The Right Fit

0



Michael Johnson personifies the lifestyle that his company

markets. The 53-year-old CEO of Herbalife Ltd. is a dedicated endurance athlete and avid user of his company’s nutritional supplements. When not

preparing for and competing in triathlons, Johnson is working to make Herbalife a healthier business and professionalize the direct distributor network it relies on. Since coming on board in 2003 after the death of founder Mark Hughes, Johnson led a recapitalization of the company and then took the now $3 billion company public in 2004. The former president of Walt Disney International, Johnson also has broadened his company’s international footprint, including opening operations in China. Despite being on road a quarter of the month to rally his distributors around the world, Johnson works hard to maintain a balanced family life with his wife, Mari, an executive film producer, and their three children.


Question: After 17 years at Disney, what attracted you to Herbalife, especially since it had been having a lot of problems since its founder died?

Answer: I saw this as an opportunity to extend a personal passion, which was the active, healthy lifestyle aspect of who I am.


Q. What got you interested in a healthy lifestyle in the first place?

A: I grew up playing sports in Michigan and my family was an active one, skiing, swimming in lakes as well as team sports and just generally playing outside. And I’ve been competing in triathlons for almost 20 years now, so I’ve always been a big supporter of healthy nutrition and the importance of living a healthy, active lifestyle.


Q: But you didn’t accept Herbalife’s offer right away, right?

A: When I first was approached by a headhunter in late November 2002, I wasn’t interested. At the time it was a billion-dollar company, not small, but not large either. In comparison I was running international for a $28 billion company.


Q: Did the fact that the company was in trouble bother you?

A: Not really, because where there are problems there are opportunities. When you’re presented with the opportunity to become the CEO of a company under those circumstances, it’s usually not running like a Swiss watch.


Q: What changed your mind?

A: That headhunter was smart, he put me together with the private equity guys who owned the company, and I met some of the key staff they had already brought in. I was impressed with their commitment to see this company through.


Q: What did you bring from your business experience at Disney to turning around Herbalife?

A: Planning, process and discipline, while still keeping the entrepreneurial spirit. The culture here was very reactive and we wanted to be very much more proactive. Disney was very five-year plan oriented, but we started out smaller with a three-year plan at Herbalife. We also brought a more disciplined financial approach to make sure people’s expenditures were more thought out. I found out that they were making decisions on the fly way too much.


Q: Over the last few years, the company has gotten heavily involved in sponsoring sports such as women’s beach volleyball to promote its healthful image. What’s up next?

A: We just announced a relationship with the L.A. Triathlon, and hopefully one day it will end down by our future offices (at L.A. Live downtown). We also promote a healthy lifestyle at the company and have our own triathlon club.


Q: How often do you compete in triathlons yourself?

A: About four or five times a year, though I was off the circuit last year because of a foot problem.


Q: Why triathlon instead of competing in one of the individual sports?

A: I was a cycle racer and I wasn’t working races anymore. It was kind of depressing. I stumbled into triathlons in the late ’80s at an event in Malibu and got hooked. We started a team at Disney and I started a club at Herbalife when I came here.


Q.: I heard you’ve ridden your bicycle from your home in Malibu to the Herbalife offices down in Torrance. How often do you do that?

A: Every so often. It takes me about two hours, since you have to go at a leisurely pace on the bike path. It’s not the easiest or safest ride. There are some places on (Pacific Coast Highway), where most boards would not want their CEOs riding their bikes. I have only a small office/conference room down there, but I love going down to the Torrance office it’s so much more energetic down there. I mean, this office here is a lawyer’s office with dark wood paneling, kind of boring.


Q: I notice you seem to have converted the wet bar in your office to healthier uses, right?

A: Yeah, that’s where I make my afternoon energy drink, and keep some of the supplements I use. It’s a concoction I invented, hot chocolate soy milk blended with one of our energy products, N-R-G, Nature’s Raw Guarana. It’s a hot chocolate tea really. Let me make you one.


Q: It’s tasty.

A: See, there you go, you’ve been Herbalized.


Q: You were into a healthy life style and competing in triathlons while you were still at Disney. How much have you been Herbalized yourself?

A: I was known as the shake guy at Disney. I always had a shake for lunch. I used supplements, but maybe not in the thought-out way I do now.


Q: So how many Herbalife products do you take on a regular basis? Do you use everything, except the children’s products?

A: No, I don’t use everything; that’s not a smart thing to do. But, yes, I do use several products myself. I start every day with a meal replacement shake. In a large water bottle when I work out in the morning, I add Lift-Off, H3O, NightWorks our energy, hydration and our blood circulation products. I also use our Best Defense immune system builder and Triple Berry antioxidant product. I take our fish oil and Garden 7, our phyto-nutrient product. I’ll have protein bars for a snack in the afternoon. I drink aloe juice, but not that much. And I use our skin care line.


Q: What’s up with the exercise equipment in the corner over there?

A: I tend to be hyperactive and use it between meetings to blow off steam. (He heads over to a large inflated exercise ball and balances himself on his knees). I can balance on this ball throughout an entire meeting.


Q: What is your typical day?

A: I get up at 4:45 a.m. to work out by 5 a.m. in my home gym. I have breakfast with my daughter, younger son and my wife every day, and sometimes I take my daughter to school. I either am out of the house by 7 and at the office by quarter to 8, or start working at home and get into the office by 10:45. Then it’s meetings all day, and there’s a lot of distributor activity. I’m both CEO and chairman, so there’s also a lot of board work. And I travel quite a bit, at least a week a month. We’re leaving on Monday for a two-week trip to Asia, five cities.


Q: How do you balance work and family when you’re on the road so much?

A: I’m intensely involved in my children’s lives when I’m with them. We were never part of the big social scene in Hollywood. So except maybe a Saturday night dinner with a close group of friends, we spent most of our free time together as a family. Weekends are pretty sacrosanct. My kids are very much into sports, so at least one parent is at 100 percent of their games. We have dinner together as a family at least three or four times a week. My kids are very disciplined and have busy lives, and my wife has her own work. She is very open to my traveling and the amount of work I need to do to make this company successful.


Q: Let’s back up a bit. With a degree in political science, how did you end up at Disney?

A: My career path was not even close to a typical road. I’m a native of Michigan and a friend of mine there bought a restaurant and wanted me to help him run it while I was still going to school in the early 1970s. When I was 19, he wanted me to help him open this restaurant in Colorado over the summer. I convinced my parents that I would enroll in the University of Colorado that fall.


Q: But you never got a degree there.

A: Well, I never saw the University of Colorado. I was a ski bum, ran the restaurant and did several other jobs. Three years later, I went back to college and got a liberal arts education at a small school in Colorado.


Q: How did you come to California?

A: I went back to Michigan in 1979 to work for an aerospace company, Aeroquip. They had bought a company here in Southern California that the Marx Brothers had founded during World War II, Marmon Industries. They sent me out here to be a salesman.


Q: How did you transition into the entertainment industry?

A: I only knew one person in Southern California, so I spent a lot of time taking extension classes at UCLA. I took a script-writing class, because I thought I might want to be a screenwriter like everyone here. I got to know a lot of people working in marketing at the studios and they were driving a lot nicer cars than me. I thought, well, they don’t seem that much smarter than me. So through a circuitous route, I ended up at Warner Bros. in late 1980 to work at Warner-Amex Satellite Entertainment Co. in West Coast marketing-sales for MTV, Nickelodeon and the Movie Channel.


Q: How did you get to Disney in 1986?

A: I was known as a very aggressive salesman. I was approached about running the international side of the Disney studio’s pay television and home video business. I had no experience internationally, zero, but I was told, “You’ll figure it out.”


Q: Did you have a lot of independence?

A: Disney really didn’t care about international at that time because they had so many other things going on. It was a $12 million business, but we turned it into a $3 billion business. International for large corporations in the 1980s and into the ’90s was a place where you could go and move fast. It was out of the corporate eye. You could take on more responsibility and if you were successful, you were pretty much left alone.


Q: How did moving to Disney change your life?

A: I got married about the time I joined Disney and we had a child not long after that All of sudden it was wow, I’m now responsible for someone. So that wanderlust had to stop.


Q: So how do you feel about your life now?

A: I feel truly blessed. I have my family, good friends, work with great people and am at an incredible company.


Michael O. Johnson

Title: Chairman and Chief Executive Officer

Company: Herbalife Ltd.

Born: 1954; Muskegon, Mich.

Education: B.A., political science, Western State College, Colorado

Career Turning Point: Going to work at Walt Disney Co.

Most Influential People: Winston Churchill, “Because he never quit.”

Hobbies: Skiing; competing in triathlons;

spending time with family in outdoor activities; reading, mostly nonfiction these days

Personal: Lives in Malibu with wife Mari, two sons and one daughter

No posts to display