How I Built This with Guy Raz - 5-Hour Energy: Manoj Bhargava

Episode Date: March 13, 2017

After living as a monk in India and running a plastics company in Florida, Manoj Bhargava decided to launch something new: a one-shot energy drink in a bright, battery-shaped bottle. Today, 5-Hour ENERGY is one of the most recognizable energy drinks in the world. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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Airbnb.ca.ca. slash host. Were people trying to copy the concept? Yes, there were somewhere, I think sort of the knockoff market became like sort of three to four hundred of them. Everybody came in and said, oh, we can do this. Coke, Pepsi, Red Bull Monster. When they all came in, Actually, our market share dipped from about 93% down to 67%. However, the one thing they all forgot was you have to have a great product. From NPR, it's How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built. I'm Guy Raz, and on today's show how a former Hindu monk turned a tiny bottle of caffeine

and vitamins into a billion-dollar business. Okay, full disclosure, I have, on the rare occasion, swallowed the contents of a five-hour energy bottle. I mean, I host two podcasts, and sometimes I've just got to get stuff done late at night. And I bet a lot of you have bought a bottle of this stuff at the airport or pulled up to a gas station late at night and added it to your pile of twicks and Doritos and Diet Coke, right? So how does it work? Well, I don't exactly know. I mean, caffeine is magic, right? But I can tell you, this little bottle made Monge Bargava a billionaire.

And when he turned 14, this is in the late 1960s, Mnose's dad decided to come to the U.S. from India to pursue a degree. So the whole family packed up and moved to a tiny apartment in West Philadelphia and started life all over again. And they didn't have a whole lot of money, so every kid in the family had to work after school. And when Minoshe was old enough to get a driver's license, he scraped together enough money to buy a dump truck.

It was the worst dump truck in the history of humankind. It cost me $350, so it was pretty beat up. It leaked every fluid possible, water, oil, gas, transmission fluid. Wow, sounds like a nice truck. Yeah. So I would park it in the evening. everything would leak out by the end of the morning. So, wait, why did you buy the dump truck?

Well, I got a job to clean houses in the ghetto in Philadelphia. These were either abandoned houses or houses that were being built. So I hired somebody, some other kid, and we used to go and clean the houses, throw everything on the truck, go to the dump site, and try to dump this thing, which, of course, the dump doesn't work very all either. So we have to get on the top of the truck and portion everything, jump up and down and try to shove it down. Wow. It's probably a toughest job I've ever had. So how much money did you make doing this?

Like, was it really worth the money? Well, I made $500 for the summer, and then I sold a truck to somebody for $350, so I got all my money out of the truck. But you turned a profit. Well, yeah, there was a lot of – I don't know if it's a profit because we worked. 11 hours a day, five, six days a week, all summer for $500. So I wouldn't say it was an incredible amounts of profit there. Okay, so you do this, I guess, you know, as you are thinking about college, and then did you apply to college?

Well, I applied to a few schools and ended up at Princeton. That's pretty good. Yeah, it's okay. You know, I mean, I think my father was happier than I was. You weren't happy? Well, I mean, I was obviously honest I mean, about it. And I said, look, this is great, but this isn't...

I mean, you go to college for really one purpose. I know fancy people have different reasons like broaden your mind. Mostly everybody goes to college to get a better job. That's why you really go. And so I really wasn't interested in the trappings of a better job. So I said, I don't need this. This doesn't make any sense.

So I said, I got to find a fact. find something better. And so after finish the first year, and I left. You dropped out? I mean, didn't your parents freak out? Pretty much. Yeah, I would imagine. What do they say to you? You know, they were not happy for sure. They were like, what are you

doing? Of course, I pretended I'm just taking a year off. So what did you, like, what did you do? Did you go back to Philadelphia? No, actually for the next several years, I for lack of a better word, I'd say

I became a monk, kind of a monk. Like a monk in a monastery? Yes. Huh. I went to a bunch of places all over the place, but certainly a lot of places in India and found something which was really valuable. I practiced that for a lot of years.

And that's pretty much all I'm going to say about that. Yeah. I don't want to pry too much into the details of it. I just want to, I mean, it sounds like that had such a profound effect on who you became, that period of time. No doubt about it. That was actually my true education. It was sort of an education on what is life, how to live. And how to live is so fundamental because it affects how you do business, how you do interaction, how you do everything.

But also how to look at some things in a very fundamental way. Most of us tend to just assume things. Yeah. You know, whatever our parents taught us, whatever our society taught us. Well, all of that was taken away. Start from scratch. And that's a perspective, actually. That takes years.

And then you look at things differently. Did you work hard during that time? Did you do labor? Oh, yeah. A lot of work. It was really tough discipline. I mean, because you're never off, ever. Day and night, you're never off.

Yeah. How long were you away from the U.S.? Oh, for a lot of years. A lot time. But anyway, let's move on. Okay, no worries. But what did you do when you got back to the U.S.? Well, I guess my thought process at that time was that, you know,

I need to probably earn some money so I can support all the work that is being done, you know, in India. And then I bought a business that was going under. What kind of business was it? It was in plastics business. Wow. Did you know anything about plastics? No, but look, business is really like most things. It's just really about common sense.

Yeah. And we bought it for under liquidation value. So the bank financed the whole thing. And it was losing money. And I looked at it and I said, okay, I can fix it. So what was the business called? In the end, I called it Prime PVC. Well, their biggest product was chair straps.

You know the kind that are outdoor furniture? You know, the straps. Yep, yep, yep. So they invented the strap. Wow. They made that and then they got competition and then they got into trouble. Now, how did you even begin to think that this was what you could do? Because you had this incredible experience in India,

but I'm assuming you did not have any background in plastics. No, you just look at it and say, okay, you know, I don't know this stuff. I don't know how to go and make the plastic itself, but I know what it costs. I can figure that out. You cut away that stuff, which is losing money. All of a sudden, you're making money. Yeah.

So it's, you know, this is what turn around guys do. It's not rocket science, but if you use common sense, you're in great shape. If you use experts, you're in so much trouble. Yeah. How long would it take for you to turn that company around to make it profitable? Oh, that was 30 days. 30 days? Just by cutting costs and cutting the production time and...

Yeah, just a bunch of common sense stuff. You know, you look at, all right, where are we spending money, and why are we spending that much money? It's, like I said, it's just common sense. You say, okay, I spent $10,000 on this. Well, why? Is it making anything? No. Then cut it out.

So how long were you running this company? Well, I was involved in it for about seven years, and we grew it from basically from zero to about, I think when I left, it was $23 million in sales. Wow. So you sold that company? Yes, I kind of retired from it first. I said, okay, I've done this already. All right, I got to go do something else. So I left town.

So I'm assuming that when you sold this company, you were financially secure for the rest of your life. Yeah, I mean, pretty much. Okay, so how do you go from semi-retirement in the plastics industry to five-hour energy? Okay, so after my retirement, I thought, okay, what do I do now? And so I thought the only way to have residual income,

in other words, ongoing income, is to have something that you own. Right. You can either find an invention or I can invent something. You know, otherwise you don't have a business. So I think there's two ways to do it, whether it's invented yourself or the second is to find it. So I started a company that looked for great technologies worldwide

in the chemical area. And we got thousands of submissions from, PhDs all over the world. And then eventually what happened is we've found this technology. I found it in a natural products trade show. Where was it? This was in California. So you went to this trade show thinking maybe I'll do something in the natural foods world. Well, actually, the other way around, I went to the trade show to see if I could find something that I can buy or license. Right. So I went there and it turned out, I had a meeting with these guys that had this, some products.

So after the meeting, I left. And then it was like two in the afternoon. I thought, oh, my God, I got meetings till 10 at night. You know, I'm not going to survive. I'm tired already. So then they had some energy, some things. So I said, you know, I went back to them. I said, you know, you said you had energy product.

Can I get some? So they gave me a little bit. And my God, it was, I took it. I said, whoa, this is amazing. With these were just people displaying a product. at the trade show? Yes. And it was an energy drink.

Yeah, it was a big drink. It was a 16-ounce drink. Yeah. And it was amazing for the next, you know, hours and hours I just felt great. So I thought, okay, I could sell this. So I went back to them and these are, you know, science guys, PhDs and so on. And I'm just a lowly business guy. So they just basically sell, get lost.

What did you say? You said to them, hey, I want to work with you guys. I want to license this thing. I want to buy this from you. said, no, we're not interested. Correct. So I kind of looked at it and said, okay, I should be able to figure out very quickly. So, yeah, I looked at the label and I said, okay, this is a good starting point.

What was on, what was in the drink? I mean, when they list the ingredients, they don't tell you how much of what. Right. So you have to figure that out. So I said, eh, you know, how hard can it be? I'll figure it out. So you go back to where you live and you start to tinker with a recipe to, you try and recreate a version of this drink?

Right. My thought was, you know, if these guys come up with this, I can do better than this. Where were you doing this in like a kitchen in your house? Well, no, we, obviously, I still had a company, and so we were, we had labs and so on. So what I did wasn't really rocket science. It's, it's, people always ask you, oh, did you have a science background? Did you have a background in nutrition? Yeah. No, that only, that only messes you up further.

It doesn't really help you at all. Okay. Because most inventions have been made by people who didn't have a background in whatever they were inventing. If you look at throughout history, the great stuff was made by people who didn't follow the rules of the experts. Experts are great for telling you what you shouldn't do, and for that they're useful. Yeah. But what you should do? They don't have a clue.

So what were some of the ingredients? I'm just curious that they had that you were working on. What were you putting together? Basically, they were vitamins. amino acids. I mean, in layman terms, it would be vitamins for the brain. Okay. And so what we created was something that had really not much to do with energy,

but it had everything to do with focus. I mean, the first thing I do is, I mean, unfortunately, everybody laughs at me in the company as well, is I try everything on me. Right. Because if I'm not going to take it, then I'm not going to expect anybody else to. So I tried it on me and see if it actually does what it's supposed to do, and it does give you. better focus, better, you know, clarity.

Every product we make or I may get involved in is if I can't use it, if my family doesn't use it, I don't want to do it. Because then you're just a con man. You know, you're just selling people's stuff you don't use. I'm curious because at this, around this time, and this is the early 2000s, and there were lots of energy drinks out there on the market, right? So like how were you going to differentiate your product from others that were already out there? So I thought about it and I said, look, if I make another drink, first of all, I got to fight for space in the cooler.

Right. You know, against Red Bull, Monster. And I got also fight Coke, Pepsi, and Budweiser. So you're pretty much dead if you want to try that. And so I said, okay. And the second thing that came to my mind was, well, if I'm tired, why am I thirsty also? I mean, you know, I mean, it'd be like Tylenol selling 16 ounce bottles of Tylenol. I mean, no, I just want to do it quick.

I don't want to drink this whole thing. And at two ounces, it's really not a drink. It's a delivery system. So how did you take it from this thing in the lab to bottling it up and then trying to sell it to stores? How long did that process take? I think it took less than six months. You know, we tried the product, had it tested, had a bunch of people take it. So then we find a bottler.

And we say, okay, you make these things. had a design guy who designed the label and so on. And then off we went. We made the first batch. Functionally, it was great, but it tasted horrible. What did it taste like? Well, it tasted like cough syrup. Bad cough syrup, not even good cough syrup.

It was really bad. In just a moment, how Monoge Bargava turned that cough syrup into liquid gold. Stay with us. It's how I built this from NPR. It's How I Built This from NPR. I'm Guy Raz. First of all, isn't it totally nuts that the guy who invented five-hour energy sounds like he has never had a five-hour energy drink?

I mean, talk about chilled out. Anyway, at this point, Manoge had a company and a product that he was still tweaking. And the only thing left was to come up with a name. You know, I didn't pay attention to the advertising guys who said, oh, no, it's the branding, it's the imaging, it's the imaging. You know, you should name it Zip or Zap or something, you know. I said, no, no, no. I don't care.

To me, I understand function, and that's what we're going to do. So we named it five-hour energy. It's not a very clever name because my thought was that you have less than half a second for the consumer to either buy it or not buy it. You have to communicate during that half-second. What are you? What are you about? And so we named it five-hour energy.

So how did you even begin to sell the? product. Where did you go initially? Well, we went to the largest vitamin store, which is GNC. And so we went to them and they said, okay, sure. How does that happen? I mean, the largest vitamin store in the country, you've no background in this industry. How did you even get into the door? Well, I think one of the great parts is not having a background in the industry because those who have great backgrounds in the industry always think it takes forever. They always slow things down. So it turns out GNC always is looking for new products because once the product gets mass, GNC is sort of out of it because, you know, if it's in Walmart and everybody else,

nobody's going to buy it at GNC. So you pitched GNC, you went to their headquarters and pitched them on this and like gave them shots? Correct. And so they put them in a bunch of their stores. Just like right at the cash register? Right at the cash register. And it just belonged there. You could tell it just looked that way that it should be there. And it was small. And when was this? This is around 2004, 2005. This is, this is Ford. 2004, okay. And how did they, did they sell right away? No, not really. I mean, I didn't advertise at all. The first week, it sold only 200 bottles, you know, which was horrible. Yeah. And this is a thousand stores. And are you, are you thinking maybe this is not going to work? No, no, no, not at all. Not at all. Because first week, I mean, you know, it's, you know,

Nothing sells that great. So six months later, we just waited and sold GNC only. And at the end of that six months, it was selling 10,000 bottles a week. How did that happen? Just people tried it, word of mouth. There were a lot of exercise people that buy at GNC, and GNC has very limited customer base. And so for them to be doing 10,000 a week was astounding.

And so then we went to the drug company. You know, we went to Rite Aid and Walgreens. And then now we're, you know, pretty much everywhere. How long did it take for five-hour energy to become profitable company? Was it in that first six months? No, no, no. It took a few years. It took two, three years.

Because the first part is always the hardest. Yeah. There's all kinds of interesting problems. You know, you have to advertise. And yet it's not everywhere. So if you advertise, nobody can find it. we'd get complaints like I don't know where it is

and then you go to let's say you put it in a drugstore and you say okay you can find it at this drugstore and then the customer goes there and there's nobody there that knows where it is can't find it yeah it's in there but nobody can find it so there's so many different issues

that happen in the beginning that you have to you have to sort of just get through I mean it's like business business is one of those things you have to do everything right and then you have to get lucky Yeah.

I mean, anybody says that luck is not part of it is just arrogant. Why do you think it took off? I mean, why do you think people bought it? Because it's this weird little bottle. I mean, I will admit to it. I've used it. I've used it before. And it is, it does work.

But it's this weird bottle and you think, oh, should I really be taking that five-hour energy? It's probably not good for me. Like, what do you? I mean, definitely the media has sort of looked at it and said, Oh, God, you know. It's not a media. Just a normal person looking at it would say.

There's different kinds of normal. So if you're working two jobs, if you're driving truck, if you're on Wall Street working, you know, 16 hour days, if you're in Los Angeles on a movie set, all of those guys work really long hours. At that point, it's really not a choice. It's like, okay, I got to survive somehow. You know, I mean, so there's just enormous number of people that looked at it. didn't sort of believe the media hype. But you're right. The bottle makes it.

And because it's up front, people look at it and say, oh, I don't know. I don't know if I should try it. It's like next to the slim gems. Exactly. You know? I'm like the lighters. Yeah, I mean, and again, we do sell a bunch. But if we sold it to everybody that need it, we would be 20 times our size.

I'm curious about competitors. I mean, were people trying to copy the concept? Yes. There were somewhere, I think sort of the knockoff market became like sort of three to four hundred of them. Wow. Everybody came in and said, oh, we can do this. You know, Coke came in with a product that was a shot. Pepsi, Red Bull Monster.

They all came in with shots, you know, with two ounce bottles. And certainly they have better distribution muscle than we have and they have more resources than we have. And so people try it. And they even came in at a lesser price than us. when they all came in, actually our market share dipped from about 93% down to 67%. And everybody tried their product. However, the one thing they all forgot was you have to have a great product. So your market share dropped to 67% once all these competitors start to come in?

Correct. And now it's back up to 93%. That's insane. I mean, there is nothing that has a 93% market share. Well, whenever people ask me, what product are you like? I said, look, we're WD40. It's not a category. It's we own that category.

We kind of, we're the guys. Right. But there are lots of really great products out there. I mean, you yourself admit that when you tried that energy drink at that convention years earlier, that was a good product. But that never went anywhere, presumably. Well, there's also this other part. you still have to have some skill and some resources. You have to still get it in front of people.

I mean, you can have a, the start of a successful product is the product has to be great. Okay, that's just the start. But then the second part. The second part is you have to understand the distribution systems. You have to understand how to get it out there and you have to work at it. Like I said, you have to do everything else at that point, right. And if both the great product and that comes along, then you have a success. If you don't have a great product, you could do everything right and you'll still fail.

What sort of trait or personality trait that you do you have that enables you to do this, to have the confidence, to believe it? I mean, were you just incredibly optimistic that this thing was going to work? No, not really. I think one of the traits that you have to have to be an entrepreneur is to be able to, you know, to take the heat of failing. Because, I mean, there were so many projects I tried that people used to ask me. I said, how do you get up and do it again?

So I said, look, I fall so many times I've got pavement marks on my face. So what? Just get up again and do it again. And I went through probably 20 different products, big failures, little failures. And you, if you can't do that, then, you know, you should just just. go work in a large company. You have signed the giving pledge, which means you promised to giveaways at 99% of your wealth. Is that right?

Pretty much. And so 1% will be left. And you have a child. I mean, are you going to, you know, make sure that your son will have a life of comfort? Or are you basically saying, nope, you're not getting anything? Basically, there's an old saying that if you raise your child to be useless, why give him money? and if you raise your child to be useful, why does he need money? So you expect your child to do it all on his own?

Absolutely. Everybody else does. Why, you know, in order to make a good, worthwhile life, you have to have the confidence. The only way you can have confidence is to do it yourself. So to make children miserable is not, I think, the job of parents. And actually, I mean, I was lucky because he said, great, I don't want anything. Wow. And so he kind of grew up as a cheap skate.

He's probably the cheapest guy I know. How has becoming a very wealthy person changed you or your lifestyle? Not a whole lot. I mean, basically, you know, I get up in the morning and pour myself some cereal and go to work. I do have the most expensive hobby in the world, which is to work for the people that don't have. much. So now believe me, that's a really expensive hobby. What do you mean? Well, I've found out that the bottom third of the world doesn't even have electricity. You know what I mean, do you know what it would be like to just at the end of the day, six, you know, after six or seven o'clock, to just sit

there in the dark? You can't do anything, right? That's a billion, it's more than a billion people. So we, I created this thing called the invention shop. And we've created equipment to go into these houses really cheap. That'll give them electricity. it's actually a hybrid bicycle. You pedal for an hour and you'll have electricity for a day. To me, what's exciting is to see,

you know, for example, we gave these bicycles out as a test, and there was a widow with three little kids. And, I mean, she was busy all day with the kids. So now with the lights in her house, she's able to sew till midnight, and that gets her five bucks a day.

And with that, she feeds her family. They even have money for, school? I mean, that's a thrill. If somebody listening to this is thinking about starting a business, they have no money, no connections, just an idea. What is it that they have to do? What is the one thing that they have to have or focus on? Well, first, use your common sense. Do not use MBA speak. Second, you have to be totally determined. I hate the word passionate because you get hit in the face a few times, passion seems to fade.

Determination means basically your face hits the floor 20 times. You get up 21 times. You know, you just get up every time. No matter what happens, you get up and do it again. If you have those two, and the third thing you need is a sense of urgency. Do it now. Don't wait. Don't delay.

If you have those three things, those are all you need. Manoge Bargava is still the CEO of Innovation Ventures, which makes five-hour energy. And despite his past life as a Hindu monk and his general chilled-out sensibility, Manoge does drink five-hour energy. He says about five bottles a week. I am assuming you do not drink it before bedtime. No, that would be dumb. That would be pretty dumb.

Please don't turn us off just yet. In a moment, we're going to hear from you about the things you guys are building. Hey, welcome back. It's time now for how you built that. And, you know, we've been doing this feature for a while. And we've heard about all kinds of products you're making, snacks and clothing, bags, bikes, apps. But somehow, we have overlooked this very vital and growing sector. Chickens. It's early in the morning. And right now, I just fed them. They're getting their morning breakfast. This is Diane Twining of Dripping Springs, Texas, where she keeps nearly 300 chickens in her very large backyard. Was that a pig? Anyway, she got her idea for a business about four years ago when she and her husband, Monty, were on a road trip. And at the time, he was in the construction business.

We were just kind of lamenting how not fun the commercial construction industry was. and we were brainstorming different ideas, and I said, you should build chicken coops, or we should build chicken coops. Now, back then, Diane only had a couple of chickens in her one coop out back, and she started to tell Monty all the ways that that coop could be better.

And so I just said, okay, build me a chicken coop, and it has to have, you know, easy access doors, it has to be easy to clean, and I just said, don't build something ugly. So Monty went to work building a coop, That was not ugly. And I said, okay, that's cute. It was a coop with a rounded roof, not too boxy, with clean, simple lines.

And Diana Monty thought, hey, you know, we could start selling these coops to other chicken keepers across the country. Because as the local food movement started to take hold all over the country, more and more people, even in cities, wanted chickens. You know, people like the idea of fresh eggs, even though it's just one item on your breast. breakfast plate, at least you know where it came from. But of course, if you are raising a chicken in a city, that could really bug your neighbors, which, says Diane, is why you need a very classy looking coop. So we use cedar wood, completely different wood than anybody selling at a big box store or something like that.

When you look at one of our coops, you're seeing the grain of the wood. They're just very pretty. Anyway, back when Diane and Monty started their business, Monty made 20 cedarwood coops to start with. And they put them up for sale on Craigslist on a Monday. And by Friday, they were completely sold out. Literally, Friday night, we're out there with our car headlights shining into the shop with our kids helping us assemble all of these coupes. So they had a business. Diane and Monty built an 8,000 square foot shop in their backyard to make more coops.

And during their busy season, which is right now, they have 10 people working for them. And last year, they sold 1,700 coups, which is enough to keep the family and the chickens going. The only problem, the entire operation has become kind of their obsession. Oh, my gosh. We cannot switch off. I mean, we do sometimes talk about other things, but I would say that good percentage of our time is spent talking about Urban Coop Company. That's Urban Coop Company, founded by Diane Twining of Dripping Springs, Texas. To find out more, head to our Facebook page.

Just search how I built this on Facebook. And as always, we love to hear and to share your stories, especially when we can play animal sounds. So please keep them coming. Go to build.npr.org. that's buildwithadd.npr.org. Hey, thanks for listening to the show this week. If you want to find out more or listen to previous episodes, you can go to how I built this.npr.org.

Please also consider subscribing to our show on iTunes and do us a favor, write us a review while you're there. You can also write directly to us at H-I-B-T at npr.org. And if you want to send a tweet, it's at how I built this. Our show was produced this week by Rumpteen Arablewe, who also composed the music. Thanks also to Neva Grant, Sanaz Meshkampur, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is Claire Breen. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built This from NPR.

I still think that's a pig. Hey, everybody, I'm Kelly McEvers, host of NPR's Embedded. On March 9th, we are back with our new episodes about police videos. Shot fly, shot fly. What did he do to deserve to be killed? that night and shot so many times. People see what they want to see. Almost no one can see those

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