In an office on downtown Main Street Missoula, you’ll find the home office of TSI USA Industries—a global company with a local origin story. Larry Kolb Jr. shares how his journey has led him from a boy growing up on a ranch in Lolo to co-founding a multinational health and science company with divisions abroad in the UK, Oslo, Norway, Sweden, Tokyo, Shanghai, Malaysia, and Australia with more than 228 patents that supplies products to over 820 B2B partners. We had to get the scoop.
MLV: You’ve built an international presence in the supplement & health science world, yet you’ve remained deeply rooted in Missoula. What is it about Missoula that makes it the right “home base” for your business?
LKJ: It’s my home. After college, I moved to Michigan to get into this industry. I had a really great opportunity there with a company, but I said I had to get back to Montana—the mountains and home.
I came back in 1994 and about a year and half later, I was laid off. I had an opportunity to go out of state…like Chicago, Portland, and I said, you know, I’m gonna try and stay here and start my own business. So that’s basically how it (TSI) got started. A big part of the history of TSI is being one to stay in Montana.
MLV: How would you describe your day-to-day responsibilities within the company, both in the multinational sense and locally? How does that translate into the work TSI’s local Missoula office does?
LKJ: Well, I used to be more active in the product lines we have, but we went public in July—we went IPO (initial public offering) on the Shanghai Big Board Stock Exchange, and since then, I’ve taken more of an executive role on the board—strategy and handling a few of our largest accounts, and I’ve taken a step back from the day to day of managing product line PnLs (profit and loss).
But, I was really active in the early days 30 years ago—a very small team trying to make ends meet, hustling. The great thing has been that a lot of people in the office, they’ve been here for two decades. We’ve got a really tight knit group and a real tight operations team here in Missoula. We make people feel better. We improve quality of life.
I was fishing with a guy who had cardiovascular problems, and he was on statin drugs, and both of his legs were really sore, and he couldn’t sleep at night from the side effects. He said “do you have anything?” I said “Well, you know, I don’t know. I take this (HMB) everyday and it removes a lot of soreness in the muscles and it’s a really good product for muscle damage from working out—delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS). It’s proven to mitigate DOMS and help you build muscle and retain muscle & strength—so it’s got a lot of benefits.” He goes, “Well give me a bottle,” and he just texted me yesterday and said “give me another bottle.” That’s why we develop these things.
MVL: You’ve already conquered farm to factory with your ginkgo groves and you’ve created a sustainable source for Glucosamine via Glucosa Green through a direct fermentation process. What’s next for TSI?
LKJ: A really cool division of the company that is gonna take off—it’s called Tailored Script. We create these beadlets, granules. Each of them is a raw material. And we have a whole system that's all patented. When you give us your health data (it could be a survey, it can be a blood draw that gives us your deficiencies, sufficiencies), we will dose into a K cup your individual personalized dosage. If you need a certain amount of vitamin D, a certain amount of B6, maybe one of your biomarkers is out of whack, so we'll throw some other specialty ingredients in there…all of this is to just your specific dose.
While supplements are great, people don't know why they're using them. People don't know how much to use. So we've developed this over about 10 years. It's based on functional medicine—it looks at root causes of different ailments, if you will. And what we're trying to do is not to do anything with disease because we're supplementation, but it is to maximize bodily function.
MVL: Most of us are using ingredients you’ve sourced and developed without even realizing it. What would you say is the most important supplement for the average Missoulian?
LKJ: Well, in the early days, we were really heavily involved in joint health. We are the largest producer of glucosamine in the world. We’re in dog treats and also, just on the supermarket aisle. We didn’t champion it on the research side, but we did on the manufacturing and supply chain. That was the focus for the first 15 years.
The last 15 years was HMB and Peak ATP. We acquired Metabolic Technologies out of Iowa State where researchers discovered HMB. It is a downstream metabolite, a signaling compound of leucine-the most anabolic amino acid. It takes 600 grams of protein to get three grams of HMB, the efficacious dose. You just can’t get enough of it. We’ve had a huge influence on muscle health for a number of demographics and the prevention of sarcopenia. It significantly delays muscle loss. My parents are both on it at 85-it is a significant benefit to them. They can feel the benefit of more energy. We supply Abbott Nutrition (Ensure) with HMB reaching millions of consumers. To lose muscle is easy. These GLP-1s produce rapid weight loss, and 30 to 40% of the weight lost is muscle in the first month.
"We make people feel better. We improve quality of life."