If one were writing a formula for success in a startup company, it would be difficult to match the one from which SAVI Health – located just outside Salt Lake City – was crafted.

SAVI’s savvy recipe goes like this

• Start with a set of former colleagues from the world’s largest personal development company.

• Blend in the former CEO of one of the world’s most successful retail nutritional companies.

• Swirl in the leading genetic scientist from biotech giant Genentech.

• Toss in hydrox from olives, lycopene from red wine and resveratrol from tomatoes and whisk in a dozen or so organic vegetable extracts and create the Mediterranean Diet in a two-capsules-per-day delivery system.

• Add the self-development content and renowned coaching team of the Og Mandino Group.

• And finally, spice it up with one of the most sophisticated compensation plans in the network marketing industry.

What pops out of this entrepreneurial mixing bowl is a one-of-a-kind, duplicatable distributor training program; an anti-inflammation product that SAVI Health founders know will spread good health to those who take it; financial success and financial management tools to those who sell it; and new relationships built on the foundational principles of the Og Mandino Group.

Of course, all of this was not accomplished overnight in some inventive kitchen. While the company swung wide its doors for business in mid-January, the trip to that point was along a unique road that could only be navigated by an experienced group of executives.

Six guys building a company

The core group of SAVI Health founders had all spent years doing personal development training and international sales for Franklin Quest and Franklin Covey – maker of the Day Planners that dot the business landscape and the most impactful training program in the history of the world.

“When we were at Franklin, our single biggest customer was Amway. The second biggest customer was Nu Skin,” said Michael Larkins, President and CEO of SAVI Health. “Particularly with Nu Skin, we created a Day Planner system that they put in their starter kits. Anywhere they went in the world, there was a Franklin Day Planner inside the starter kit.”

Larkins went on to say that as he traveled across the country and to more than a dozen countries, he and his team found that networkers used Franklin’s products because they had a strong desire to be organized and productive in their home-based businesses.

“As part of our time management training, we taught people about governing values – those things that really matter to people – those things that are core.” Larkins went on, “The three governing values that emerged anywhere we went in the world were people’s concern for their health, their financial well being, and certain key relationships. No matter where they came from or where they live, everyone wanted to have greater control over these three areas.”

“We wanted to create a company that helped people succeed in these areas,” says Craig Case. “After twenty years of searching, we decided that the best place to do that was in network marketing. So we got together to bring it to pass.”

“We talked a lot about a mission,” Larkins recalled about his days at Franklin. “Our mission was to help people figure out what mattered and then to act upon it. Franklin really lived pretty true to that desire and enjoyed tremendous success. We still believe that if we live our mission, everything else, money and making a difference is going to follow. We’ll have the revenue and profitability. If we’re mission-driven and we walk that talk, good things are going to follow.”

So it followed in the early days of SAVI Health that the founders used their Franklin experience to build the foundation for their new venture.

Making the grade ‘A’

Larkins and his SAVI Health founders call their work building an “A” Company, where mission comes first and profitability comes second.

In the great report card on company practices, this is how grades stack up:

• A “D” company exploits people by the way it does business.

• A “C” company is not harmful, but neither is it helpful—it makes no effort to pursue a mission that benefits society as a whole.

• A “B” company uses sound business practices to earn an income and doesn’t hurt anyone, and then, as a sideline, pursues a beneficial mission.

• Finally, an “A” company is mission-driven. By pursuing mission first, profits come as a natural byproduct.

And so on the basis of their love for running an “A” company, five former Franklin employees got together again and created SAVI Health.

“That common experience brought us back together 20 years later,” Larkins said. “A year ago we decided, ‘You know what, we had a good experience, so let’s do it again!’ We’re in the second half of our lives. We learned some good lessons in the first half, but now let’s make our biggest, best contributions in the second half. And so we came back together, the five of us. At SAVI Health, our mission is to help people build their best life, with a focus on good health, strong relationships, and financial well-being—those universal values we saw so often while at Franklin.”

The original, former Franklin five include:

Mike Larkins, who as a member of the senior executive team at Franklin Covey helped grow the company sales from $1 million to more than $600 million. He also serves on several bank boards.

Craig Case, who began his career with Xerox, where he was one of the company’s top earners. His next stop was Franklin and after that he has headed three network marketing companies in the United States and consulted with many of the industry’s giants.

Greg Fullerton, a cofounder of Franklin Quest and member of the team that developed the Franklin Day Planner – one of the most widely used time management tools in history. Post-Franklin, Fullerton founded several companies, including Max International with his colleague Case.

Mark Brown, who will forever have a legacy as a trainer. When working at Franklin, Brown was a train-the-trainer specialist who licensed more than 2,000 trainers whose work then spread to many thousands beyond that. He also started several small businesses.

Tony Wetzel, an MBA and holder of degrees in chemistry and microbiology. During his time at Franklin, Wetzel set up operations in both Asia and Europe. He is particularly adept at solving problems and setting up systems of controls within companies.

The single non-Franklin founder is Richard Crosetto, whose business expertise has allowed him to run companies that worked in such diverse fields as high technology and fertilizer. Recently he was president of New Protein, another health-related business.

The right partnerships and a real product

“We kinda got the band back together,” Larkins said, “around the desire to create something that would lift and serve people and help them. And we could only do that by offering real, impactful, validated products.”

Helping SAVI find and develop such a product was Greg Horn. Horn is a renowned expert in the nutritional space, having helped grow GNC into a $1 billion-plus company before becoming CEO of that firm. With that expertise, Horn is often approached to help formulate or develop a product—any product—for companies looking to make a buck. He had always said no.

But he said yes to SAVI.

“Greg probably knows more about nutritional products than anybody in the country,” Larkins said. “Greg at one point was chairman of Royal Numico’s North American Executive Committee. In that position, he learned the power of networking and believed that, when done right, it is a channel that can get products to market faster and more economically with better story told than maybe any other channel.”

Horn had never found a version of a networking channel that he could truly believe in. Until, that is, he met the founders of SAVI Health. He liked what SAVI believed in, and the team’s commitment to offering a real product with real science to back it up.

And through Horn, the SAVI founders were introduced to Roberto Crea, a scientist and founding director of Genentech.

Creating the partnership

Crea, it turns out, owns a large organic olive orchard north of Sacramento where he has devoted a good deal of time to studying the nutritional secrets of the olive. Crea holds several patents and, while they did not know it at the time, one of those would prove to be the basis for SAVI Health’s product.

The SAVI team took several trips to California getting to know Crea and his team and allowing them to understand what the SAVI network might be able to do for the olive derivative.

Crea had been working to get his patented component to market for years but had been discouraged by the costs involved and the difficulty in getting one’s product to stand out from all the others.

So through all the SAVI visits to Crea’s operation, two things happened:

1) The SAVI founders became convinced that Crea’s component – Hidrox™, a beneficial polyphenol found in olives – was a product their network could turn into a viable product.

2) Crea came to see that the six SAVI founders were people that he wanted to partner with.

“A lot of it was based on Greg Horn’s recommendation,” Larkins said.

Understanding the SAVI Health product

Crea is a huge proponent of olives and olive oils. In his studies he noticed that olives have certain polyphenols that are super-antioxidants and anti-inflammatory.

Further, Crea found that the most potent polyphenols did not end up in the oil when the olives were pressed, instead ending up in the waste juice and pulp that would be discarded. In fact, the polyphenols’ potency was as much as 300 times what was found in olive oil.

Both Crea and Horn had done a lot of research on the Mediterranean diet and realized that Crea’s findings created a perfect, primary component for a supplement that helped capture the best of that diet.

So Horn formulated what would become SAVI Health’s product, SAVI Vital™, using Crea’s patented component as well as the most-researched components of the Mediterranean diet – resveratrol from red wine, lycopene from red tomatoes, and organic extracts from more than a dozen other herbs and vegetables.

“There has been a staggering amount of attention given to the Mediterranean diet in the last year,” Larkins said. “One of the most noteworthy is a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine in February of 2013. This study involved 7,500 people in Spain. A third of them were on a Mediterranean diet with olive oil, a liter a week. Another third of them were on a Mediterranean diet including a handful of nuts every day. And a third of them were on an American Heart Association low‑fat diet.”

Nearly five years into the study, it was abruptly halted because the low-fat diet people were having 30 percent more heart attacks, strokes, and sudden death than the olive oil group.

“This product has five human clinical studies on it,” Larkins continued. “It is really the Mediterranean diet in a bottle. Greg Horn put his best work into SAVI Vital.”

He says the focus of SAVI Health is on the anti-inflammatory qualities of the supplement. Horn remains part of the company and will help create a roadmap of other anti-inflammatory products that they will bring to market.

“Dr. Crea continues to work on the research front and Greg Horn on the formulation front,” Larkins said. “Our intent is to have products for the inside and the outside that revolve around anti-inflammatory properties.”

Recent studies have shown inflammation – both on the surface and inside the body – is the cause of multiple health problems. In fact, a recent “Day in Health” article by award-winning writer Lisa Collier Cool suggests that inflammation may be the root of many of our most serious diseases.

Cool writes: “Chronic, low-grade systemic inflammation—fueled by such disorders as excessive belly fat, poor diet, lack of exercise, smoking, and gum disease—may explain why lifestyle-linked diseases have reached epidemic levels in Western countries while remaining rare in the developing world.”

That provides a very large target for the SAVI Health gang.

Putting it all together

SAVI Health now had form. It had a wizened team, a product and a mission ready to be launched. There remained, of course, a few details.

Based solely on their experience and expertise, the founders of SAVI Health had attracted financial investment and interest from potential distributers. Now came the sometimes-dicey issues of training and compensation for clients who came aboard.

“It’s important that we identify here that our product really is a combination of our nutritional supplements and our Og Mandino relationship,” Larkins said.

Augustine “Og” Mandino wrote the bestselling book The Greatest Salesman in the World, which has been purchased more than 50 million times and released in more than 25 languages.

Mandino’s writings tended to be simple but powerful and said, among other things:

• ‘Always do your best. What you plant now, you will harvest later.’

• ‘I am here for a purpose and that purpose is to grow into a mountain, not to shrink to a grain of sand. Henceforth will I apply ALL my efforts to become the highest mountain of all and I will strain my potential until it cries for mercy.’

• ‘I seek constantly to improve my manners and graces, for they are the sugar to which all are attracted.’

Mandino’s philosophy has become the center for the Og Mandino Group, which teaches and coaches individuals and business on improving their professional lives.

“The center of the relationship with Dave Blanchard, CEO of the Og Mandino Group, is an assessment on how you think and how your thoughts are either helping or hurting your progress. Anyone can take the SAVI version at www.saviic.com. To follow it up, there’s a one-year coaching program for our Associates and Preferred Customers that helps them align their thinking with progress,” Larkins said.

So basically, to make sure their own company is a success, SAVI Health wants to make sure each member of its network is a success as well.

Measuring the success

Of course the most common method of gauging success is via compensation.

“We’ve had experiences professionally with other companies and have been involved in binary, uni-level combos and check match,” said Case, explaining how the company decided on its compensation strategy. “As we talked with distributors who wanted to be involved in our business, they really pushed us towards that combination of the comp plan.”

Case went on to say that SAVI Health consulted with several experts and worked with compensation software packages in coming up with its final decision.

“It’s been a complex journey getting everything to work together and then to make sure that things are paying right and displaying right to the field,” Case said. “We’ve spent a lot of time and devoted a lot of effort to be sure this critical aspect was working like a well-oiled machine.”

Case said the company tested its compensation package extensively under a variety of conditions to assure its smooth launch.

Delivering the product

In the beginning, SAVI Health will be relying on the fulfillment vendor IntegraCore.

“They service roughly 20 other network marketing companies,” Case said of Integra Core. “At this point, there are vendors that can do that probably less expensively than you can do it yourself, that have systems already set up. They’re doing it for many companies and it certainly makes sense to use competent, experienced vendors.”

Case also noted that customer service will be overseen by an employee who has serviced companies as big as 6,000 people and demand a good customer service focus.

“We’ve got some real competence in our key areas,” Case said.

Boldly helping people build their best life

“Some combination of this team has been working together for 25 years,” Case said of the founding team.

And so with all their strengths, expertise, and industry insight on the table, SAVI Health marches boldly into the world, focused on helping people build their best life, confident of its product and its connection with both the business world and the everyday population of the nation.