Bio: Steve Fife likes to exceed expectations. And that might be putting it mildly. Fife brings over three decades and a lot of financial leadership experience to LifeVantage where he uses big-picture strategic thinking and an in-the-weeds work ethic to create a healthy financial organization by focusing on delivering a growth strategy while creating value for customers, shareholders, and employees.
Fife is passionate about bringing affordable, science-based products to market as well as seeing companies reach their potential. Before joining LifeVantage, he served as Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer at Evidera, Inc., a private equity-sponsored professional services firm that provides outcomes research, market access, data analytics and epidemiology services to pharmaceutical companies. Prior to that, he worked as Chief Financial Officer for several publicly traded companies, including Active Power Inc. and LECG. In addition, he served in several senior financial roles for Gilead Sciences, Amkor Technologies and JDS Uniphase. In other words, he’s been doing this for a while, and he enjoys it. Fife is a Certified Public Accountant (inactive) in the State of California and holds a Bachelor of Science degree in Accounting from Brigham Young University.
SSN: Tell us about your journey to LifeVantage.
My background is in accounting and finance. Coming from the San Francisco Bay area, most of my experience has primarily been with publicly traded tech companies. I’ve been with a number of publicly traded companies—always on the business and finance side of the equation, focusing on driving value where I could.
I’ve never shied away from a challenge if I felt like it was within our control and that I could influence it. What I think is much more difficult for companies to be successful with is more on the revenue side, the demand for the product—is it positioned well? What are the market opportunities? And so my career has really been spent with companies that have had some kind of internal challenges and yet have great product differentiation and revenue opportunities. That was the case here. What I saw with LifeVantage when I joined six years ago, both from its product portfolio as well as its geographic footprint and market penetration was that there was a tremendous opportunity for growth.
So that’s what attracted me. I’ve been fairly industry-agnostic my whole career. I’ve been with semiconductor companies, biotech companies and consulting companies. One of my skills has been coming in and understanding business drivers regardless of the industry and trying to leverage those in a way that drives results.
SSN: You recently led a relaunch of the LifeVantage business plan, including a new consultant compensation plan and customer loyalty program. What sparked your decision to move forward with these changes?
A lot of companies in this space experience some fairly rapid and significant growth when they launch, and that was the case with LifeVantage. We grew from $0 to $200 million in four years. For the last several years, we’ve had ups and downs, but nothing that could sustain any meaningful growth. The good news for LifeVantage is that over this time we developed extremely loyal customers and distributors that have stayed with us during a period of plateauing. I think that speaks volumes about our culture and our products. But I believe that we had gotten into a trap of trying to address larger issues with short-term solutions. Looking at our compensation plan from the highest level, which on a number of fronts has some very, very positive areas, I believed there were also some holes or gaps.
For years the company tried to plug those holes through incentives and promotions. What we saw were very short-term successes, but nothing that provided sustainable growth. So, when I was asked two years ago to step in as the CEO, we had some pretty candid conversations as an executive team and with our board and asked, “Is this the company we want to be?” It turned out that no one wanted to be with a company that just aspired to maintain the status quo. So, we started an initiative that internally we refer to as LV360. And really what that means to me and to the team is that we picked up all of the stones. When we walked into this about a year ago, it was with a view that we needed to address some of these shortcomings in our compensation plan, but it became apparent really quickly that it wasn’t just a compensation plan overhaul that was needed for us to grow the company.
Thus, with LV360, we’ve addressed several aspects of our business. First and foremost, we went through a “mission, vision, values” process in terms of who we really wanted to be and to establish a guidepost for that. We then looked at our product strategy and put some fairly significant guardrails in place in terms of what criteria was needed for both new and existing products. This strategy led us to the launch of a unique collagen product in June that has been wildly successful for us.
And we’ve continued to build upon that success. We launched three new products at an event that we called “Rock the Rhythm” which, again, builds upon this product strategy. So the keys have been product strategy and a focus on compensation, of how we incentivize and pay our distributors. Historically, we have called our business partners “distributors,” and we’ve changed that. We’ve now pivoted and are referring to them as “consultants.” The reality is in today’s network marketing world—social selling world—they’re not distributing products. They’re consulting, advising, and selling products to customers. And so that name is significant in my mind in terms of how we think about our business now.
LV360 was created holistically, and March 1 is another important milestone with several other initiatives going live. LV360 really accelerated very quickly from, “Gee, we need to change a few things around our compensation plan,” to us taking a much broader approach to the business.
SSN: After the channel’s pandemic boom, many companies began to plateau and many have seen declines in sales. In response, several direct sellers have explored avenues that have been resisted in the past—affiliate marketing, retail partnerships and influencers. What are your thoughts on these secondary marketing strategies, and is it something that should be embraced by the channel?
I think they need to be more than embraced—they need to be addressed and adopted. Our compensation plan and business focus were established 13 years ago when the company made the decision to leave a retail model for direct selling. Previously, you could buy our flagship product at GNC, The Vitamin Shop and others. But it wasn’t getting the traction that the company needed. We brought in advisors—and this obviously predates me—and the ultimate conclusion was that the direct selling channel, the network marketing channel, would allow the company to tell its story in a certain way. LifeVantage then developed a compensation plan that I think, 13 years ago, was spot on to address those business builders in this channel.
If you just think about the evolution, not just in our space, but of the consumer buying patterns over the last 13 years, I’d argue that they’ve accelerated and changed during the COVID period. Although it was a great compensation plan for 13 years, it didn’t address today’s consumers. So we planted a seed just over a year ago with our consultant base. Our vision was to become an “AND” company. And by “AND,” I wanted to make sure we could meet people who were passionate about LifeVantage products AND people who were passionate about a business opportunity—meet them where they are from a personal standpoint or from a capability standpoint. I wanted to be able to appeal to people who wanted to sell products and make $500, $1,000 or $2,000 a month, whatever it was.
And that really became a rallying cry for our organization. Rather than creating two separate camps or groups within the company, we started a year ago trying to unify and put in place the things that were beneficial to both of those personas through promotions and behaviors. So today, with the launch of our “Evolve” compensation plan, we remind ourselves that if we’re not evolving we are becoming, and we would continue to become irrelevant in a world that is changing.
We are thrilled with this compensation plan because it accomplishes the goals that we set over a year ago by appealing to customer gatherers—people who want to sell products and can make a reasonable commission comparable to affiliate marketers—and also to social sellers. They can make a reasonable income by selling products, but they can also build organizations with this new compensation plan. My goal wasn’t to swing a pendulum to one side or the other too far, but to find an opportunity, a plan, that could be embraced by everyone and provide an avenue regardless of what appeals to you.
SSN: What are the keys to staying under the regulatory radar and building a consultant base that “does it right?”
I’m a principle-based person. You teach correct principles, and then, hopefully, people will govern themselves. However, I think transparency is huge at every level and at every touchpoint. We have a phenomenal marketing/branding team that I think understands the guardrails of the environment we are in, and we are focused on staying within and not even touching those guardrails. We want to be compliant.
This extends to our product roadmap and our product strategy of being able to develop products that are demonstrable, that are science-based, and that have a story that can be told without having to make significant form function claims.
I believe that the notion of a commitment to customers is critical to that, as well as a commitment to compliance monitoring. However, I think even more important than the monitoring aspect is the continual training. We have a number of training activities that are led by our compliance group. There are monthly trainings for consultants where we discuss how to compliantly talk about our products and income opportunities.
SSN: What are the challenges that direct selling executives need to focus on over the next 5 to 10 years?
I think that this industry is going to continue to evolve at an accelerated pace. Identifying that now and identifying what your company can do to work with existing leaders in helping bring them along in the transition is key. One of the things that I’m most proud about in terms of this last year and LV360 is how we integrated feedback from several different field leaders, our internal leadership team, and candidly, also our board of directors. We’ve got a phenomenal board of directors. But to bring together and create a common vision was critical to the success that we’ve had so far, and it’s a continued success that I know we’re going to realize. So, bringing people along is critical.
I also think technology is going to continue to play a massive role in the evolution of this industry. If we’re not providing customers with convenient experiences that are comparable to what they’re getting elsewhere outside of the industry, they’re going to migrate away from us. We need to recognize that and ensure we’re at or above benchmark experiences for our customers. Our communication in terms of who we are, what we’re doing, and our value proposition has to continue to strengthen and become crystal clear because consumer options will continue to grow. And so the question of why direct selling, why LifeVantage, has to be much more clear to attract and retain consumers. Change is going to be our constant. Making sure the executive team is comfortable with that and also making sure our field is comfortable with change is important because I think it’s going to continue to accelerate at a pace that we’ve got to be prepared for.
SSN: You mentioned that you were brought on by LifeVantage at a point when they were trying to get to the next level. If I’m an executive of a company that’s trying to scale, what advice do you have for me?
I’d say first and foremost, whatever you’re thinking needs to happen within your company, think bigger. I mentioned that when we started this, we knew we had a lot of things that we needed to fix; but the center, the bullseye, was a compensation plan enhancement. While that was a central element of it, we learned that there were a lot of other things that we really needed to address as well.
I was with a group of distributors a few months ago when we started to roll out our Evolve Compensation Plan. One of them talked about vision and dreams, and I love the way she described it. She said, “If your vision is crystal clear, you’re not dreaming big enough.” There needs to be some uncertainty on the fringe, some cloud, some ambiguity and some fuzziness on the edges. If there’s not, you’re not dreaming big enough.
Steve Fife was interviewed by David Bland on behalf of Social Selling News.
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