Over the last dozen years Scivation CEO Mike McCandless has been involved in just about every aspect of the supplement retail business. He began by working for GNC corporate in 1998 before moving on to manage franchise stores for the popular chain. Never one to be content while working for someone else, the entrepreneurial McCandless opened his own brick-and-mortar supplement store in 2001, called “Unlimited Nutrition.”  

Later that year, McCandless went down the rabbit hole of a popular supplement and training online forum. After a few months and several hundred posts, he quickly realized he could get many of the people on the forum to start buying from him. In 2002 he launched www.1fast400.com. The name was his handle on the forum, and a nod to his best event when he competed in track and field at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. Soon after, he launched www.bulknutrition.com, which would grow at a phenomenal rate, surpassing his previous online ventures. 

In the summer of 2004, Scivation was born. While McCandless was the controlling shareholder in the company, he chose to take his hands off the wheel and focus on some literal wheels. After selling Bulk Nutrition in 2006, McCandless bought a drag strip. The son of drag racing legend and world champion Herb McCandless, the entire McCandless family has been around racing tracks for most of their lives. Following in his father’s tire marks, both his brother and nephew are world champion drag racers and Mike owns the record for world’s fastest Viper on street tires (8.55 seconds quarter-mile, 155 mph,) and world’s fastest convertible Viper (5.86 seconds 1/8-mile, 125 mph).

McCandless sold the track a few years later and in 2010 he returned to take an active role in the supplement industry. Scivation had grown impressively since 2004, but McCandless has even greater aspirations for the little label that could.