Indholdsfortegnelse for September 2023 i Inc. Magazine

Big messages, sometimes they arrive quietly. Sometimes you don’t even notice when they land. I don’t know, that’s just a thought that keeps coming to me as I write this letter, which is supposed to be about the Inc. 5000. So let me set it aside and get on track. OK… My first Inc. 5000 season came smack in the middle of the pandemic. You see, I joined Inc. right when the virus went, uh, viral—basically at the same moment this year’s class of Inc. 5000 honorees was ramping up the growth journey tracked in your applications. One of the things that had attracted me to this job—per suaded me to abandon my own broken entrepreneurial pursuit and return to working for someone else—was the idea of meeting so many…

It’s not a proven oven fact to that martial arts can help you scale your company quickly. But it did help Ranil Piyaratna. The co-founder of Lathrop, California-based Human Bees, a staffing company that ranked No. 1 on the Inc. 5000 in 2021, says that when he and co-founder Geetesh Goyal launched their company in 2017, “we believed that we had to know the details of each other’s worlds to make the proper decision.” When a salesperson wasn’t performing well, for example, they wasted precious resources debating each other. The dynamic became unsustainable when the company began expanding quickly in 2019, prompting Piyaratna, 44, to look for a new framework for co-leading. He found it in tai chi, a meditative martial art he’d trained in since his late 20s. “I…

After cycling through three presidents in two years, Jenni Kayne was ready to give up her executive search. The entrepreneur had stepped back from the dayto-day management of her eponymous clothing business in 2013 to focus on creative direction and let someone with more financial chops lead her team—at the time just 30 people—and scale up the Los Angeles-based brand. But with all three presidents she hired, it became evident early on that they did not understand the brand as well as they seemed to during the vetting process. To make matters worse, they clashed with employ ees, who complained of feeling overworked and criticized to such an extent that the camaraderie, which once propelled the office, evaporated. “It was a very emotional time for me,” recalls Kayne, 40. “I…

DR. GEETA GUPTA-FISKER CFO and Cofounder, Fisker Manhatt an Beach, CA Dr. Gupta-Fisker cofounded Fisker with her husband, Henrik, in 2016, to build ultrasustainable electric vehicles with jaw-dropping curb appeal. The debut Fisker Ocean reached its first customers in May, and the company recently announced plans for Pear, a compact electric vehicle designed for city drivers. MATTHEW SKARUPPA CFO, Duolingo Pittsburgh For Duolingo, what began with a simple mission to teach languages for free has grown into one of the world’s most popular learning apps. Since Skaruppa came aboard as CFO in 2020, Duolingo’s monthly active users have grown by more than 80% —a success in any language. ARIBEL AGUIRRE-BECK CAO-CFO, Naturipe Farms Estero, FL In 2020, the longtime CFO of berry producer Naturipe Farms also took on the job…

Next April, you can connect with Chip Conley in person at Inc.’s most exclusive event of the year: Inc. Masters Baja. An all-inclusive retreat experience co-hosted by Conley and Inc. editorin-chief Scott Omelianuk, Inc. Masters Baja is designed to foster intensive connection and collaboration for the innovative founders and CEOs who have earned a spot on the Inc. 5000. The five-day, five-night program will include guided yoga and meditation as well as workshops, lectures, and exercises designed by both Inc. and Conley’s Modern Elder Academy. Above all, Inc. Masters Baja will bring together a community of like-minded entrepreneurs who are determined to help one another optimize their business achievements, impact their teams, and even change lives. Inc. Masters Baja is an intimate experience—next year’s retreat is open to just 22…

A major internal factor behind the industry’s growth was NAPEO’s decision to start evengelizing the benefits PEOs provide to small and midsize business(SMBs) about 12 years ago. Before that, the PEO industry had been notably insular, and NAPEO’s marketing budget was correspondingly small. With an increased marketing budget - now about $1.4 million annually - the association ramped up the production of research, surveys, and white papers documenting the benefits that accrue to business using a PEO. Cheif among them are double the survival rate of comparable businesses not using a PEO, median revenue growth rates twice those of non-PEO companies, higher profitably, and significantly lower employee turnover rates. The industry got a big external boost with the passage of the Small business Efficiency Act (SBEA) in 2014. The SBEA…

No. 100 FARMBOXRX CEO: Ashley Tyrner Category: Health Three-year revenue growth: 4,748% • FarmboxRx founder Ashley Tyrner, 39, sees healthy food as a form of health care. In 2014, she launched Farmbox Direct, which shipped boxes of fresh food anywhere in the U.S. In 2019, she pivoted to focus on the health care market, partnering with Medicare Advantage and private health insurance plans to offer produce boxes as a benefit to members, a business that had attracted an estimated $200 million in public funding through the end of 2022. The Boston-based company, rebranded as FarmboxRx, had nearly $35 million in revenue last year and 46 fulltime employees, but Tyrner still recalls what her life was like in 2010, when she was newly single, pregnant, and living with her parents in Casa…

KAPCO FUTURES No. 369 CEO: Jeff Kaprelian Category: Financial Services Three-year revenue growth: 1,569% • While working as a commodities broker, Jeff Kaprelian, 38, spotted a problem in the cattle industry begging to be fixed. Ranchers, like stock brokers, grappled with the daily whipsaws of the markets, but without the same tools to hedge against the price swings. The dusty state of things was on full display at auctions, where buyers still chose cattle on the basis of how they looked, eyeballing each meaty investment like a used car. When Kaprelian looked at a cow, he saw data points—lots of them. In 2019, armed with his finance background, he launched Elgin, Illinois-based Kapco Futures to help ranchers make data-driven decisions and improve their returns. The only hurdle? The city kid didn’t…

No. 1,948 Blueprint Lighting CEO: Kelly Aaron Category: Manufacturing Three-year revenue growth: 288% Kelly Aaron remembers the day a newly acquired pair of 1950s Italian chandeliers got snapped up in a heartbeat at the vintage furniture and lighting boutique she and her husband, Josh, owned in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood. It was 2016. The sale was quick—but insufficient to slow the array of designers and collectors who asked if she could get her hands on additional fixtures or anything that looked like them. “ ‘Do you have any more?’ is what they’d ask,” Aaron, 47, recalls. “And they wanted them immediately.” Aaron soon realized that tastemakers don’t necessarily care about provenance. They were happy to buy faithful reproductions of midcentury lighting fixtures—and to place multiple orders. That light bulb…

Shortly before he launched Splendies, Anthony Coombs had an unsettling job interview. It was 2013, the then-33year-old had just moved to Los Angeles, and a friend had arranged for him to meet with a partner at a prestigious tech incubator. Thirty minutes after the interview was supposed to begin, the man popped out into the reception area and asked Coombs why he was there, and then he made him wait another 30 minutes. Coombs was stunned, and even more so when he finally took a seat opposite the partner, who put his feet up, crossed his arms, and issued a challenge. “Impress me,” the man said. When he got home, Coombs, still fuming, wrote the words Impress me on a piece of paper and stuck it to the wall of…

PRODUCT No. 61 BLK & Bold CEO: Pernell Cezar Category: Food & Beverages Three-year revenue growth: 7,404% In the beginning, there was coffee. A lot of coffee—like, gallons and gallons, consumed on the many business trips Pernell Cezar took working in merchandising at Target in the 2010s. “Coffee,” he says, “is what fueled me.” It wasn’t the only thing. While at Target, Cezar saw the barriers that entrepreneurs, especially Black and Brown ones, faced in getting access to capital. Long possessed of an entrepreneurial streak himself, in 2017 he approached his best friend, Rod Johnson, whom he’d met growing up in hardscrabble Gary, Indiana, with an idea: How about they start a business together, one built on a mission to fund programs for at-risk kids, like the ones they’d been?…

No. 297 SQUARED AWAY CEO: Michelle Penczak Category: Business Products & Services Three-year revenue growth: 1,908% • Michelle Penczak could see the look on prospective employers’ faces when she told them her husband was a Marine Corps pilot. Like many military families, the Penczaks moved every few years, and it always came up in interviews. So it was a relief when, in 2013, Penczak landed a job working remotely at virtual assistant company Zirtual, where she led a team of 15 employees and served as an assistant herself, to consultants, developers, and CEOs. Suddenly, it didn’t matter where she lived. Two years in, though, while pregnant with her first child, she got some news that upended everything—and led her to found a company built around employees just like herself. “One morning,…

“Where business gets personal.” That’s Inc. editor-in-chief Scott Omelianuk’s theme for the expanding roster of Inc. Founders House experiences that we now host across the year and around the country. It’s also the theme of this letter. Like Inc., I was born in Boston in 1979. I’ve worked here for 16 years and counting. Having attended every Inc. 5000 Conference & Gala during this span, I’ve met so many of you brave founders and entrepreneurs. And each and every one of you— your lives, your journeys, your failures, and successes—informs Inc.’s mission and our responsibility to you. I’m not an editor of this mighty brand dedicated to small and medium-size companies, their leaders, and their teams. But I listen to all of you, and I absorb what I hear. And…

No. 313 T&T INDUSTRIAL CEO: Carson Tesch Category: Manufacturing Three-year revenue growth: 1,830% • Carson Tesch, 49, found his fascination with building and fixing things early. Growing up in a union household in Milwaukee, Tesch figured his dad’s path would be his, too. And it was, until his expertise grew—from steamfitting to welding and well beyond—and he spotted an opportunity to apply his formidable skill set in a booming city that desperately needed tradespeople. Tesch founded T&T Industrial in 2018 to build and maintain mechanical systems for the burgeoning industrial sector in Oklahoma City, one of the top 10 fastest-growing U.S. cities. The company brought in more than $17 million in revenue last year, and employs 72 workers. Meanwhile, OKC just keeps growing—and with it, T&T’s outlook. “When I was 8…

PRODUCT No. 1,130 Balloon Therapy Events Founder: Jessica Porter Category: Consumer Products Three-year revenue growth: 523% While working as a school counselor in Dallas, Jessica Porter was known around her neighborhood as a big-time decorator, throwing over-the-top graduation and birthday parties for family and friends. But her designs grew even bigger after a 2019 trip to Los Angeles to see building-size balloon installations by Geronimo Balloons. Back home, with help from YouTube videos, Porter ordered balloons and chicken wire and threaded her first garland in her parents’ living room. The result: a 15-foot cascading wave of blue balloons intertwined with palm fronds. “It was awful,” says Porter, 36. “The chicken wire scratched the shit out of a wall, as well as my hands.” Regardless, she posted a photo on Instagram—…

PRODUCT No. 43 Defender Safety CEO: Teddy Haggerty Category: Manufacturing Three-year revenue growth: 8,983% Teddy Haggerty’s reputation as a wunderkind began in high school, when the selfdescribed nerd outfitted drones with cameras to take photos for real estate agents, netting $100,000 a year. In his first year of college in Florida, he connected with an IT pro who turned Haggerty on to bitcoin. He in fact made so much money designing and building crypto mines that he dropped out of school, returned home to New York City, and found himself at the head of some impressive tables. Hedge funds sniffing around crypto enlisted him—all of 23—to teach crash courses. “They would hire me to sit there for hours in the boardroom and explain how it worked, the risks, and the…

Inc.5000 HONOR ROLL 8X Inc. 5000 Honor Roll 1M+ People Hired 5M+ Real Jobs Offered 25K+ Employers Served Anyone who has ever applied for a job listed on a job board, and suspected it was fake or closed, knows the frustration that Boris Rozman to staet Capital Markets Placement (CMP) and CMP.jobs. Rozman had been stuying the recruitment marketing industry, and he discovered that job seekers often didn’t end up at the right place and insted “run in circles” because job boards are designed to generate revenue from clicks, not from job offers. “The foucus of the job board industry shifted from connecting people to jobs to generating clicks and applies [job applications] for revenue,” says Rozman, CEO of the New York City-based company, which first appered on the Inc.…

Cameron Newton and his brother, Dean, have quite the track record. In the decade since the launch of their Nashville-based Relevance Ventures, the company has invested in no fewer than three early-stage startups that have gone on to make our list of the fastest-growing private U.S. companies. Their secret? Backing founders who are already thinking about how to sell—and not counting on big tech to provide the payday. That’s how these Inc. 5000 alums got the brothers’ attention and, as a result, their funding.—J.C. Betting on Success PASSPORT No. 4,552 in 2022 (also 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021) A platform for collecting municipal parking payments Winning pitch: “They had early traction, revenue, and customers,” says Cameron, including the promise of a major municipal contract. PETSCREENING No. 485 in 2023 (also 2022)…

Inc. 5000 HONOR ROLL 5X Inc. 5000 Honoree $20B Credit Transactions Processed, 2022 200+ Employees 45K+ Merchant Partnerships ElectronicPayments® Some might say that a founder and CEO of a company with 1,000 sales partners should not be selling and installing new merchant accounts, as Michael Nardy does on occasion. Nardy, founder and CEO of Electronic Payments, Inc. (EPI), knows how to delegate to his sales partners and 200 employees. But he finds value interacting with the sales and installation teams, seeing what works well andwhat needs improvement. This hands-on attention to detail helped build EPI from a company he incorporated as a Boston College student in 2000, to one now processing $20 billion in annual credit card volume. The English and history major taught himself programming, creating online auction software…

13 TALES OF TOWERING SUCCESS 123 INSIGHTS FROM ENTREPRENEURS WHO KNOW 1,220 VOICES CHIMING IN ON OUR ANNUAL CEO SURVEY, AND … Inc. 5000 • If today is any indication, tomorrow is looking pretty amazing. That may sound a bit starry-eyed to some, but we here at Inc. have a unique perspective. You see, we’re steeped in the stories of the founders who’ve built the fastest-growing private companies in our nation. They are by turns astonishing, harrowing, fascinating, and—most of all—inspiring. • Consider FarmboxRx (p. 78), the company founded by a formerly single mother on food stamps that delivers produce as medicine under health care plans. Or Pyx Health (p. 154), an intervention platform built to tackle the loneliness epidemic by a couple who lost their daughter to it. Or CareBridge…

No. 293 NOTTINGHAM AGENCY CEO: Ernest Dukes Category: Advertising & Marketing Three-year revenue growth: 1,920% • When Hollywood stars need to get the hype train rolling, an increasing number of them call on Ernest Dukes. As the founder of Los Angeles-based Nottingham Agency (2022 revenue: $5 million), Dukes creates publicity campaigns for musicians, actors, athletes, films, and TV shows. His client roster includes William H. Macy, Nick Cannon, and films like Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse. Dukes, 33, founded the agency in 2009 when he was a teenager—an exceptional feat for anyone, but especially for someone who, as a child in Santa Ana, California, was passed between caretakers while his father served time in prison and his mother coped with addiction. “Santa Ana is a rough community. It’s not the Orange…

No. 02 CHARTERUP CEO: Armir Harris Category: Travel & Hospitality Three-year revenue growth: 111,130% →Armir Harris is on a bus. He’s 9 years old, traveling with his mother and 12-year-old sister from the south Texas border to Boston. The trip, he’s been told, will take nearly three days—but his motion sickness makes him miserable, so he tries to sleep as much as possible, clutching the three action figures he’s been carrying with him for the past two years, through four countries. He tries not to worry that his mother has less than $3,000 to last them for … how long? Long enough for him to learn English? Long enough for them to find a home? Long enough for her to find a job? He tries to shove the questions down, deep…

No.393 GASOCHEM International CEO: Charu Jain Category: Manufacturing Three-year revenue growth: 1,469% • Charu Jain, 45, has had to jump through some pretty exacting hoops to win customers such as Ecolab, the USDA, and the U.S. Navy. Still, the biggest barrier to her ambition was actually living with her back in her native India: her own family. Jain had to leave them all behind to carve out her slice of the $500 billion U.S. chemicals market with the bulk chemical supplier she founded a decade ago in Houston. And now, after clocking more than $3 million in revenue in 2022, her success is the envy of everyone back in New Delhi. “A piece of paper, a bottle, a laptop—to manufacture anything in this world, you need chemicals. Gasochem International gets bulk…

The 500 fastest-growing U.S. companies, by industry. For the complete Inc. 5000 rankings, go to: inc.com/inc5000/2023 To see how these companies were selected, turn to page 143. Inc. 5000 ADVERTISING & MARKETING Includes traditional advertising agencies and public relations firms, as well as SEO specialists, data-mining experts, and developers of online marketing platforms. Number of companies 37 | Total revenue $810.3M | Median revenue $6.1M | Median growth rate 1,919.9% | Total employment 1,881 $ FOR MORE EXCLUSIVE INC. 5000 COMPANY DATA, VISIT DATA.INC.COM RANK THREE-YEAR REVENUE GROWTH NUMBER OF EMPLOYEES • The number of red dots indicates how many times a company has been a past Inc. 5000 honoree. BUSINESS PRODUCTS & SERVICES Companies that sell products and services primarily to other businesses. Number of companies 55 | Total…

No. 45 KinderFarms CEO: Jeremy Adams Category: Health Products Three-year revenue growth: 8,744% PRODUCT Jeremy Adams was worried. His 1-year-old daughter had spiked a 105-degree fever in the middle of the night, prompting the 46-yearold entrepreneur to call urgent care. Their advice: Find an electrolyte solution, and fast. He rushed to his local 24-hour drugstore, where he found himself staring at a “fluorescent blue-colored liquid,” baffled by its label. “It had a lot of different artificial ingredients that I didn’t feel comfortable giving my kids in their daily life,” recalls the father of two, “and I certainly didn’t want to give it to my 1-yearold when she was sick.” Adams tried whipping up his own solution at home, a mixture of juice and electrolytes. That ended in failure. But it…

Inc. Best Work Places Inc. Best Workplaces 2x winner Employees 840 full-time, 90 part-time Employee Survey 95% confident in company direction Headquarters Denver, Colorado I botta is in the business of giving away money. Since its founding in 2012, the company had paid out more than $1.4 billion in cash rewards through its web and mobile app. The chance to help consumers earn money on everyday purchases is one of the reasons people choose to work there. “We make money by giving away money. That’s pretty rare,” explains founder and CEO Bryan Leach. This unique mission, coupled with a well-defined culture and value system, earn Ibotta an Inc. Best Workplaces recognition for the second time. According to a recent anonymous workplace survey, 95 percent of employees are confident in the…