- September 12, 2024
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Long life spans run in Mark Pentecost’s family. His parents are in their late 80s. Three of his grandparents lived into their mid-90s. “So that was my plan,” Pentecost says, sitting in his capacious office at the Palmetto headquarters of It Works!, a company he founded in 2001 that has amassed him and his family a substantial fortune.
“Then I got hit.”
In 2016, he was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, an incurable form of blood cancer. Pentecost, 67, has outlived his life expectancy. “Usually, it’s a five-year [death] sentence,” he says. “But we caught it early. My memory is not as sharp. I blame it on the chemo. Because of the stem cell treatments, I lost all my hair and muscle. I don’t have the stamina I used to.”
If cancer has Pentecost operating at a deficit, it doesn’t show. The hair is back and he looks fit wearing a blue sport jacket and pin-dot shirt. His ruddy complexion connotes a man who spends considerable time outdoors. Pentecost, with a home three miles west of the State Road 64 exit of Interstate 75, has also spent considerable time in east Manatee County. These days, he follows his passions, which include making a movie, giving money — lots of money — to cancer charities and spending time with family.
On a Friday afternoon in late May, meanwhile, the large waterfront office building was mostly empty due to employees working from home. Pentecost sits in a cushy chair that provides a panoramic view of the Manatee River and Bradenton to the south. He points east toward his primary residence at the Inlets, a warren of mansions and other homes on the riverfront in Bradenton. Pentecost built homes in the same neighborhood for his three children — two daughters and son — as well as his parents. Kami, the oldest, is a single mom who lives two doors down with her five children that range in age from 12 to 19. One of Pentecost’s great joys is having his grandkids nearby.
During a 90-minute interview, Pentecost is open and affable, and does his level best to suppress the irrepressible salesman in him. At one point, well into a soliloquy about the value of dreaming big, he stops. “I guess I started preaching a little bit,” he says with a sly smile.
In 2021, Pentecost stepped down as CEO of It Works!, while remaining chairman of the board. The direct-sales enterprise has routinely racked up more than $500 million in annual revenue selling an array of skin care, nutritional and beauty items. Its foundational product is Skinny Wrap, used for body toning. The company’s sales force, all of them independent contractors, numbers about 30,000, Pentecost says.
Free of the corporate day-to-day, Pentecost turned his attention to dream projects. He conceived, financed and produced a scripted movie titled “Florida Wild,” which was filmed on his 10,000-acre ranch in Myakka City. It stars Lee Majors of “The Six Million Dollar Man” fame and Oscar-winner Mira Sorvino.
“Florida Wild” is not the only project in the Pentecost pipeline. He’s also putting the finishing touches on a book, “Living Your Best Dream,” which is part memoir, part motivational tract. Both the movie and the book are due for release in the first quarter of next year.
“My wife said the other day that I’ve excelled at everything except retirement,” Pentecost says. “I’m really bad at retirement.” He and Cindy, his high school sweetheart, have been married for 46 years, and she’s been a partner in business as well as life.
Not to say it’s all work and no play. Pentecost tries to get out to his ranch every Tuesday to “ride horses, round up cattle, shoot guns.” He has a regular tee time on Wednesdays at The Founders Golf Club in Sarasota. Pentecost used to play at Stoneybrook Golf Club, which he bought in 2010 for $3.5 million. He sold the property in the late 2010s.
Pentecost also owns a private island. He purchased 104-acre Little Bokeelia Island, west of Fort Myers, for $14.5 million in 2015, primarily for business entertainment. The property includes a 6,500-square-foot, Spanish-style villa. Lately, he doesn’t get out there as much as he’d like.
Mark and Cindy are spending the summer at their home near Banner Elk, North Carolina. They bought it to provide an escape from the Florida heat, which takes more of a toll on Mark due to cancer. “Typical me — I saw a mountain that had a trout stream, so I bought the land,” Pentecost says. “I’d never fly-fished, but now I fly-fish.”
All told, not bad for a former high school math teacher and basketball coach.
Since cancer, Pentecost has put more of his time and money into philanthropic pursuits. He’s one of the biggest donors to the V Foundation, the children’s cancer charity passionately supported by basketball announcer and Lakewood Ranch resident Dick Vitale. In May, Mark and Cindy Pentecost surprised the audience at the 19th Annual Dick Vitale Gala in Sarasota by announcing a gift of $12 million. They’ve made substantial contributions at the event in the last few years. But this was the largest. “The next day I looked at my wife and said, ‘What did we just do?’” Pentecost quips. “But it’s such a good cause.”
Vitale was floored, based on social media posts of the event and donation.
“Mark and Cindy love utilizing their incredible success in a positive way, especially in causes that touch them emotionally,” Vitale says via text message. “They have been a key reason why my gala has had such fantastic success. If I were on ESPN & talking about Cindy & Mark I would simply say ‘CINDY & MARK ARE AWESOME BABY WITH A CAPITAL A!’”
In addition, the Pentecosts are helping fund research for Tampa-based Moffitt Cancer Center. Mark had treatment at top hospitals in Boston and Houston, and then Moffitt. “If I was doing it over today, I’d go straight to Moffitt,” he says. The Pentecosts have donated $13 million and established the Pentecost Family Myeloma Research Center there.
Pentecost’s grandparents on both sides moved from Tennessee to Michigan in the 1950s to work in the automobile factories. His father, along with five brothers, stayed on the same track.
Mark played basketball and tennis at Holt High School in Lansing, Michigan, and was good at math. He got together with Cindy when he was a senior and she was a sophomore. Their first date was at the end-of-season varsity basketball party. “We took a time-out [in our relationship] once or twice, but then realized, ‘Hey, this person is pretty special,’” Pentecost says.
A key pivot point in his life came after high school, when he was accepted at the General Motors Institute. “You go to school there for like three months and then you work in the factory for three months, and then you get a job and make great money,” Pentecost recalls. Another option was to matriculate at nearby Grand Valley State University. Pentecost’s father encouraged him to leave the family trade and chart his own course. Mark was the first in his family to attend college. He joined the Teamsters and worked during summers as a mover for North American Van Lines.
After graduating, the newly married Pentecost took a job as a math teacher at Allegan High School south of Grand Rapids, Michigan. He worked his way up to head basketball coach. It was a solid life, but Pentecost was growing restless. “I was making forty-thousand a year teaching,” he says. “I’d take my lump sum from coaching and we’d get a little bit ahead. But something always went wrong — the car makes a funny little rattle, the washing machine is not working, so we could never stay ahead. I was driving a junk car. We had the ugliest house. It was a battle.”
Pentecost’s father, who had retired from GM and moved back to Tennessee, tipped his son to a job at a company called Excel Communications, a reseller of long-distance telephone minutes that used a multilevel marketing platform. “So dad calls me and says, ‘You need to do this.’” Pentecost recalls. “I said, ‘Dad, I haven’t got the time. I’m coaching basketball games every Tuesday and Friday.’ He said, ‘Son, 10 years from now you’re going to be just as broke. The only thing you’ve lost is 10 years of your life.’”
Pentecost relented, and he and Cindy signed on as Excel reps. They worked their side hustle on nights and weekends, hoping to make an extra $500 a month. Mark proved adept at recruiting new sales people under his umbrella, and — in the standard multi-level sales mode — made money off of their earnings. “All of a sudden, I’m making 6,000 a month and, I thought, ‘If we get to 10,000, I think I’ll quit teaching,’” Pentecost says.
He left Allegan High in ‘97. In all, working for Excel provided five lucrative years. But in the late ‘90s, the rise of cell phones caused the bottom to fall out of the long-distance reseller business, and the Pentecost’s household income plummeted. “At this point, I’m thinking, ‘I don’t wanna go back to teaching,’” he says. “I decided that the next thing I did, I was gonna own my own company — because I wanted to control my destiny.”
Pentecost’s plan was to continue applying the network marketing prowess he honed at Excel, but needed a new product. He heard about a body wrap that could strip away inches of fat in 30 minutes. The Pentecosts visited the manufacturer in Mexico to check it out. They applied the wrap, and to their surprise, it worked, Pentecost says. “It may not have been a product I would’ve chosen,” he adds “The athlete in me wanted energy and strength [products], but I had a strong feeling that these wraps would really sell.”
In 2001, Pentecost took out a second mortgage on his Michigan home and sank $300,000 into founding It Works Global Inc. They chose the name because it answered the question everybody asked about the fat-fighting wraps. “I had the owner of Direct Selling Journal tell me, ‘That’s a terrible name. Did you pick the name?’” Mark recalls. “Ten years later, he said, ‘That name is genius.’”
It Works! didn’t exactly burst out of the blocks. “People say, ‘Oh, you’re so lucky,’” Pentecost says. “But there were like three or four times during probably a seven-year period where we didn’t know if we were gonna make it or not. But it was all in. I didn’t have a plan B.”
The company ultimately found its footing and then hit full stride. Sales spiked from $29 million in 2010 to $200 million in 2012. During that time, Pentecost decided to move corporate operations from Grand Rapids to Bradenton. The climate, the lifestyle and tax incentives offered by Manatee County all factored into his decision.
It Works! purchased a then-vacant waterfront building in Palmetto for $3.1 million and expanded it to 50,000 square feet. The gleaming white HQ has plenty of amenities inside. Visitors can skip the stairs and instead hurl down a slide from the second floor to the first.
These days, Pentecost’s cancer is “under control, that’s what the doctors say. But I don’t like the word ‘control.’ I prefer, ‘cure,’’’ Pentecost states emphatically. “I feel great right now. But I do go at a different pace.”
As the conversation begins to wind down, Pentecost muses, “What a journey.” Then, he utters a surprise. “I don’t think I’d do it again.”
After a pause, he added, “But I was talking about this to a friend and he said, ‘We would do it again if we were that age again.’”
Pentecost smiles in agreement. Of course he would do it again.
