Jorge Vergara Madrigal, the businessman who started the successful multi-level marketing company Omnilife from nothing, before purchasing the Guadalajara Chivas and restoring the fortunes of Mexico’s most followed soccer team, died last week at the age of 64 following a cardiac arrest in New York.
With a direct business style that confounded Guadalajara traditionalists, Vergara was one of the city’s most interesting characters and rarely off the front pages of newspapers.
As a young man growing up in Guadalajara, Vergara was keen to start his own business. He had several false starts: a street food enterprise selling pork scratchings, a restaurant, and a spell hawking timeshares at the coast. He then took a sales job with Herbalife, the nutritional and dietary supplement corporation, becoming one of their first distributors in Mexico.
Using the U.S. company as a model, in 1989 he set up Omnitrition, with just three employees, six distributors, one product and an investment of $US10,000.
The energy that Vergara sank into the business – later renamed Omnilife – ensured that the company grew rapidly, not only in Mexico but throughout the American continent, and later to Europe and Asia.
The product range eventually expanded to include more than 100 nutritional and dietary supplements, as well as soft drinks, skin care merchandise and other products.
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