Frank VanderSloot

Eighty percent of the world tea tree oil market. That was the claim attached to Oil of Melaleuca, Inc. when Frank VanderSloot's brother-in-law Roger Ball and Roger's brother Allen asked him to run it in September 1985. The real share was about 5 percent. The Food and Drug Administration was already asking about medical claims made by salespeople, and the plan required new recruits to buy $5,000 of inventory up front. VanderSloot's verdict, quoted by Wikipedia: "the company was a mess." The partners shut it down within the year. Melaleuca, Inc. was incorporated in Idaho on August 19, 1985, with VanderSloot as president, and about half the old distributors declined to follow him into it.

He was 37 and had spent his working life inside other people's companies. Raised on a ranch at Cocolalla in northern Idaho from 1949, son of a painter for the Northern Pacific Railway, he joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints at 16, finished Sandpoint High School in 1966, and paid for two semesters at Brigham Young University by working and living at a laundromat. A two-and-a-half-year mission in the Netherlands came next, then an associate's degree at Ricks College in Rexburg and a marketing degree from BYU in 1972. Nine and a half years at Automatic Data Processing in three cities took him from sales into general management; a regional vice presidency at Cox Communications in Vancouver, Washington, followed. None of it was entrepreneurship. Idaho Falls was the first time the numbers were his.

Melaleuca is the main event, but the holding pattern around it is wide. The ranch in particular is bigger than it sounds: Forbes counts roughly 148,000 acres across Idaho, Utah and Montana (2026), and The Land Report ranked VanderSloot the 92nd largest landowner in the country in 2011. Outside the table: he sits on the board and executive board of the United States Chamber of Commerce, served on the Taxation Task Force of the 1993 White House Conference on Small Business, and in 2005 flew supplies to Baton Rouge shelters after Hurricane Katrina, work for which Melaleuca received the Salvation Army's Others Award in 2007. In 2019, per Forbes, he set up a $1 million fund to help Idahoans facing aggressive medical debt collection.

The Melaleuca model is what VanderSloot has trademarked as Consumer Direct Marketing. Customers order from the company's catalog or website and the goods ship to their homes; the people who referred them, whom the company calls independent marketing executives rather than distributors, earn commissions on those purchases and on purchases by the people their customers refer, out to seven referral generations. No inventory sits in anyone's garage, which is the distinction VanderSloot draws between his company and the $5,000-a-head plan he inherited. Growth on that model was steep: $300,000 in sales in 1985, $1.2 million in 1986, $11.6 million in 1988, $29 million in 1990, $105 million in 1991 with more than 900 workers across three plants, an estimated $300 million by 1998, over $1 billion in 2011, $1.13 billion in 2012 and about $2 billion by 2022, the figure East Idaho News used when it reported the change of chief executive. Canada opened in 1994, Taiwan in 1997, Japan in 1998; Argentina was being closed by late 1999. Wikipedia puts a quarter of revenue in six overseas markets, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Australia, New Zealand and the United Kingdom, with US operations centered on Idaho Falls and Knoxville, Tennessee. Sales flattened in 1998 and, according to a 2004 Forbes piece cited by Wikipedia, VanderSloot found senior directors living on residual commissions without recruiting, so he cut their pay unless they brought in or trained new people. The regulators have been consistent in their view of the model. Michigan issued a cease-and-desist order in 1991 under its anti-pyramid law; Melaleuca signed a consent decree with Michigan and Idaho in 1992 agreeing not to promote an illegal pyramid; the FDA sent a warning letter in 1997 over claims for two supplements; and a Federal Trade Commission paper on multi-level marketing concluded that fewer than 0.29 percent of Melaleuca participants make a profit and that the company fails to disclose that about 99 percent lose money. The same paper compared those odds, unfavorably, to a single spin of a Las Vegas roulette wheel. On June 5, 2020, the FTC sent another warning letter, this time over earnings claims made during the COVID-19 pandemic. VanderSloot's answer, as quoted by Wikipedia, is that the company offers "a business model for those people who want to supplement their income." He took a three-year seat on the Direct Selling Association's eight-member board in 2008, and he and his wife gave $10,000 to the association's political action committee in December 2009. Both things are true at once: a company with about 2,000 employees in Idaho Falls and sales around $2 billion, and a compensation plan whose odds the FTC put in writing.

VanderSloot is a Republican donor of national scale and an Idaho donor of local scale, and the record on both is long. One sentence per item; every item below comes from the Wikipedia article and the press coverage it cites.

• He was one of 47 national finance co-chairs for Mitt Romney's 2008 presidential campaign and a finance co-chair again in 2012, when his companies gave $1.1 million to the Restore Our Future PAC and he said he raised between $2 million and $5 million.
• On April 20, 2012, a Barack Obama campaign website listed him among eight Romney donors with "questionable and troubling records"; IRS and Labor Department audits that followed found no wrongdoing, and he said defending them cost $80,000.
• He gave $50,000 to a PAC backing Marco Rubio in June 2015, said in June 2016 he would support Donald Trump, and wrote after the election that Trump had not been his first, second or third choice.
• He spent $1.3 million in 2012 on advertising for Idaho Propositions 1, 2 and 3, the Luna education laws, which voters rejected.
• His defamation suit against Mother Jones, filed in January 2013, ended in October 2015 with summary judgment for the magazine; a separate suit against former reporter Peter Zuckerman settled the same month.
• In 2013 he said he supports equal rights for gay people but holds that marriage is a union between a man and a woman; two full-page ads he placed in the Idaho Falls Post Register in 2006, about a reporter's Boy Scout coverage, drew accusations of outing that he denied.

Where the faith shows in the business is mostly in the founder's own biography: a convert at 16, a mission in the Netherlands, Ricks College in between, BYU twice. The Wikipedia article does not record a Sunday closure policy or a tithing story, and no fetched source supplied one, so none appears here. The ranch is easier to document. Riverbend Ranch, started in 1993, took 21 awards at the Utah State Fair between 1995 and 1997 and by March 2012 was hosting the world's largest Angus bull sale, with a stated mission of giving Intermountain ranchers "the best genetics at an affordable price." Awards followed the money: Idaho Business Leader of the Year from Idaho State University in 1998, Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year for the Northwest in 2001, the Idaho Hall of Fame in 2007, the Horatio Alger Award in 2015. Net worth has tracked the company. Forbes valued Melaleuca at $1.4 billion in 2004 and VanderSloot's holding, 55 percent of the voting stock and 44 percent of the nonvoting, at about $700 million; Business Insider called him Idaho's richest person with $1.2 billion in 2013; the Forbes 400 put him at number 302 with $2.7 billion in 2017; the Forbes profile shows $3.3 billion as of September 2026. On June 13, 2022, Melaleuca named Jerry Felton, who had run its international business for about a decade, chief executive, and moved VanderSloot to executive chairman with marketing and legal still reporting to him. His comment that day: "Melaleuca's growth continues to astound me." He was 73. Forbes also lists six world records in indoor rowing, which tells you something about the previous 40 years.

Fewer than 0.29 percent of Melaleuca participants make a profit, by the FTC's count.