Indholdsfortegnelse for May/June 2022 i Inc. Magazine

NGL, or, as those with the energy to type it out say, not gonna lie: I feel, to be honest, a little sapped. No doubt, I have been in a better headspace. Things had seemed, before now—meaning this past month or so-a touch sunnier. They’d been not quite so little man at the bottom of a big hill, with sore feet, heavy legs, and not enough sleep. But then it’s not every day your family has to deal with the lingering effects of its second bout with Covid; six days and six nights without heat and hot water because of a service and parts shortage; a spouse’s broken kneecap and its recovery; and waiting, nervously, for that text or call about a dear father-in-law who is in the hospital with…

“I’D JUST GRADUATED from college, in 2005, when Kiko Calendar, a startup I founded with Justin Kan, was accepted to Y Combinator’s Cambridge, Massachusetts, accelerator. There, I met Paul Graham, co-founder of Y Combinator—and the man who would teach me how to think bigger, and to inspire others do to the same. Paul is the sort of person who can make you feel, after just one conversation, that your work is the most important thing in the world. That’s his superpower—along with an ability to reimagine ideas in ways others never would. One day, in Paul’s office in Cambridge, I was telling him about Kiko’s strategy. ‘You know what you should do?’ he said. ‘You should make Kiko a programmable calendar, so hackers can create custom event types, and triggers.…

If you’re not careful, you can grow out of business. That’s the painful truth my co-founders and I learned 15 years ago when Nourish, the spillproof-bottled-water company we founded in 2007, closed a deal with a huge customer that ended up killing us. The rapid growth, coupled with late payments from this large retailer, led to a cash-flow crunch that stopped us from getting the outside capital needed to scale. That’s when we learned: Cash is king, but cash flow is queen. In our new book, Level Up: Rise Above the Hidden Forces Holding Your Business Back, we share tips for managing that cash flow—such as having a steady stream of customers, a plan for scaling sustainably, and focusing on impact, rather than innovation. READ MORE AT INC.COM/BEST-PARTS-LEVEL-UP.…

These days, we’re quick to label everything “great.” There was the Great Recession, which lasted barely a year and a half-not really that great, in the scheme of things. Now, it’s the Great Resignation, though when you actually examine the data, it’s more like a somewhat-higher-than-average resignation. Regardless, whether it’s to gaze at their navels or to take new positions, a lot of people are leaving their jobs. And that has a lot of other people asking: How do you get them to stay? Now, that is a great question. A recent article in The Wall Street Journal ’s The Future of Everything section posed it to five people in the fields of management and human resources. Their suggestions included more flexible time off, more get-togethers, and a focus on the…

1 | Reproductive Rights Support Fintech software firm Alloy covers 50 percent of legal expenses, up to $5,000, for anyone navigating newly enacted anti-abortion laws. The company also offers up to $1,500 for travel expenses and another $1,500 for additional out-of-pocket costs. 2 | Handyman Help Health care staffing company Fusion Medical Staffing offers its employees access to a full-time handyman to help with everything from broken garage doors to bathroom tile work. This allows workers to address nagging repairs without having to wait around at home for Mr. Fix It. 3 | Parenting Coach Digital marketing agency Stealth Venture Labs offers a professional coach to help new and expectant parents manage life with a newborn. The coach assists with preparation for maternity and paternity leave and navigating the transition…

MARK CUBAN GRINS. “I’m the luckiest guy in the world, ” he says. It’s mid-March and he’s on a stage in front of a thousand fans at SXSW with tech founder Falon Fatemi of the new audio-video entertainment platform Fireside talking about, well, just about everything: why everyone should get a crypto wallet, how the metaverse will change media, what TikTok means for pro sports. And, little surprise to anyone who’s watched him on Shark Tank or run into him on Twitter, Cuban has well-developed thoughts on each. Ever since he sold his startup Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in 1999 to became an instant billionaire, Cuban has followed his curiosity into a wild array of fields, from health care to fintech to media, consumer products, and, of course,…

1. Ro HQ: NYC Funding: $1B Ro’s virtual primary care requires no insurance and offers affordable health, weight-loss, and other services, plus cheaper, generic drugs by mail. 2. PayZen HQ: SF Funding: $20M PayZen uses A.I. to determine how much of a medical bill a patient can afford to pay and create a zero-interest payment plan. PayZen claims nearly 90 percent of patients stick to their plans. 3. Gravie HQ: Minneapolis Funding: $147M An insurance marketplace for employers, Gravie offers its own benefits plan, with no deductibles or co-pays, that covers common services like primary care, specialists, and generic prescriptions. 4. MedArrive HQ: NYC Funding: $32.5M MedArrive’s 50,000 EMS workers make at-home visits to patients, letting them shorten pricey hospital stays. The startup’s investors include 7wire and Kleiner Perkins. 5.…

ANDY DUNN WAS RIDING HIGH. It was 2012, and he was running a hot e-commerce fashion company he’d co-founded. He’d cashed out seven figures’ worth of shares on the secondary market and was living like he thought a CEO in his early 30s in New York City should be living: large. He bought a black Porsche. He jetted off for weekends in Istanbul and Moscow, and ran up a $10,000 Four Seasons bill in Bali. He went out to clubs and restaurants almost every night: drinks with a potential hire at 6; a dinner date at 8; meeting a friend for more drinks at 10. • His company, Bonobos, had launched in 2007 and pioneered an online-first, brand-building model that just a few years later was being copied by entrepreneurs…

Expert advice from Inc.’s inner circle AFTER MOVIEPASS FIRED co-founder Stacy Spikes in 2018, he got to work planning a Steve Jobs-style sequel. Sticking to his usual script, he’s been devising a new twist for an old industry, this time tackling the flicks before the feature film: “We’ve heard from the advertising world that the large majority of advertising is wasted, ” says Spikes. Figuring anyone who could change that paradigm would gain a competitive edge, he beta-launched PreShow Interactive in April 2021. The app lets users earn credits for watching branded content—while optional facial detection confirms they’ve paid attention. Spikes says the platform was inspired by, and complies with, data privacy laws like the E.U.’s GDPR. And early testing indicates PreShow’s model can hike engagement by 75 percent. The…

AFTER CO-FOUNDING Rent the Runway in 2008, Jennifer Fleiss helped scale the fashion e-commerce brand to a $1.7 billion valuation as of its 2021 IPO. She shares here her predictions for the fashion industry—and which fads entrepreneurs need to take seriously. How is the fashion business going to change in the next year? A lot of retailers are not doing that well—consumers are losing interest in fast fashion because of sustainability and quality issues. But on the flip side, tools like Shopify are opening up the industry for more diverse and innovative brands to get started. And, on the topic of sustainability, I think we’re going to see the fashion industry implement a carbon tax and try to discourage consumers from making wasteful and costly returns. The next decade? Web3…

In 2019, just five months after launching her weighted blanket company, Bearaby, Kathrin Hamm received an email from a buyer at the home furnishings retailer West Elm. The buyer had read an article about Bearaby’s blankets and wanted to visit the company’s showroom to see the product in person. The only problem: Bearaby didn’t have a showroom. “We were two people with five sewing machines in a garage, ” Hamm says. Rather than taking the meeting in the garage, Hamm, 39, packed 300 pounds’ worth of Bearaby blankets onto a borrowed hotel trolley and rolled them into West Elm’s headquarters in Brooklyn. The 20-pound, hand-knit blankets were a hit. All of a sudden, Bearaby had national distribution in West Elm. “That was kind of the pivotal moment, ” Hamm says.…

COMPANY: ADDIGY LOCATION: MIAMI EMPLOYEES: 65 What do you do when someone starts droning on in a meeting, hopelessly—painfully—lost on some tangent? At Addigy, a Miami-based software company that specializes in Apple device management, they’ve come up with a way to snap speakers back on point: tossing a yellow flag. Digressions and off-topic discussions during meetings were becoming a pandemic of their own at Addigy last year. It was cutting into productivity. That’s when chief people officer Lynn Erger, working with a consultant to formalize better meeting habits, came across the yellow-flag idea and decided to empower all employees as agenda referees. She ordered a bunch of facial tissue-size flags from Amazon and handed them out the next morning, at the start of a six- person planning meeting in a…

COMPANY: FRONT LOCATION: SAN FRANCISCO EMPLOYEES: 322 In early 2021, the leadership team at Front, a customer communication software company, convened a meeting to tackle an important question: How could they bring relief to employees suffering from burnout without sacrificing productivity? The number-one request on Front’s most recent employee engagement survey had been for more flexibility in the way they were working. As in many companies, a year of the pandemic combined with the country’s reckoning on social justice had left Front’s workers feeling stressed and anxious. Front co-founder Mathilde Collin conferred with business owners in her native France who had instituted a four-day workweek, but determined that her San Francisco-based company couldn’t leave its 7,500 clients in the lurch even just one day. Still, something had to give. Focusing…

COMPANY: CHILI PIPER LOCATION: NEW YORK CITY EMPLOYEES: 224 When Alina Vandenberghe founded Chili Piper in 2016 with her husband, co-CEO Nicolas Vandenberghe, she was set on building a global, fully remote team. The B2B software startup knew how to run virtual meetings; it was core to the service it provided. But the company faced the issue of how to get workers to feel connected over screens long before the pandemic forced the challenge on the rest of the world. “It takes time for people from different backgrounds to learn to work together, ” Vandenberghe says. “There are subtleties in different cultures that can be hard to pick up on.” From its launch, Chili Piper hosted an annual company offsite to gather employees at some dreamy destination, like Tulum or…

“We’re honored to be ranked in Inc. magazine. In spite of a pandemic, we made smart pivots and trusted the process.”Jessica Garrett Modkins, president and founder Hip Rock Star Advertising is an award-winning, socially conscious 360 agency that works exclusively on impact advertising and marketing initiatives that are gateways to Black culture. With more than two decades of brand-building experience, the team has completed more than 1,300 marketing and communications campaigns and deployed $3 million in advertising budgets. Hip Rock Star has a proven approach for achieving breakthrough outcomes and rockstar results. “With our proven track record, our customers are assured that their IT systems are being delivered on time and operating efficiently.”Deepak Goyal, president and CEO KR3 Information Systems, Inc. has been providing information technology (IT), management consulting, and…

IN CASE YOU hadn’t heard, TikTok’s short-form videos are the latest and greatest way (until something else comes along) for businesses to showcase their brand and communicate with consumers—especially those of the Millennial and Gen-Z variety. Take, for example, Duolingo. The language-learning platform’s account took off toward the end of 2021, when many of its videos—which usually feature the company’s mischievous fuzzy green owl mascot—went viral. Now, 3.5 million TikTok users follow Duolingo’s account. But to emulate that success, you’ll need some strategies beyond boisterous mascots, so we’ve compiled advice from TikTok marketing experts to help you get some younger eyes on your brand. 1 Be Authentic “Throw out your brand book, ” advises Evan Horowitz, CEO of Movers+Shakers (No. 78 on the 2021 Inc. 5000). The marketing firm tells…

AFTER TWO DECADES in fashion, Kristy Caylor was disheartened by the industry’s sustainability issues. Too much inventory and incentivized high consumption created so much waste. That’s why, in 2018, she launched For Days, which let customers exchange worn-out clothing basics for new products, while it upcycled the returns. Caylor thought her business model would solve fashion’s waste problem. But she’d gravely miscalculated. “Right after we launched For Days, we started hearing from customers that our subscription model made them feel pressured to get their money’s worth by using more clothing than they needed. My gut dropped—we’d hung our hat on sustainability; I was like ‘Oh, no. This is big. Like, this is not a little shift.’ I already had press, seed-round investors, momentum, customers, and revenue. I honestly considered moving…

There is no way to sugarcoat the impact of the Great Resignation, which saw 38 million U.S. employees quit their jobs last year, and there are no signs of relief in 2022. With more than 11 million job openings currently unfilled, a recent Labor Department report tabulated a robust 678,000 new jobs added in February and the unemployment rate dipping to 3.8 percent. “The biggest challenge small and midsize businesses (SMBs) currently face is filling jobs in the midst of a severe talent shortage, ” says Mary Kay Engelhardt, vice president, recruiting and selection, at Insperity aptly puts it. With millions of employees having left the workforce and millions more hesitant to change jobs due to a continued atmosphere of uncertainty, including the lingering pandemic, high inflation, and the war…

TO FILTER BEST WORKPLACES BY COMPANY, SIZE, OR BENEFITS, GO TO INC.COM/BWP2022. That old business bromide “People are our greatest asset” got stress-tested in 2021. Many companies discovered that their workplaces were wanting when employees started walking, as we saw during the Great Resignation. Other businesses managed to boost their people as well as their P&Ls. So what’s the difference? Over the past two decades, startups and innovative entrepreneurs have reimagined what a thriving workplace should look and feel like, from the furniture (goodbye, cubicle) to the perks (hello, free food and fun distractions). Then along came the pandemic and chucked that model right out the window of our empty offices—foosball table and all. Employees are tiptoeing back in, but there’s no returning to Before Times. Something has shifted. For…

COMPANY: THE MB GROUP LOCATION: PLANO, TEXAS EMPLOYEES: 31 It could have been just another eye-roll-inducing moment, but for Susan Bryant, it was galvanizing. She mentioned to a male partner at the MB Group that she needed to leave work early to pick up her kids from school. “Oh, I need to cut out early too, ” he snickered. “To let my dogs out.” That microaggression summed up what was wrong not only at her firm, she thought, but with the prevailing culture in public accounting, where women are often made to feel invisible. “I’ve been in situations where the partners wouldn’t even look at me or introduce me to the clients, ” Bryant says. “You don’t exist.” In 2018, Bryant and Janet Haston Quinones bought out the last male…

How Inc. Selected the Best Workplaces of 2022 The Best Workplaces list was determined by calculating engagement scores and benefits scores for thousands of applicants. Employees at each company completed a 37-item questionnaire, and the raw data was calculated on a six-point Likert scale (strongly disagree to strongly agree) to find an average score that is indexed to a 100-point scale. Benefits and perks, including health insurance and 401(k)s, were assigned a 1-to-4 weighting. Abilitie Abnormal Security Acceleration Partners AccountingDepartment.com Addigy AdWatch Media Affinity AgBiome Agency Elevation Alation ALKU All American Entertainment Allocations Alloy AllVoices Alma Alpine Solutions Group Amazing Outdoors Analysis Prime Anchor Health Properties The Anti Appcast AppLovin Apptegy Aptima Apty AQUABLUE Aqueduct Technologies ARGI Articulate Asana Aspirent Consulting Atlanta Compressor Atrium Audley Consulting Group Austin Data Labs…

If you take the drug Humira to treat the skin condition plaque psoriasis, the cost is $35,000 annually. If you have insurance where you work, as more than 156 million Americans do, it will foot most of the bill. That’s $350,000 over 10 years. Yet a cheaper solution exists, a handheld light-therapy device called Zerigo that is just as effective at a 10th of the cost. Most patients and employers don’t know about it, because their insurer doesn’t approve this treatment. So you and your company pay too much. Hell’s waiting room has a special spot reserved for insurers. The deductibles, the coverage limits, the life-sapping paperwork that adds stress to whatever is actually ailing you. (Their inability to approve an equally effective, far cheaper device.) Employers hate them, doctors…

Best-selling author Seth Godin brings his marketing genius to bear on climate change in a new resource manual, The Carbon Almanac. Slated for release June 21, it packs in assiduously sourced explainers, infographics, and calls to action produced by more than 300 volunteer contributors from 40 countries. Godin organized the collective effort, which itself echoes a key theme: Individual action won’t get the job done. “What’s going to solve the problem is when small businesses lead the way in culture change, so it becomes normal to do the things that dramatically change the carbon equation, ” he says. “This is an opportunity for entrepreneurs, because the world is going to change.” Opportunity, that is, to build a business that creates demand for carbon-zero products and services. Meantime, here are five…

Reggie Aggarwal led Cvent through an IPO, in 2013, as well as a $1.65 billion sale that took the event-software company private three years later. Then, in the middle of the pandemic, the Tysons, Virginia-based firm went public again, this time through a SPAC deal with Dragoneer Growth Opportunities Corp. II. Here’s how the 52-year-old founder turned a dire reality for his business into a $5 billion-plus valuation. –AS TOLD TO KEVIN J.RYAN “In early 2020, 95 percent of our revenue was connected to in-person events. The pandemic wasn’t something we’d modeled even as the worst case. We had to make massive adjustments quickly. We pivoted to create a virtual product, and went from $32 million in annual revenue related to virtual events in 2019 to $266 million in 2021.…