Dell Brown: creating opportunities.

• Author: Creager, Janine S.
• Position: Spotlight

Dell Brown knows a lot about making dough. As president and chief operating officer of MonaVie, Brown has overseen incredible growth and success at the South Jordan-based company. But the dough he really loves to get his hands into is in the kitchen.

Brown recalls a time when he shared a loaf of his homemade bread with a neighbor who was so impressed that she turned to compliment Brown's wife who pointed at him and said, "I didn't make it, he did." The neighbor then said, "I didn't know you had a bread machine," to which Brown replied, "I am the bread machine.

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"I'm a cook and love to bake bread," adds Brown who learned the skill from his grandfather. "My goal is to someday own a brick oven. I'd love to fire up a brick oven to bake my bread in."

Growing up, Brown had his eye on medicine rather than business. His father was a doctor and Brown majored in Zoology with a pre-med emphasis. But as he pursued his education, he found himself drawn more and more to business.

"I am not a particularly entrepreneurial person," he says. "I have a low tolerance for risk. I really knew nothing about what it meant to work in business. I just thought that would be an interesting path to pursue [and] entered business quite naively."

But what Brown lacked in experience, he made up with enthusiasm. After receiving a BA in science, he hired on at NuSkin where he became director of product development. While the position was a great challenge and opportunity for him, Brown knew he needed more. He moved his young family to Chicago where he received his MBA from Northwestern University. While there, he interned for, and was later hired by, APM Management Consultants, a health care management consultant...