Let me just start by giving an overview of the brands that we own. In short, we are an owner and marketer of nutritional supplement brands, primarily nutritional supplement brands. We do own a couple of skincare brands as well. The way we have recently been reporting our performance is in kind of three categories: what we call legacy FitLife, and these are brands that were either internally developed or were acquired more than two years ago. You can see those here on the left-hand side of the page. You can also see for each of these brands how we go to market. The first five brands on the left are exclusive to GNC in terms of brick-and-mortar distribution. We do not wholesale those to anyone else.
One other thing you'll notice as you look at all of these is we sell all of our brands, all of our products, online ourselves. We do not sell to Amazon. We sell on Amazon. We sell on Walmart.com, on eBay. The Isatori, Energize, Biogenetic Labs, those were acquired in a transaction in 2015 before I got involved with the company. More recently, though, we have been on the path to continue consolidating in the nutritional supplement space. We've completed really three acquisitions since I've been the CEO. One of them was quite small, but the two bigger and more recent acquisitions, the first was Mimi's Rock, which we acquired in February of 2023, so a little more than two years ago. Mimi's Rock was publicly traded up in Canada. The brands we acquired with that were Dr. Tobias, ANA, and Maritime Naturals.
I mentioned two skincare brands. ANA and Maritime Naturals are two skincare brands. Those are sold exclusively online, predominantly on Amazon, and really predominantly on Amazon in Canada. We do sell a few of those SKUs on Amazon in the U.S., but those were a Canadian business that started up there and really scaled up there. Not a big part of our business. We did not necessarily want those brands, but like I mentioned, Mimi's Rock was a publicly traded company in Canada, so we could not just get Dr. Tobias, which is what we really wanted. Dr. Tobias is a pretty large seller of nutritional supplements, again, primarily on Amazon, very, very limited wholesale distribution. We sell a lot of kind of colon health products. I think we are the number one seller of colon health products on Amazon. We are a very large seller of fish oil, multivitamins.
We kind of categorize that as what we call general health, whereas a lot of the products on the left, these brands you see here, are, generally speaking, there's some diet brands in there, but for the most part, sports nutrition. Again, think GNC, think pre-workouts, protein, BCAA, stuff like that. The other significant acquisition that we completed was MusclePharm, which we acquired in October of 2023. MusclePharm is a brand that's been around for 15 plus years, was publicly traded. Many of you may have heard of it or followed it when it was publicly traded. Did a lot to grow the brand, but never to grow the brand profitably. I think their peak revenue was somewhere around $175 million in revenue, but never really a profitable brand. They spent a lot of money on marketing.
They had brand ambassadors like Arnold Schwarzenegger and Tiger Woods. Never made money as a result, borrowed a lot of money, and that merry-go-round comes to a halt at some point. They ended up in bankruptcy. We acquired their assets out of bankruptcy. MusclePharm is all kind of sports nutrition, much more heavily indexed to protein than our other sports nutrition brands. Probably close to 80% of the revenue for MusclePharm comes from protein. That is an overview of our brands. Just to sum it up, what we are doing is consolidating. We think we're pretty good operators, so we think we do a good job operating the brands that we own, but we're looking to further consolidate in the nutritional supplement industry, and we'll talk a bit more about that as we move forward.
Just to give you an overview of what we think the investment thesis here is, we have a proven management team that is aligned with shareholders. We'll walk you through each of these in more detail as part of our presentation. We think we have pretty compelling financial performance. W e're publicly traded on Nasdaq, so you can go look at all of the numbers, but we're growing revenue. We're very profitable. We have a very clean balance sheet, very high free cash conversion, and we use the cash flow generated from the business to acquire other brands. We'll talk a bit more about the growth potential, not just the inorganic growth potential, but also the organic growth potential within nutritional supplements, which as a category is big, again, probably $60ish billion just in the US and very, very, very fragmented.
Lots of opportunity to consolidate, but also if you look back over time, this is a category in an industry that really never has a down year. It's not growing 15%-20%, but it's generally growing kind of mid to some years high single-digit organically. I'll kind of take you through this first section about the management team and our story of how we got to where we are now, and then I'll hand it over to Ryan to take you through the rest of it. I'm not going to walk you through everybody on here, but I'll talk a little bit about my background and about Ryan's background. Again, I'm Dayton Judd. I'm the CEO of the company, took over in February of 2018.
There's a fairly long story about how that came to be, but the best way for me to sum it up is normally for many, many, many years, I attended these conferences where you sit. I run a hedge fund as well, and it's through that fund how I initially built a stake in FitLife, and it's again a longer story how I ended up joining the board and then becoming the CEO. My background, kind of studied accounting. I'm a CPA, Harvard kind of business school, started at McKinsey, went to business school, went back to McKinsey for several more years, and then left in 2007. That's when I got into the investing space, worked for a kind of multi-billion dollar hedge fund called Q Investments based in Fort Worth, did that for about five years before launching my own fund in 2012.
My fund is called Sudbury Capital. Again, I won't walk you through the others, but you can see the team. I think we have a good team, a good mix of people with really deep industry experience, some people that have come in more recently with kind of strong functional expertise and with some kind of fresh perspectives as well. Just to touch a bit on Ryan, Ryan joined in 2023. Similar background to me in that he studied accounting and he worked in consulting as well, worked at Bain & Company, and then spent some time as a COO for a dental roll-up. He's been doing this consolidation thing in a different industry, and he's been working with us now for about a year and a half. That is the management team.
This is a very busy chart, but it's one of my favorite charts just in terms of telling the story. To tell you in a bit more detail again about the history, I was just an external investor leading up until summer of 2017, is when I joined the board of FitLife. October of 2017 is when I became the chairman. At that point, the company had acquired Isatori. They overpaid for the company. The integration didn't go as well as it should, and that's what kind of set the company on this downward trajectory that you see late 2016 and all through 2017. Again, summer of 2017 is when I started agitating and ended up joining the board ultimately in June. At the time, I mean, we were in a difficult place, o bviously, revenue coming down, negative EBITDA. We had some debt.
We were in default on the debt. I think when I took over, our market cap was less than $3 million. I think we'll show a share price chart here in a bit, but I think split adjusted for the splits we've done, it was about 35 cents a share. We were literally on death's doorstep, and the decision was basically, do we file the company for bankruptcy, right, or do we try and turn it around? There was a number, I had a number of ideas of what I thought would be opportunities for the company. Long story short, I ended up coming in in February as an interim CEO. I had, again, run a fund, I had no intention of taking a permanent operating role.
One of the biggest opportunities I thought the company had, now these brands that I mentioned when we were on the first page, some of those brands have been around 20 years being sold GNCs nationwide, and they were largely not available online. FitLife, prior to my involvement, was just very reluctant to sell online. 99% plus of their revenue was coming from wholesale, and they did not want to be perceived as competing with their brick-and-mortar customers. They just did not sell online, which is a very unusual strategy 20 plus years after the advent of the internet. That was really the biggest priority. There is a lot of cost cutting as well, a lot of expense that was not needed. I think we took something like 30% out of SG&A without firing anybody. Online has really been the big growth opportunity and profit opportunity for us.
For that first, I like to give the anecdote. That first month, I think I took over February 18th. Those last 10 days of February, we sold about $900 worth of product on Amazon. Today, it's not unusual for us to have a week where we do $1 million a week selling these brands that we have on Amazon. As a result, again, when we started this, less than 1% of our revenue again was coming from online. Now, roughly two-thirds, a little more than two-thirds of our revenue comes from online. The reason that's important, there's a couple of benefits to us of that. Number one, it's significantly more profitable. When you're a wholesaler, you're generally happy with about 35ish % gross margins. When you can sell retail, capture retail margins straight to the end consumer, that margin number is significantly higher.
If you look at our gross margins over time, you'll see that increase, that growth from in the 30s to now closer to the mid-40s in terms of gross margins. Another benefit is when I took over, an d again, just the company historically, because of those five brands that I mentioned were exclusive to GNC, they were a very significant part of our revenue. I think GNC, for a lot of the company's existence, was more than 90% of revenue. That's never a good place to be because they can do what they want with you. They can pay you when they want, if they want, and you don't have a lot of other places you can go. We love GNC. They are still our biggest brick-and-mortar, our biggest wholesale customer, I should say.
We have diversified away from them, not by reducing sales to GNC, but by growing elsewhere. GNC is now maybe 20% or less than 20% or so of our revenue. You can see kind of the early days, what we did, the first thing was getting the company kind of out from under its debt. We were millions behind in payables to suppliers as well. You can see the business start to grow as we start selling online. You can see the EBITDA start to come in. Once we were out of the woods as far as the financial difficulties we had, actually, I'll take a step back. Before the company was in a position to buy back stock, again, I mentioned I run a fund. When I took over the company, I owned about 8% of the company.
Once I saw this opportunity, the success that we were having by transitioning some of these brands to selling online, I started buying both myself personally and through my fund. We will kind of get to this here in a bit. The net kind of takeaway of that is between myself and the fund that I run, I own about 56% of the company outright and on a fully diluted basis, about 60%. I was buying when the company was not in a position to buy, but as soon as the company's balance sheet was in better shape in 2019 and the company was in position to buy back stock, I think we bought about 20% of the outstanding shares during 2019.
Refreshed a lot of the branding and packaging, again, got out of debt, started building cash, and it's then when the strategy kind of came into play, which is we're going to use this cash that we're generating from these brands and from our online sales and use that to acquire other brands, which gives us the benefit of diversifying away from GNC and just diversity just in general, right? So that we don't have all of our eggs in one basket or with one brand. You can see the impact of COVID-19 and the GNC bankruptcy that happened right in the midst of that as well. It didn't affect us a whole lot. I think it was something like a $300,000 or $400,000 write-off. We actually ended up getting paid for most of the money that they owed us. Did our first very minor acquisition in April 2021.
Here on the right-hand side of the chart, the pink section is kind of the growth in the M&A phase. That is when we bought Nutrology. We launched some new products. We acquired MRC, which is the Dr. Tobias and the two skincare brands that I mentioned. You can see the scale. That essentially doubled the size of the business, and Ryan will walk you through the economics for these transactions, but it is a very compelling kind of multiple arbitrage opportunity where we trade, I do not know where we trade today because of everything going on with Trump and the tariffs, but we have historically traded kind of 10-12 times, and we can acquire these brands for 3 to 6 times depending on how they are doing.
You have this kind of multiple arbitrage, and we think, not we think, I mean, our track record is once we buy them, we tend to get even better performance out of them because of the platform that we can bolt them onto. You can see the acquisition of MusclePharm in October of 2023. Most common question we get now is, okay, nothing in 2024, is it time? We are very, very disciplined. We look at dozens and dozens of deals. We are very picky. We just wait for the fat pitch, and when it comes, we will swing. When we do, we are looking for deals where I like to use the heads we win and tails we win a lot, right?
When we sign these deals, even if the business never grows and we can't get anything out of it, it's still a good acquisition for us. That is the story of our transformation, which is continuing. The balance sheet is in a great place now. I think we're less than 0.5 times EBITDA now in terms of net debt. Significant borrowing capacity. Ryan will walk you through it. M&A, we have never issued shares to do M&A. We use debt capital and cash off of our own balance sheet. For the right acquisition, we may at some point use equity, but that certainly is not the plan. Maybe, but we're not. I own the most, and I'm very sensitive about dilution. Just to kind of keep us going here, here's kind of been the story in terms of the stock chart.
You can see the recent drawdown, although it looks like we've gained back about half of what we lost with the tariffs and the uncertainty in the market. You can see, I won't kind of read through the numbers, but you can see the performance, the annualized performance there on the left, and the shares outstanding. We have not issued shares. I think we did a preferred stock raise that was convertible into common in 2018, but that was the last time we did any sort of equity capital raise ever. The dilution that you do see happening there is just kind of employees exercising options and whatnot. I mentioned this before. We have a vested interest. I have a very vested interest in how this plays out and what happens here between myself and the entities I control, about 56.4% of the equity.
On a currently outstanding basis, it's closer to 60% on a fully diluted basis. Other insiders own right now 2.1% with options. They have options as well. I forgot to mention, by the way, we are totally fine if you guys want to ask questions as we go rather than saving till the end. If you do have questions, we'll do our best to answer them, but if not, we'll just keep plowing forward. With that, I will hand it over to Ryan to talk a bit more about the other parts of our investment thesis.
Awesome. Questions for Dayton quickly before I jump in here? Keep going.
From your standpoint, where do you see a couple of particular segments that look particularly interesting on a macro level for the next five years?
From the categories within nutritional supplements, is that what you mean?
Yeah. In terms of what you have already and what would be something that you don't necessarily have or much of a concentration that you need to consider?
Yeah. We like sports nutrition just because we have several brands in that space, and we know it very well. We know a lot of manufacturers. We're good at sports nutrition. We will certainly look at more sports nutrition. Until we bought Dr. Tobias, we did not have a lot in general health. We did have some. We really like that. One thing we like about that is it is less cyclical than sports nutrition. Sports nutrition is very, very, very big in kind of January, February, March, April, right? New Year's resolutions and then swimsuit season and whatnot. General health has the same type of cyclicality, but it is about half as much, right? People do not buy as much fish oil and multivitamins in December as they do in January, but it is only about half as much. We like general health. We like sports nutrition.
We do not like diet. Diet has been a challenged area for a while, and the GLP-1 drugs have not helped that. We do have some diet products, but we are not actively. If we were to buy a company in the diet space, it would be a very, very compelling price because we are not really focused on that.
Okay. I am going to jump in here and move fairly quickly. This is all available on our website and whatnot. You can see the margin profile here on the left, kind of the gross margins that Dayton talked through. We also focus a lot on what we call contribution, which for us is just gross margin less advertising and marketing expenses that we can allocate kind of specifically on a brand basis before the kind of company overhead, right?
That's another metric we use that you can see here that results in adjusted EBITDA north of 20%. Just a couple of quick examples on the brick-and-mortar side is Dayton mentioned GNC is our largest customer there. We have some products just with exceptional advocacy, both from the end customer as well as GNC and the franchisees that help market those products in store. That's been a really symbiotic flywheel on that side of the business. The other item, I guess I'll mention here on the Amazon side, I don't think it's a mystery to any of us that kind of placement there rules the game, right? It's much easier to maintain than it is to improve ranking on a platform like Amazon. We're fortunate to have inherited some brands that do have some really strong search performance.
That results in kind of some good placement there, right, that we can continue to harvest. From just an EBITDA perspective, right, a lot of that we do flow through to free cash flow. As Dayton mentioned, we have a really solid network of contract manufacturers. We outsource all of that. We do not own any of the assets to do the manufacturing. There's a number of folks throughout the country that are certainly capable. Leverage that network, virtually zero CapEx. From a debt perspective, the only time we take debt is to do a great deal. Besides that, we do not need debt, and we try to pay it down fairly quickly after taking debt, which results kind of in the right-hand side, what you can see there from a free cash flow perspective. This is a bit more detail on the contribution metric that I mentioned before.
This bucketizes it based on the three categories Dayton introduced, with Legacy FitLife, the MRC brands, and MusclePharm. You can see kind of the last five quarters here, how that has trended. This is critical to us, right? We are improving revenue and/or improving the margin profile of the product after marketing and advertising. A number of levers here come into play, probably differs a little bit by the specific subset of brands we are talking about. I'll maybe highlight MRC here. You can see it has been about $2.5 million of contribution the last four quarters, $10 million in 2024 in totality. We paid $17.1 million for that deal. It has been kind of a home run, and that is the kind of stuff we would love to do more of. Online, as Dayton alluded to, this has been a huge journey for the company.
Everything that you see up through 2022 was just organic. None of that was acquired. That was simply just a transition to capitalize on customers in that channel. Since then, there's been some inorganic, obviously, bumps there with the MRC acquisition in particular, where the vast majority of those products are sold online. I'll comment that it's not just the gross margin percentage that's superior online, right? Even more than that, it's the gross profit dollars that flow through, right? We're selling a protein powder for $70 bucks right, instead of the wholesale price that's probably less than half that. It is significant in terms of just the quantum of dollars that flow through. Lastly, I'll touch on this final pillar here from a growth perspective. We're fortunate to be in an industry with some pretty strong, consistent tailwinds.
You can see there kind of mid-single digit, 6% expected growth in the US for the categories in which we play. I'll comment, again, you can read this all, but I'll highlight a couple of exciting areas for us just from an organic growth perspective. Dr. Tobias is a brand that's done phenomenally well on Amazon and has the right to play in probably hundreds of products that it currently doesn't offer, right? Where it still has some relevant brand equity with that consumer base. We're actively launching new products under that brand to capitalize on a lot of trends that we see in the industry around focusing on single- ingredient supplements, not so much blends. Consumers, I think, are even more educated today and wanting to diagnose what they need and kind of self-select versus be presented with maybe a more of a functional benefit-oriented supplement.
On the MusclePharm side, there's a bunch of new product development happening as well. Recently introduced a Pro Series line, which is premium formulas differentiated from the line that we currently have. Currently available in Vitamin Shoppe, but thereafter would be available in other channels as well. We also have a new ready-to-drink protein. A MusclePharm tub of protein may cost $70 bucks retail, but this is a much cheaper entry point to the brand for new consumers who may want to spend $4 bucks on a protein before buying the full tub. As Dayton mentioned, inorganic growth, I can't underemphasize the importance of this to our strategy. Dayton and I probably spend at least half our time focused on this. It's been a little while since we've done a deal, but don't take that as a lack of effort here.
We are turning rocks constantly, and this is certainly a huge priority that we have. The multiple arbitrage is real, as you see there on the left. That's just reinforced over and over with every deal that we have seen. The deal funnel here is a pretty kind of steep, I guess, funnel here in terms of the deals that we actually action. We consider ourselves very disciplined buyers. As we continue to do well in the public markets, generate more and more deal flow and interest, which is positive, and have a balance sheet ready to do a deal kind of whenever we have the next one up. I spoke a little bit to the MRC deal that we did just about two years ago. Dayton spoke a little bit to the MusclePharm deal. Let me just highlight on the MRC side.
That business was doing maybe $1 million of EBITDA, kind of under prior ownership with their platform, right? In our hands, that's completely different, right? There has been a lot of unnecessary SG&A that's been eliminated, as well as a lot of advertising cost optimization resulting in that really strong contribution that you saw before. We're hopeful we'll find more of this, right? Can kind of plug it in the platform and see similar economics. I think my time's up, so I'll wrap there. I don't know if we even have any time for questions.
I think not, but we're here. We're in booth 413. I think we'll probably be hanging out over there until 1:00 P.M. when we start one-on-ones if any of you have questions. Thank you very much.
Appreciate it.