Indholdsfortegnelse for March/April 2022 i Inc. Magazine

“I WILL DO everything in my power to personally hurt you.” It was spoken with enough anger that I did one of those movie-scene things and took the phone from my ear to look at it before pressing it, nervously, back to my cheek. “I promise you, Scott—and you talk to anyone who knows me—I am not going to take kindly to this. I will ruin you and ruin Inc.” No, it was definitely not the kind of call one gets every day, and its intensity, turning from initially cordial to quickly, existentially threatening, brought a chill to an otherwise warm spring day. The man on the other end, who shall remain nameless, had learned that Inc.’s editors and journalist Scott Eden were working on a story about the murder…

A LITTLE EXTRA CUSHION Back in 2012, Kurt Seidensticker struggled to run without experiencing joint pain. He pored through medical journals and realized he needed to replenish his collagen, a type of protein that helps connective tissue cushion joints and becomes harder to produce with age. Further research revealed the supplements on the market didn’t contain enough glycine—an amino acid vital to collagen synthesis. So he self-funded a factory in Chicago to produce his own collagen peptide supplements, launching Vital Proteins in 2013. Within a few years, he’d nabbed the endorsements of Jennifer Aniston and influencers like Katie Wells—who runs Wellness Mama. Aniston joined the company as chief creative officer in 2020, and last year, Vital Proteins earned almost $500 million in revenue. Think of it as supplemental income that’s…

When an owner cancels a standing order after a pet’s death, the online pet supply retailer Chewy often sends flowers or a note. Showing that it cares makes customers more willing to recommend Chewy to friends, earning the company a Net Promoter Score that crushes Amazon’s in the pet category. In my new book, Winning on Purpose: The Unbeatable Strategy of Customer Love, I lay out research from Bain & Company that proves customer happiness should be any company’s primary purpose—and that when corporate leaders focus on customer happiness, their firms generate total shareholder returns two to three times the market average.…

When you think about the future of meetings, what needs fixing? At Calendly, we think about meetings in three distinct phases: scheduling, preparation, and follow-up. We call this “the meeting life cycle.” Automation is going to change all three phases. So what changes in preparation? Today, most people are not prepared for meetings, and it’s not because people don’t want to be. It just takes a lot of effort, because the necessary information exists in many different places: in your CRM, your email inbox, LinkedIn, and even in articles you haven’t read yet. Today, there are products that can aggregate external and internal data very well, but in the future, those things will merge into a single tool. What is the biggest innovation today that’s going to increase in value…

Kenny Lao is the principal of Culinary Task Force, a hospitality consultancy based in Venice, California. Clients include Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams, Nike, 21c Museum Hotels, Ash NYC, Taco Bell, and Oakland International Airport. Prior to CTF, Lao co-founded and was managing operator of NYC’s Rickshaw Dumpling Bar, an Asian fast-casual restaurant group. We were opening for lunch. It was the summer of 2006, and the dumplings at my first New York City eatery were ready to roll out to customers. As I turned up the volume on the sound system from my basement office, I glanced at the security camera feed. I saw Gina grooving to the Jamiroquai song I had just uploaded as she broke open a roll of quarters on the side of the counter. In her…

The same strengths that powered 35 years of growth for American Specialty Health Incorporated (ASH) enabled it to turn the Covid-19 crisis into a time of positive change. “Every year we’ve been in business, it’s been about taking the next step forward-innovating by being entrepreneurial, creating new capabilities, and improving what we have. There’s never been a year where we’ve said, okay, we’re going to just stand still,” says Chairman and CEO George DeVries. DeVries co-founded ASH from the second bedroom of his condo in 1987 with $5,000. Today, ASH provides tech-enabled benefit management services, including musculoskeletal health provider networks and programs, fitness center networks and exercise programs, and health management solutions to health plans, insurance carriers, employers, and others. The journey from startup to $600 million business, with 10…

Welcome to the 2022 Inc. Regionals, our celebration of the fastest-growing companies in America by geographic area-economic hometown heroes of the first order. A local take on our Inc. 5000, this annual ranking features entrepreneurial out-performers from the Pacific to the Southeast and beyond. To make the cut, all had to show a minimum of 60 percent revenue growth over two years, although many far exceed those table stakes-like Pushnami, the push notifications startup in Austin that pegged a dizzying rate of 27,530 percent. In a year when the U.S. economy grew more than it had since 1984, astonishing growth on these seven regional lists was less the exception than the rule. Unlike the Inc. 5000, which ranks growth over three years, the Inc. Regionals tracks growth over the past…

1.666 % Two-year growth rate Washington, D.C. David Simnick, co-founder and CEO, & Dan Doll, president Mid-Atlantic ranking: No. 5 David Simnick knew since becoming an Eagle Scout that he wanted to be an entrepreneur who gives back. After college, he was interning at a government contractor in D.C. when he came across a disturbing statistic: More than one million children in the developing world die each year from diseases that are largely preventable with proper hand washing. So, in 2010, Simnick (and fellow Eagle Scout Eric Vong) co-founded a vegan personal care company with the mission of donating one bar of soap for every item they sold. He named it Soapbox, and the brand made it all the way to the aisles of Whole Foods. But when Soapbox made…

1,268 % Two-year growth rate Phoenix Jamie Baxter, co-founder and CEO Southwest ranking: No. 7 Jamie Baxter and Chris Loeffler launched Qwick in 2019 to solve the hospitality industry’s perennial headache of staff retention. The app let hiring managers at bars, restaurants, and hotels order up staff the way you order an Uber: Tap a button, and people show up to work. They’d negotiate a 40 percent fee on top of each worker’s pay, beating temp-agency rates without lowering wages. It was all going great until the world shut down, demand for hospitality workers evaporated overnight, and Baxter, as CEO, had to lay off 80 percent of Qwick’s own staff. Here’s how Baxter and a skeleton crew catapulted out of the company’s “darkest hour.” BAXTER: On top of the layoffs,…

HAVING WORKED on an oil rig off the coast of Louisiana, Paul Chittenden knows firsthand the sort of cast-iron backbone that’s required to wrestle heavy, oil-slick equipment in harsh conditions. That’s why, when naming his oil and gas workgear company in 2012, he settled on the name Bad Ass Work Bags—a tip of the hard hat to the tough trade. He did wonder, only briefly, if that name might be too vulgar. Google Ads thought so, and banned Bad Ass Work Bags from participating on its ad platform, forcing Chittenden to get creative. He printed up stickers with the tag-line “the toughest bags for the toughest men,” and handed them out to his buddies, who passed them along to their friends. As one roughneck after another slapped the brand’s sticker…

Even before the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, it was clear that a foundational transformation was underway in the U.S. labor market. The pace of change has only accelerated over the past two years, leading up to what has been dubbed the “Great Resignation.” Small and midsize businesses (SMBs), which have always fought an uphill battle against larger organizations in the competition for the best employees, now face even more challenges. Advances in HR technology can help overcome them Voluntary separations (“quits,” in U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics parlance) hit a record high in November at 4.5 million. They came close again in December, and they averaged 4 million a month throughout 2021. Among the hardest-hit sectors have been hospitality, food service, health care, transportation, and warehousing. “The HR challenges…

Eren Bali is a cofounder and the CEO of San Francisco-based Carbon Health, which aims to make high-quality health care accessible to all and ranks No. 2 on the 2021 Inc. 5000. A serial entrepreneur, Bali previously co-founded and led Udemy, the world’s largest marketplace for online education, with more than 50 million students worldwide. For decades, many investors believed it took one sort of leader to start a company and another to scale it. Especially in Silicon Valley, where I work, the stereotypical founding CEO would be a young engineer who’d start the company and reach product-market fit, and the second CEO would be a gray-haired executive with a business or sales background. Then, around 10 years ago, the common wisdom began to change. Many investors now favor keeping…

When L.A.’s pleasantly alliterative Staples Center was renamed the goth-tinged Crypto.com Arena in late 2021, some fans considered it an upgrade. After all, the $700 million deal meant LeBron’s house would no longer be sponsored by the purveyor of Post-its-but by one of the hottest startups in the rapidly growing crypto economy. Crypto.com has signed deals with sports teams (Paris Saint-Germain) and leagues (Serie A, Fl) across the globe-a strategy designed to quickly spread brand recognition. And yet longtime stadium-name watchers remain cautiously pessimistic. After all, pricey, vanity-plate naming deals often speak to a company’s more-money-than-brains mindset, which in turn can foreshadow a financial nosedive. Or worse. Behold the venues that gave sponsorship a bad name. Enron Gets Called for a Balk There was a time when Enron was known…

4,639 % Two-year growth rate Miami Andrea Lisbona, founder and CEO Southeast ranking: No. 1 Andrea Lisbona grew up in Barcelona, where her family owned a business that imported American goods and distributed them in Europe. One product that caught her entrepreneurial eye was hand sanitizer—so practical and sooo boring. Which is why, in 2016, long before Covid taught the world that keeping your hands clean is critical to staying healthy, she started obsessing over hand sanitizer. When she learned the U.S. owned 30 percent of the global market, she picked up and moved to America with dreams of reinventing a common household item. LISBONA: There had been a total lack of innovation in hand sanitizer. A lot of the formulas smelled like tequila or vodka; they were sticky; they…

9,114 % Two-year growth rate Noblesville, Indiana Charles Livingston, co-founder and CEO Midwest ranking: No. 2 Charles Livingston may be a chiropractor by training, but the source of his success resides in his gut. After running a supplements business for three years, the entrepreneur founded Lifeboost Coffee in 2015, simply because the beans didn’t upset his stomach. His gut proved useful again two years later, when his one and only supplier suddenly pulled its beans from the market. It was a crucial moment that put Livingston’s venture on the path to becoming the second-fastest-growing company in the Midwest. LIVINGSTON: I don’t believe in accidents; those are for people who aren’t aware of their environment. I believe in actions. I launched Lifeboost Coffee in March 2015 after one of my customers—a…

2,931 % Two-year growth rate New York City Rosie Mattio, founder and CEO Northeast ranking: No. 5 Rosie Mattio knows what sells. She was living in Seattle doing publicity for a cannabis cookbook in 2013, just after Washington became the first state to legalize recreational marijuana. She founded Mattio Communications to specialize in PR for pot companies, and since then, 35 other states have legalized marijuana use in some form. Business boomed. But running the company alone—with four daughters at home—became overwhelming. Her next step, in which she relocated to New York City, proved pivotal—and set her shop on the path to becoming the fifth-fastest-growing private company in the Northeast. MATTIO: I hit a breaking point in 2018 after moving to New York City. Despite having nine clients at the…

1 Establish your own code. Every deal Frankel does must check two boxes: She needs to enjoy the work and to drive most of the decisions. “If things are not enjoyable to me, no matter how much money I’m making, I don’t want to be doing that,” she says. Case in point: She recently ditched a months-long project that offered a paycheck in the millions. She realized, “I don’t like the dynamic with the partner. It feels hostile, it feels like a dictatorship, and I don’t love it. And there’s no price on enjoyment.” 2 Pick the partner that moves at your pace. Trust and shared values ought to ground every partnership, Frankel says. But from there, pick a partner that can work at your speed. “I’ve had the small…

THE NEIGHBORHOOD OF Pleasure Point stands on cliffs overlooking one of the more famous surf breaks in California, a menacing swell that locals call Sewers. Some four miles from the Santa Cruz boardwalk, the break takes its name from an old underwater pipe that once disgorged the town’s sewage into Monterey Bay. Today, the Sewers can draw a rugged crowd, and woe betide the newcomer who does not pay the proper deference to those locals, for the surfers of Santa Cruz have earned a reputation for being as hostile as they are skilled. A stretch of opulent oceanfront villas also looks out over the surf at Pleasure Point. Ever since San Francisco first got rich—more than 170 years ago, from the California gold rush—the city’s elite has treated Santa Cruz…

When Mike Salguero met Michael Jellinek at a company offsite, he knew he’d finally found someone to help him work through the issues that affect how he interacts with people daily. A licensed psychiatrist and executive coach, Jellinek has now been working with Salguero twice a month since the latter founded high-end meat subscription service ButcherBox in 2015. Salguero credits Jellinek with, among other things, helping him better communicate with his team: “It’s about understanding who I am, what’s in my own head, what my triggers are, and being aware of how they consciously play out during conversations.” According to the Institute of Coaching at McLean, a Harvard Medical School affiliate in Belmont, Massachusetts, 70 percent of people who receive coaching benefit from improved work performance and more effective communication…

Big Ass Fans founder Carey Smith led the fan and light maker from $0 to its $500 million sale. He started working at age 9 and has never stopped. His “secret” to success is common sense, and he’s happy to share it. His firm, Unorthodox Ventures, focuses on finding small companies with big potential. A wise man once said, “’Tis better to distribute your eggs into several baskets than to put them all in one”-or something to that effect. And that’s especially true if your only basket is 7,000 miles away in a country that could quite fairly be described as hard-line. You’d think it would be obvious that sourcing your product, or major components of it, in China would eventually lead to trouble. Yet a lot of businesses continue…

Keith Ferrazzi, founder and chairman of Ferrazzi Greenlight, has counseled the world’s top enterprises on how to dramatically accelerate the development of business relationships to drive sales, spark innovation, and create team cohesion. Find out more about teaming out at goforwardtowork.com. During a recent call with a group of presidents from some of the world’s largest companies, the number-one issue keeping them awake at night was attracting and retaining great talent. It’s an issue that companies of every size have been grappling with since the Covid-19 pandemic disrupted first our lives and then the labor market. The executives were participating in a discussion of the Great Resignation, hosted by the Growth Institute, which is our research arm. The president of a large consumer products division expressed a familiar concern, that…

She Wants to Turn Her Brand Into a Following... Reaching $1 million in sales is a milestone that can take years to achieve. For Emma Grede, it took one day. In 2016, Grede’s size-inclusive denim brand, Good American, sold $1 million of product within hours of launching. By the midafternoon, the company was completely sold out of jeans. It didn’t hurt that Good American’s co-founder was reality TV star Khloe Kardashian. While Los Angeles-based Good American had pulled off the largest denim launch in history, Grede spent much of her first day as a fashion entrepreneur explaining to customers why her company had run out of product. The experience helped set the tone for how the brand would communicate with its customers for years to come. “It was the beginning…

2,431 % Two-year growth rate Solana Beach, California Katherine Zabloudil, co-founder and CEO Pacific ranking: No. 4 As its name suggests, the Vertical Collective offers to do all things for direct-to-consumer brands, from creative direction and product development to sourcing and logistics. So when supply chains faltered, it threatened to undermine the company’s promise to handle everything. Here’s how cofounder Katherine Zabloudil (and her Hong Kong-based co-founder, Morgaine McGee) managed to grow revenue for the company exponentially— and land it near the top of Inc.’s ranking of the fastest-growing companies in the Pacific. ZABLOUDIL: When Hong Kong closed its borders in early 2020, our team couldn’t get into Mainland China. Here in the U.S., we couldn’t jump on a plane to Kentucky to figure out what was going on with…

Your first business-heck, even your second and third-comes with challenges. Lots of challenges, all of which seem like they need to be addressed today, this minute, now, and planned for, of course, yesterday. What’s your company’s mission? Who’s your first hire? How can you beat Big Widget to market? And trying to figure out everything yourself can make it nearly impossible to emerge with your sanity intact, your vision still relevant, and your bottom line strong. So we’re here to help. • Well, not just us, but other entrepreneurs-ones who’ve dealt with it all before. To bolster your bid to launch, we sought these founders’ hard-earned insights on the 10 categories we think are most important to VCs and always in the pitch deck requirements of venture firms like Sequoia…

Shortly after the sale of his second company—the communications hardware maker Acme Packet, which Oracle acquired for $2.1 billion in 2013—Andy Ory came to realize something about computer networks: They were built the wrong way. Originally designed to connect computers, they were now being used for running apps and services. The very next year, Ory co-founded 128 Technology to fix that. Six years later, he began talks with Juniper Networks about acquiring 128. The challenge: His Burlington, Massachusetts, router company was now entirely remote. We asked him: What was it like trying to get to a handshake deal without actually being able to shake hands? “We shared a very large customer with Juniper, and it was that customer that said, ‘You know, you two should talk.’ So the conversation was…