhargava, 58, is so under the radar that he barely registers on Web searches. His paper trail is thin, consisting primarily of more than 90 lawsuits. This is his first press interview. �I�m killing it right now,� he says, adjusting a black zip-up cardigan from behind the table of a soulless conference room in a beige low-rise building in a suburban business park in Farmington Hills, Mich. �But you�ll Google me and find, like, some lawyer in Singapore.�
Vague and inscrutable is how �Bhargava likes things. The names of 5-Hour�s parent company, Living Essentials LLC, and that company�s parent firm, Innovation Ventures, are purposely bland. �They were intended as placeholders, and they stuck,� he says, smiling.
