About Blake Roney
Blake Roney, co-founder and chairman of Nu Skin Enterprises, has continued to address company audiences with messages emphasizing resilience, innovation, and the company’s social impact. In a December 2024 opening address at the US Convention, Roney described business as a constant struggle against challenges, saying that “everyone runs for shelter when it rains except Nu Skin — we have a history of dancing in the rain.” He stated that the company’s growth comes from innovation and that it must adapt to changing regulations, technology, and market conditions. Roney expressed confidence in the company’s future, citing past achievements such as providing meals in Africa and said he expects that number to grow.
In earlier remarks from 2023 and 2024, Roney discussed goal-setting and the company’s ambitions. He said Nu Skin intends to become “the most successful direct selling company in the world,” defined by paying out more to distributors than any competitor, and expressed a desire for the company to “do more good than any existent company in the world” and to help solve child hunger. Roney has also repeatedly urged distributors to focus on recruiting honest, cooperative people, warning against sponsoring “unpleasant or dishonest” individuals, whom he called an obstacle. He has framed the company’s mission as helping others, stating that “a good person to me makes other people’s lives better” and that distributors should “get up every day and ask, ‘Who can I help?’”
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Blake Roney's recent appearances.
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Transcript (12 segments)
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Interviewer0:22
How do you set goals? How do you do it?
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Blake Roney0:26
I'm a planner guy. Let's make a to-do list.
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Interviewer0:30
Yeah, I do. I make to-do lists. I love checking boxes.
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Blake Roney0:37
I make little boxes. Back before electronic planners, I would just make my own on three-by-five cards originally. Things that I could put a little box next to so later I could check the box. Sometimes I wrote it down after I'd done it. And it's an amazing thing to me: if you write some goals down, you write them down and you don't even know how you're going to attain them. Somehow you just magically are thinking in the right ways to do the right things at the right times, and you accomplish some of those things.
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Interviewer1:08
Do you sometimes have those lists side by side or on the same list? The little ones like go to the dry cleaner and the bigger ones like go to China?
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Blake Roney1:15
Yeah, projects versus things to do, I suppose, is what we're talking about, and they might get intermingled. A lot of times, I find in order to keep them in front of my face, I'll have them on today's calendar, and then I gotta move them to tomorrow. I'm going to move them tomorrow. But it is best to have big goals and then the little small components, which is all the boxes you get to check. You hardly ever get to check the project boxes, so you have to have small things so that you can check a box every day and go to bed satisfied. But I did this before we had our first product. I sat down and wrote down some goals which were outrageous. I mean, they were ridiculous. Now that I'm wise, I can see that they were foolish. A couple years, maybe five years into the business, I found when we were moving between offices, I had to stare at them for a minute and recognize, 'Oh, this is my handwriting. Oh yeah, I remember when I wrote these.' And we had attained all of them. It was just magic. Wonderful. But they were ridiculous. There were things to do millions of dollars worth of volume and have a certain number of successful people. And there were things that were really truly outrageous when I wrote them. It magically happened.
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Interviewer2:32
Do you have a similar list right now going?
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Blake Roney2:34
Yeah. We currently intend to become the most successful direct selling company in the world. And in our definition, that means to pay out more money to our distributors than any other company does. We have a ways to go to get to their top, but we'll get there. I want our company to do more good than any existent company in the world. And that's pretty goofy, it's pretty big. I think we could, and I think we might. And this is crazy: I'd like to go ahead and solve world hunger of children. That's outrageous. And yet, we see our distributors making really interesting headway toward that. I don't remember how many meals now they've provided to children, but we're going beyond that. We're setting up systems so that they become self-sustaining. Malawi is the first place where we've done that. In Malawi, we set up the factory, and they work in the factory, and they grow extra crops, and we buy them. Then they work in the factory to make our ingredients. All these things have helped the local economy. But before long, they'll be able to do all that themselves because we have someone who owns the factory who later, he's going around getting people to grow a second crop they didn't know they could do. Napoleon, who's a jewel, he'll get them to grow a second crop, and he buys it from them, and it will become very self-sustaining because the way the model is set up and because our distributors have been so dedicated to it, because it's what they do for a living.
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Interviewer4:21
Looking back as that 25-year-old idealistic young businessman, could you ever have imagined that the company would have gotten this big, that you would have been able to check off so many of those things on that to-do list?
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Blake Roney4:34
The quick answer is no. And yet, things that we wrote at the time match up with these kinds of numbers that we've done. So we actually thought we could. And I think that's pretty naive now that we thought that. We really shouldn't have had such grandiose thoughts, but we did. But I didn't translate in my mind what that all meant. When you get to go look into the faces of the kids in Malawi, and when you get a distributor whose life was bad and now it's good, looking in the face and with tears in their eyes telling you, somehow it didn't all translate into reality. But on paper, we thought so.
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Interviewer5:24
So is that the lesson to distributors, then, not to be afraid to think big, because you really never know how much you can achieve?
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Blake Roney5:35
Yeah. To be bold enough to go after a goal. I don't know what their goals are, but I think I know what makes them happy. And if they can begin to match their goals with things that make them happy, and go find some opportunity—I don't care if it's ours or anyone's, I happen to believe it's ours—but if they'll be bold enough to pursue that which takes you out of your comfort zone, makes life kind of scary, but if you can be bold enough to start doing it and persist and stay with it, and do it in a way that's enjoyable, then you get to be part of the magic.
