Energy Drinks
Keeping tabs on your competition is one thing.
Decorating an entire wall of your office with their products is quite another.
For Tyler Benedict, it's a way to remember how hard he's worked and how quickly it could all slip away.
His display of more than 200 energy drinks represents the success he's earned in an industry that's more likely to send intrepid entrepreneurs into bankruptcy than into Donald Trump's tax bracket.
"About 80 percent of these are gone," he says proudly. "Most energy drinks fail in six months."
Benedict is the founder, owner and CEO of Greensboro-based Source Beverages, a thriving energy drink company with expected revenues of $2 million this year and distribution in more than 20 states.
At 31, Benedict works at home in jeans and button-down shirts, selling the most caffeinated energy drink on the market.
Burn, a tangy citrus-flavored beverage created in 2002, packs a walloping 118 milligrams of caffeine in each 8.3-ounce blazing yellow can 48 percent more than industry leader Red Bull.
But the creator of this human rocket fuel isn't what you expect. Benedict exudes an aura of calm and tranquility more typical of a yoga guru than the extreme athletes who down his product.
The University of Florida journalism graduate doesn't fit the mold of success in the billion-dollar energy drink busi-ness an industry where nearly 1,000 new drinks have been released in the past four years.
"We've been very careful not to grow too fast," Benedict says. "Lots of companies try to saturate the national market right away, and they go bust."
Red Bull, introduced in the United States in 1996, jump-started the energy drink business. The Austrian company has dominated the market ever since, and in 2004, its sales topped $1.2 billion. His other competitors include multibillion dollar...
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