Indholdsfortegnelse for November 2019 i Inc. Magazine

Inc.’s Founders Project began, earlier this year, as a way to commemorate our 40th anniversary. But as you can tell from this issue, it has grown into something much bigger—into a kind of mission. By the end of the year, we will have matched 40 seasoned entrepreneurs with the founders of 40 companies that find themselves at a crossroads. One of our Founders Project mentors is on the cover: Tilman Fertitta, the harddriving CEO of Landry’s, owner of the Houston Rockets, and star of CNBC’s Billion Dollar Buyer. You can read his remarkable biography, written by Inc. editoratlarge Bill Saporito, starting on page 26. But be sure to also check out the dialogue he has with his mentee, Megan Eddings of Accel Lifestyle, on page 30. Her company, which makes…

ADORA-BOT • noun Amazon’s charming and hilarious nickname for its autonomous delivery droids. Presumably an acronym for “Amazon drives our retail apocalypse.” Source: Live Mint GOLDEN SKIRT EFFECT • noun “Whereby a few qualified women are invited to sit on many boards.” Or a depressing mashup of The Office and The Golden Girls. Source: The Wall Street Journal EXPODENTIALLY • adverb A Joe Biden word-mangle of exponentially—but can we adopt it as the official term for podcast hyperinflation? We’ll find out … after this mattress ad! Source: Washington Examiner SAD TRADER FACE • noun The expression in every photo that’s used to illustrate a stock market wobble. Coming soon: Recession bitch face. Source: Twitter…

The Fertitta Portfolio The holdings of a college dropout—restaurants, casinos, hotels, pleasure piers, and an NBA basketball team. Sitting on the terrace of the Oak Room, the 25th-floor members-only sanctuary in Houston’s luxurious Post Oak Hotel, Tilman Fertitta is making his introductions when he spots an errant piece of potato chip on the floor. He instinctively scoops it up and discards it—though he does, in fact, own the joint, so there are plenty of wait staff at his disposal to do this sort of tidying up. But it’s second nature to a billionaire who learned the restaurant trade from the ground floor and can’t stifle his inner busboy. Fertitta has stepped outside on this warm sponge of a Houston evening to escape the typically frigid air conditioning within—is every thermostat…

About a year after its 2016 launch, Pencil realized its name was Co-founder Sydney Liu would talk about the online storytelling platform to enthusiastic listeners at events—but would-be users, thwarted by a second-rate domain name (usepencil.com) and a barrage of unrelated search results, couldn’t find its website. So, in 2017, the company, based in Menlo Park, California, decided to redo its logo, site design, and color scheme before ultimately relaunching as Commaful. The overhaul worked almost immediately. “Within a week, we were number one on Google for our name,” Liu says, and organic sign-ups began to increase. Rebrands are fairly common for startups and small businesses that don’t spend the time (or money) in the early stages to get their messaging, logos, or even monikers just right, says Douglas Spencer,…

As a small or midsize business (SMB) owner, recruiting and retaining an effective workforce is fundamental to your success. On its surface, this seems a fairly straightforward proposition: your employees work on your A behalf, and you pay them for their efforts. But of all the things that can—and often do—cause problems for growing businesses, payroll is one of the most persistent. For starters, doing payroll inhouse is time intensive for SMB owners, who already struggle with competing demands for their attention. Nonprofit business consulting organization SCORE found that 43 percent of SMB owners doing payroll in-house spend three to 10 hours a month on this task, and 11 percent spend even more. That means up to two or more hours a week devoted to an activity that generates no…

Inside the infrared cedar sauna at Epic Entrepreneur House in San Diego, aspiring startup moguls can strip down to their core assets, generate a little sweat equity, and, finally, focus. At Epic, you see, nearly all distractions (friction, in productivity hackers’ parlance) have been removed. There’s no commute, because this is their home. The living room has standing desks; dry-erase boards line the walls from the kitchen to the family room. Friends come to them, lured by prearranged social events; an in-house chef prepares all meals. At Epic, one can ideate a vision for industry dis-ruption while staying totally undisrupted. It’s enough to make you wonder: If the founders of yore—Bill Gates or Steve Jobs, say—had started their companies here instead of in some stupid garage, what might they have…

“I haven’t had to wait in line to go to the women’s bathroom since I got started in tech.”—Ran Ma, co-founder and CEO of smart-sock company Siren, describing perhaps the only advantage to being female in the Silicon Valley boys’ club Like many great startup origin stories, the one for Love Billy!—a New York-based direct-to-consumer clothing brand—begins at a party. It was 2015, there really was a Billy, and Candice Pool Neistat thought it’d be funny to wear a T-shirt emblazoned with his name for his birthday. She found iron-on felt letters just like those her mother used in the 1980s. And a logo for a booming business was born. Love Billy! is far from the only such company going retro when it comes to the crucial task of choosing…

When Anu Duggal returned to New York City eight years ago from India, the two-time founder and angel investor was shocked at how little venture capital was going to female-founded companies in the U.S. Duggal set out to bridge the gap by creating the Female Founders Fund. At first, the going wasn’t easy; Duggal estimates it took her more than 700 meetings to assemble a $5.85 million early-stage investment fund—but she has since raised $27 million for her second fund. F3, as it’s known, has invested in everything from highly valued consumer brands like wedding site Zola to upstarts like Tala, a mobile-based personal lending platform for the developing world Mentee Rhian Horgan knows finance from both sides. After her family emigrated from Ireland when she was a grade-schooler, Horgan…

Jag Bath, an e-commerce veteran of Gilt Groupe and RetailMeNot, became CEO of the Austin-based on-demand delivery service Favor in 2015, fully prepared to execute the Silicon Valley playbook of growth at any cost. But it wasn’t until he made a series of painful decisions, and took a much different approach, that the company really succeeded. FAVORITE Favor CEO Jag Bath, architect of the strategy that saved the business, at company headquarters in Austin. Favor connects smartphone users to an army of Uber-style freelance drivers who deliver anything from a restaurant or store in less than an hour. In 2014, around $4 billion of venture capital—that’s $1 billion a quarter—poured into the on-demand app industry. That’s not including ridesharing companies like Uber. It was food delivery, grocery delivery, house cleaning,…

You ran Qualtrics at a positive cash flow for 10 years without outside investment. What made you decide to start taking venture capital? We got an offer to sell the company in 2012 for half a billion dollars. We turned it down. I think we wouldn’t have raised a round if we hadn’t had an outside offer, because it really showed the decision we had to make: Are we going to keep running this like a homegrown Utah company, or are we all in to build a multibillion-dollar company? And we just said, let’s go. What was your near-IPO experience like? In 2018, I sat the whole company down and said, hey, our biggest bet yet is going public this year. We saw that we could do it right before…

At the B Lab Champions Retreat in Los Angeles attendees in September, nearly 700 attttendees representing the B’s—the tip of a global movement numbering 60,000 companies—are gathered to honor great performers. And to declare victory The B’s are B Corporations, companies that have been certified by B Lab, a nonprofit dedicated to the concept that business must be a force for good, rather than profit alone, and allies working toward that goal. That concept had clearly become mainstream when, in August, the Business Roundtable, which represents the nation’s leading corporations, rejected “shareholder primacy” as the sole purpose of business in favor of stakeholder considerations. By doing so, the business titans at the very least acknowledged that business must have a purpose beyond making money—that companies must serve their customers, their…

In a time of seemingly unrelenting mass shootings, American corporations, especially retailers, have struggled to respond. In September, 145 CEOs signed a letter to the U.S. Senate demanding tougher background checks and better red-flag laws to deny guns to potentially dangerous individuals. Ed Stack of Dick’s Sporting Goods was one of those CEOs. But Stack was already far ahead of his peers. After 17 students and staff were killed at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, in 2018, Stack led the company to decide to permanently remove assault rifles from its 850 stores, which include Dick’s, Field & Stream, and Golf Galaxy. It has also stopped selling guns of any sort to anyone under 21 years of age. These policies would cost Dick’s some $250 million in sales…

For all the changes I’ve gone through since I began my entrepreneurial journey 40 years ago, I’m still essentially what I was back then—namely, a salesperson—and I suspect that, whatever changes you’ve gone through, you are too. Most of us who start businesses are salespeople—in part, I suppose, because we couldn’t get anywhere without selling. Aside from selling products or services to customers, we have to sell our idea to investors, creditors, and other people. Fortunately, I like selling, especially if negotiating is involved. Not only do I like it, but I also like to watch other people doing it, which makes me a prime target for ropers, as I call them. Those are the people whose job is to round up potential buyers for selling sessions staged by marketers…

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Synchrony set out to celebrate 10 individuals who define what it means to be from a particular place, help elevate their local economies, and foster community pride. In everything they do, the 2019 Synchrony Pillars commit, push forward, and change what’s possible. Meet them now BENJAMIN MADARY CYCLEWORKS, LAKE JACKSON, TX The town of Lake Jackson, Texas, has changed since Benjamin Madary moved there in 1998, when he was only 12. Back then, there was a mall and just about nowhere else to go on a Saturday. In the ensuing years, Lake Jackson has seen explosive growth, and residents even experience rush hour during the work week. Despite the town’s expansion, it was still a leap of faith for Madary to open his bicycle shop, CycleWorks, in 2016. “Our local…

“My wife and I were able to adopt a child because of remote work.”—Darren Murph, senior manager on GitLab’s culture curation team 1 The Fort Washington, Maryland-based entrepreneur entered the competition to raise money for Flavors Culinary Group, the food-startup incubator she hopes will become, in her words, the “WeWork of kitchen spaces.” 2 Awarding a total of $25,000, the contest pitted Bingham against two other founders—of music therapy provider Maine Music & Health and landscape planner Garden in Minutes—in five timed trials of entrepreneurial skill. 3 While big names like WeWork and the Wing have taken co-working spaces prime time, a champion brand has yet to emerge from the kitchen and food incubators servicing the $140 billion specialty foods industry. 4 When Bingham launched her startup, landlords were reluctant…

“It may have a slight impact on productivity.”—Eric Rea, co-founder and CEO of Podium, on his favorite workplace activity: playing Fortnite DEENA FOX Founder and CEO of Brightfox, an HR software and platform that helps companies manage their talent Is the annual review process still relevant? Employees typically feel that the annual review process is not fair or objective and dislike that managers make assessments without talking to anyone else in the company. But why dismiss annual reviews altogether because of two fixable pain points? Can more casual feedback replace formal reviews? I would say that informal does not work at scale. The board of any company is going to want you to be able to tie individual employee performance to business outcomes. And that’s nearly impossible if you don’t…

I like to think I have a good reputation. Someone who works hard, knows what he’s doing, creates helpful products, and is trustworthy. So when I started a company, I figured those virtues would apply to my venture, Iodine.com. If I was credible, so was my startup. That was true, to a point. In our early days of recruiting and fundraising, for people who knew me, yes, my reputation counted. But once we launched, it didn’t matter a hoot. People on the internet didn’t know me; they had merely stumbled onto some website about medicine. And, as nice as the site looked, it didn’t do a very good job of explaining why it should be trusted. In short, we lacked what Google calls EAT: expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness. EAT, which…

BIGELOW TEA THE B PATHWAY Six years ago, when Cindi Bigelow first read about B Corps, she wasn’t all that interested in taking her family’s 75-year-old company, Bigelow Tea, through the certification process. But she did want to get her hands on the criteria that the nonprofit B Lab uses to evaluate firms and their business practices. “I thought that scorecard could be a blueprint for how to be a good corporate citizen,” says Bigelow, the third-generation Bigelow Tea boss. “That’s when the journey started.” In fact, Bigelow was already on the right path. Cindi’s grandmother, Ruth Campbell Bigelow, started the company out of her New York City kitchen in 1945, when she whipped up the first batch of Constant Comment tea, her signature spiced orange blend. By the ’60s,…

In August 2008, Kim Kardashian cut her foot on a shard of glass and a then-newish celebrity gossip website, TMZ.com, sent out alerts to millions of people. As it happened, I was sitting with several executives, who collectively eye-rolled and argued that the famous-forbeing-famous set have a short shelf life. Say what you will about Kim Kardashian—at least she’s a human. The next generation of the famous-for-being-famous are being engineered from scratch. They’re synthetic stars—algorithmically generated characters who have millions of Instagram followers, show up in glossy magazines, and have songs on Spotify. Like Lil Miquela, who’s sort of the synthetic Beyoncé, thanks to her 1.6 million Instagram followers. She models for the likes of Prada and Calvin Klein, her first single came out last year, and she has sponsorship…

Less than a year into launching HireAHelper in 2007, co-founders Mike Glanz and Pete Johnson were close to turning a profit. But the owners would soon find themselves fighting to keep their moving-services marketplace alive, when industry behemoth U-Haul sued the startup over a trademark dispute. “We were just about to break even—and all of a sudden we were looking at five-and six-figure legal bills coming in,” says Glanz, CEO of the Oceanside, California–based company. Soon the founders were embroiled in a three-year court battle that drastically upended their company’s plans. Until the litigation was settled out of court, the process forced them to try to be as strategic as possible—in the courtroom as well as the boardroom. “Paying for those types of legal bills when you’re a year old…

Being the CEO and founder of luxury pajama startup Lunya “provides a nonstop challenge,” says Ashley Merrill, who launched her company in 2012. Merrill leads a team of 45 employees based in Santa Monica, California, and turns to boxing to relieve stress, to stay healthy, and even to test her staff. “When you work out with your team members,” says Merrill, “you see how they handle a challenge. Do they turn inside themselves? Do they get angry?” Merrill and her hard-hitting team have grown Lunya 400 percent yearover-year since its inception.…

CARA DAU ALLEN DAU FURNITURE ELLISVILLE, MO We are blessed to be able to help the community by donating mattresses to people transitioning out of homelessness, children in the foster system, veterans, and many people in need. RENEE SPRESSER PAULS FURNITURE SELDEN, KS A bouquet of wheat that represents Kansas. The farm economy drives everything in Kansas. MEELAD DEZFOOLI BEST BUY FLOORING HENDERSON, NV The Las Vegas area has been very good to my family, and we have been fortunate to provide jobs for Las Vegas locals who might not otherwise have found work. SARA VINCENT GOWANDA HARLEY-DAVIDSON GOWANDA, NY I imagine a Harley-Davidson from 1947 (the year we started). Tourists come from all over just to see our dealership, and we send them into our small town to shop,…

Stand out in the job market. In the intense competition for talent, small businesses should sell the opportunities they offer employees to connect with their mission, their culture, and how they impact the community. Differentiators like flexibility options, a sense of ownership, incentives for growth, and the ability to develop diverse skills are selling points that many larger organizations can’t offffer. – Liz Heitner, SVP, Talent & Transformation, Synchrony 2 Put all your data in one basket. A modern POS is your cloud-based customer management system, your loyalty platform, your transaction system, your invoicing system, and more. Having all that in one place makes it really easy to grow, and because the information is centralized, it can be a lot simpler to deploy than you might expect. – Will Kievit, VP, Integrated…