From Deseret News archives:
Henry Marsh: a success story
Ex-Olympian is a co-founder of thriving MonaVie
It's been 20 years since he ran his last race, but with the arrival of another Olympics, Marsh, a four-time Olympic distance runner, muses on the connection of careers.
"Athletics prepared me for this," he says in his office. "I haven't encountered any situation in business that even comes close to the pressure and stress you experience at the Olympics. I've been through the refiner's fire."
Welcome to the second half of Marsh's life. Now 54, Marsh is co-founder and executive vice president of MonaVie, a wildly successful multilevel marketing company that sells a health juice consisting largely of an exotic berry from South America.
Marsh, a 10-time U.S. champion, famously never captured the gold medal on the track in Olympic and world championship competition thanks to a luckless series of ill-timed boycotts, falls and viruses, but much of what he's dabbled in since then has turned to gold.
Since then, the company claims it has made cumulative sales of $1 billion and reached six countries. MonaVie has expanded from home basements to a corner of one floor in a leased building in Sandy, to four spacious floors of the same building.
"It's a fairy tale," says Marsh. "Really, sometimes I have to pinch myself and ask, 'Is this really happening?'"
For Marsh, it was a gutsy move, gambling so much on a berry juice, but he has demonstrated a willingness to take chances throughout a remarkably varied professional career. He took a law degree paid for by Nike, his running club at the height of his running career, but he practiced law only briefly.
He worked for Parsons, Behle & Latimer, a Salt Lake-based law firm, for 3 1/2 years before deciding a law career wasn't for him. He worked as a sportscaster for KSL-TV for 18 months before deciding that business "had no future." He started Athletes Unlimited, which managed and represented so called "amateur" athletes during the last days of amateurism, but after 18 months he moved on again.
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