Innholdsfortegnelse for June 2019 i Inc. Magazine

Culture eats strategy for breakfast,” according to a famous quote attributed to Peter Drucker. There is a lot of room to quibble there, starting with whether Drucker ever said this. Strategy, obviously, is vitally important and frequently misunderstood. Too often when leaders talk about strategy, they are really discussing procedures or vision or something else. (Richard Rumelt’s book Good Strategy/Bad Strategy, which I’m currently reading, makes this point brilliantly.) And yet, in at least two ways, the wisdom of Drucker’s observation stands up—which is why you’ll see it turn up elsewhere in this issue. For starters, a culture is going to be there whether you plan it or not. Many companies treat workplace culture as something that just happens. That omission isn’t necessarily fatal, but it often means wasted energy…

In business disgrace, Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes is attaining a second celebrity: Her con-artist saga has vaulted from best-selling book to HBO documentary, and, soon, Hulu miniseries and Jennifer Lawrence movie. The needle on the hustle dial for entrepreneurs has long twitched between “legit business owner” and “total fraud.” But, today, Hollywood is landing heavily on the latter. Holmes’s rise as the Dark Steve Jobs (another terrible person, as his daughter’s memoir makes clear) followed Fyre Festival documentaries recounting the sheer audacity of fraudulent “entrepreneur” Billy McFarland. “One of the greatest modern scams,” The New York Times declaimed, “is the entrepreneurial fetish itself.” It’s a bleak time for entrepreneurs in pop culture, which once glorified the likes of Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life. This century we…

TANTRUM CONGESTION • noun There was a time when CEOs tried to prepare for a stock-crashingTrump Twitter attack. But now the insults fly so thick and fast that the wise thing to do is … nothing. Source: The New York Times CLICKHEADS • noun Advertisers who rely on “‘vanity metrics’ such as click-through rates to measure the effectiveness of online media.” Because the real metric is: Do you whistle the jingle in the shower? Source: Internet Advertising Bureau UK NEPOCIDE • noun “The conscious willingness to sacrifice future generations for current convenience.” As Churchill sort-of said: Never in the field of human consumption was so much destroyed for so many by so few. Source: Tony Booth SHARE OF LIFE • noun “The most powerful brands will measure how many minutes…

If you've ever lain awake at night wondering how you're going to pay your bills and keep your business’s doors open, you're not alone. Sleepless nights are common among owners of fast-growing companies. Business concerns, including cash flow, keep 35 percent of entrepreneurs awake at night, according to a recent report from Kabbage, an automated business funding platform. Worse, 63 percent of respondents report being "regularly stressed or have anxiety due to cash flow concerns." And it’s not for lack of experience-survey participants reported running successful companies for an average of more than 10 years. ”Having owned multiple businesses before founding Kabbage, I am intimately familiar with cash flow challenges, ” said Rob Frohwein, kabbage’s CEO. ”Sleepless nights were my reality when waiting on customer checks and thinking through needed…

5 million Number of paying businesses for G Suite, Google’s powerful collection of productivity products—Google Docs, Google Drive, Google Hangouts, and, of course, Gmail. And you likely use Google Ads to market your products and Google Analytics to track the performance of your website. Source: Cloud.Google.com 135 Number, in millions, of monthly users of Office 365, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella recently told analysts. The company has long ruled productivity software and has moved that dominance to the cloud with Office 365. Don’t forget that Microsoft also owns Skype. Source: Reuters 150,000 Number of companies that use Salesforce, often cited as the world’s largest software-as-a-service provider. The CRM giant has an estimated 3.75 million subscribers. Source: SalesInside 33.2 Percentage of global blogs hosted by WordPress.com, a company that hosts websites and…

“Some customers will always shop online—and if they don’t get it from you, they will from Amazon.” THE MENTOR Jaime Schmidt bootstrapped Schmidt’s Naturals from farmers’ markets to a Unilever deal in just seven years, and is now investing in fellow entrepreneurs. “Everybody gets acne. So product accessibility is really important, and that touches distribution.” THE MENTEE Korean-born Ju Rhyu brought K-beauty innovation to an American e-commerce startup. Next stop: Target. Jaime Schmidt is the quintessential maker-made-good. In 2010, she started manufacturing deodorant in her Portland, Oregon, kitchen as a hobby. From farmers’ market tables, her products—which came to include soaps and toothpaste—stormed the shelves of CVS, Walmart, Costco, and Whole Foods. By 2017, when Schmidt sold her company to Unilever for an undisclosed amount, Schmidt’s Naturals was in more…

“When transparency isn’t a priority, it can create this sense of mystery: Are we doing well? Should I be looking for another job? So we present high-level finances on a quarterly basis and invite anyone to dive deeper during the CFO’s monthly presentation. Not everyone will take us up on it. It can be boring. It can go over your head. But I think just knowing that the books are open establishes a level of trust.” DAVID HEATH Co-founder and CEO, Bombas (consumer products and services) 2018 RANK NO. 175 GROWTH 2,457% 2017 REVENUE $46.6M “Transparency is powerful, because the more people understand our financials and goals, the more personal ownership we see. But you have to drill down from the overall financials to specifics. You don’t need marketing staying…

A CEO friend invited me over for dinner recently. While splashing a final drizzle of hot oil over his famous green curry, he asked Alexa for an update on March Madness. His college had won, so he broke out a fancy bottle of wine. (Apparently, my presence alone didn’t warrant the good stuff.) While we ate, I asked him if he remembered who’d told him the score. “Alexa,” he said. “No,” I pressed. “Where did the news actually come from?” It took a minute. Then he understood: Not only had he missed the source of the news, but he’d also missed a sweeping change already underway in how people get information. If talking is the new typing, then the new SEO (search-engine optimization) is VSO (voice-search optimization). By 2020, more…

Building a culture that allows teams to thrive is critical to being a best place to work. The physical work environment is important, but the employees’ daily experience, both with their direct leaders and the teams they work on, is what differentiates “best” from the rest. Traditionally, team success has been evaluated by one simple metric: Is the team producing what it’s supposed to produce? But a more progressive lens encompasses success in terms of how much a team propels overall growth. Effective, high-performing teams—what we at InspireCorps call inspiring teams—take on ambitious goals, know the competitive landscape, innovate, clear the toughest obstacles, and own the idea of building a better future for the firm. They sustain and grow the team’s and the firm’s capabilities in the process. What makes…

No Health Care? No Way! Only 1 percent of the Best Workplaces don’t provide health care. At one of them, Ocala, Florida–based MzeroA.com, which offers flight training, employees get gym reimbursement and access to company-paid, flat-fee partnerships with local health care practitioners, as well as a catastrophic insurance plan for emergencies. 99% provide health insurance–and some cover the cost. A Doctor in the House Four percent of Inc.’s Best Workplaces take health care a step further by employing onsite medical providers. For some, that’s easy: Steven Lee, co-founder and chief science officer of the Chicago-based Visibly, also happens to be an optometrist, which makes free eye exams for his workers pretty simple. Klein Hall, an accounting firm in Aurora, Illinois, has a life coach for one-on-one employee support and an…

I hear from a lot of entrepreneurs who are having problems and don’t understand why. If you look hard enough, there’s always a logical reason for whatever has happened, but it can be difficult to pinpoint when you’re dealing with a variety of issues at the same time. It’s especially tough if you’ve had to take on debt from multiple lenders to finance your growth and they are all charging different interest rates. That was more or less the situation that Kate and Jason McCrea found themselves in several months ago, when Kate first came to see me. She realized that something was wrong at their company, McCrea’s Candies, but she wasn’t sure what it was. The McCreas started the business in 2010. They sell caramels that Jason, who has…

This spring, Amazon did something very un-Amazonish. Across many popular product categories, from batteries to baby food, the retail behemoth quietly discontinued aggressive promotions for its private-label brands, which compete with—and in truth are often near-clones of—independent merchants’ products. It was an uncharacteristic retreat for a company that generally loves nothing more than using every weapon in its substantial arsenal to annihilate its rivals. Call it the Elizabeth Warren effect. Amid growing public wariness of the biggest tech companies and their outsize role in our economy and public life, the Democratic presidential candidate is far from the only politician in her party demanding stiffer regulation. Even President Trump has blasted Amazon as a “no-tax monopoly,” and his Federal Trade Commission is spinning up a tech task force “to ensure consumers…

There were hoodies. Robots. Free drinks. Young founders milling around a loftlike, concrete-floored space. Your typical startup demo day, in other words—except for the presence of a four-star Army general and pockets of uniformed military personnel and besuited corporate types with name tags from giant defense contractors like Booz Allen Hamilton. And the senior U.S. senator from Texas, John Cornyn, standing near the general, along with the mayor of Austin and the speaker of the Texas House of Representatives. It was February 21, opening day of the Center for Defense Innovation, in the downtown Austin high-rise that houses Capital Factory, the city’s leading accelerator. Last fall, the U.S. Army chose Austin as the home for its new Army Futures Command, the most sweeping modernization effort in decades across the largest…

If they’re being honest, most entrepreneurs would say that selling their company was always the plan. Sure, we talk about building a billion-dollar, publicly traded, long-lived enterprise. That’s the dream. But if we’re pairing our positivity with our pragmatism, the more likely exit strategy involves some larger company finding that the product or service we created is essential to its grander plans. M&A beats IPO any day. This is especially true in my neck of the woods, amid the sprouting startups of San Francisco. Every year, dozens of tech tykes are acquired by Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, and other such behemoths. There are long-scrolling Wikipedia pages dedicated to tallying the hundreds of deals that have occurred over the past decade or two. I certainly have spent time daydreaming about how…

Retrieving data from a former software provider can be a challenge. If that data consists of, say, sewing patterns for last year’s fashions, that may be all you need to do. But what if it includes detailed information on customers or employees? If so, you also want to make sure your former software company isn’t storing it once you’re gone. The more places your data resides, the greater the risk of its being compromised. You can minimize that risk by reviewing the software provider’s security certifications. “All cloud-hosting vendors have very lengthy documents that address the different classifications of security they’re certified for,” says Tom Novak, IT architect at technology consulting firm SPR. Better yet, before you let an outfit host your data, ask whether it will certify its destruction…

Inc. kicked off its yearlong Founders Project in March. For four days and nights, guests at the Founders House ate and drank and listened to insights from some of America’s most successful entrepreneurs, including Craig Newmark of Craig’s List, Carey Smith of Big Ass Fans, Ben Chestnut of Mailchimp, and Tyler Haney of Outdoor Voices. Throughout 2019, The Inc. Founders Project will pair 40 veteran entrepreneurs and business gurus with 40 businesses that find themselves at a crossroads. We’re taking the mission that Inc. has pursued for 40 years—to help entrepreneurs launch and grow their businesses—and making it happen in the real world, in real time. SPONSORED BY…

There are a lot of companies that make cookies. So how did Tate’s get so big? I had another bakery business for 20 years, called Kathleen’s Bake Shop. I made a bad business deal and ended up losing everything. So when I opened Tate’s, I said, “OK. I have to have a strategy; I have to plan to grow this business so I can sell it when I’m 55 and retire.” Besides having a clear timeline, what did you do differently the second time around? When I opened Kathleen’s, I was 21 years old. It was my baby, so I worked 24 hours a day and thought nobody could do anything as well as I could. The second time around, I vowed that I wasn’t going to be emotional; I…

DOG FRIENDLY FREE LUNCH PATERNITY LEAVE UNLIMITED VACATION COMPANY TRIPS Dogs or cats?” Tripleseat CEO Jonathan Morse likes to ask job candidates. If they say cats, he says, “they’re not paying attention.” That’s because half a dozen canines roam the company’s Concord, Massachusetts, office on any given day. But maybe a candidate who admits a preference for cats then goes to the defense of felines. “We like that,” he says. Tripleseat’s casual interview process is jarring to some candidates, but that’s by design: It helps weed out people who aren’t likely to fit its “party people” culture. The 75-person events-management-software company hires lots of folks from the restaurant and hospitality industries. “They’re used to a fast-paced, open environment,” Morse says. “They’re not used to sitting in a cubicle and just…

STOCK OWNERSHIP PROFIT SHARING UNLIMITED TIME OFF FLEXIBLE HOURS GAME ROOM STRESS-RELIEF BREAKS FREE LUNCH Bombs were rocking Tehran when Ara Mahdessian was born in 1985 in a hospital bunker lit by backup generators, the war between Iran and Iraq raging and his mother. Meanwhile, northwest of Iran, Vahe Kuzoyan’s family was preparing to flee the poverty and lack of opportunity that defined Armenia in its final decade as the poorest of the Soviet Union’s Transcaucasian republics. Both families, ethnic Armenians, soon left their respective countries for a safer life in Southern California, which has been home to the largest Armenian expat community in the United States for generations. (Perhaps you’ve heard of the Kardashians?) There they followed a path familiar to so many immigrants who came before them: Take…

UNLIMITED VACATION STOCK OWNERSHIP PAID VOLUNTEER PET FRIENDLY CASUAL DRESS REMOTE WORK Bitter experience taught the co-founders of Bombas what they needed to know about building a beloved company. When Bombas co-founders David Heath and Randy Goldberg first worked together, at another startup, they got a lesson in how not to run a company. As employees, they always felt there was a lack of transparency. Policies, procedures, and organizational structure were not explained to them. The financials were a mystery. The health care plan was so unhealthy that Heath had to use vacation time to have surgery after he broke his leg. When they decided to start a business together, “Randy and I said, ‘We will never make people feel that way,’ ” says Heath. “We will make people feel…

Abilitie Accelerated Growth Advisors Acceleration Partners Acorio Adjective & Co. Adswerve AdTheorent Advanced Electronic Designs Advertise Purple AdvicePeriod Adwerx Adzerk AgBiome Alation Alice Ali Cox & Company ALKU All American Entertainment ALL4 AllPro Hospitality Staffing Ambra Health AppLovin AppNeta Aqueduct Technologies AristaMD Arkadium Armor Protective Packaging Arrive Logistics Asana Attivo Networks Auth0 Awake Security Aya Healthcare Backblaze Bankers Healthcare Group Beehive Strategic Communication Belle Communication Bellmont Partners Big Sea Binc Bit-Wizards The Black Sheep Agency Blend Blue Frog Dynamic Marketing Bluetree Network BNG Team Bolt Bolton & Company Bombas BombBomb Boomsourcing BQE Software Brandito Braze Buildium Burwood Group Button CallRail CampMinder capSpire Cassaday & Company Central Point Partners Choozle Chowly CK Commercial CKD Technology Partners Clari Clearview Group Clever Clickstop Cloudticity Coastal Credit Union Columbia Safety & Supply Componere Fine…

In 2009, Supergoop distributed its line of mineral sunscreens solely to private schools in Dallas. Satisfied moms urged its founder and CEO, Holly Thaggard, to sell her product at the local country clubs where their families spent summers and Thaggard, a harpist, spent weekends performing. “I’d play board dinners, and they all cared deeply about me as a person,” she says. “They were willing to listen.” The exposure helpedThaggard workshop her packaging design and devise a retail model. By 2011, the brand was in Sephora and Nordstrom, and last year it pulled in over $40 million in revenue.…

LIBBY BROCKHOFF Co-founder and creative director of Odysseus Arms, a San Francisco–based ad agency How can employers know that freelancers have the expertise their company needs? Freelancers are really good at providing answers, but I rely on my core team to create questions and to solve problems on a much bigger scale. I totally disagree that all the best people are freelancers. If you look at their portfolios, they’re majorly outdated. How do you get freelancers on board with your vision? It takes way too much time to train all of these people. Freelancers tend to stretch themselves thin. They don’t have the level of commitment, and they don’t have skin in the game, to put in the same kind of effort as full-timers. How do you ensure that freelancers…

A decade ago, storing data in the cloud seemed risky. Today, cloud-based, software-as-a service applications such as G Suite, Offce 365, and Salesforce have made outsourcing data storage simple. But not risk-free. One big issue: With each of them, data is stored in a format that won’t work well outside that application. It can make switching from one to another tricky. Just ask the Intern Group, a startup that places students in international internships. In 2016, the company consolidated its data. Some was in Google Sheets, some was in the customer-relationship management application Highrise, and some was in a second CRM app, Contactually. Intern Group wanted to consolidate within Vtiger, yet another cloud CRM app. Moving databases was hard enough—and then there were the emails. “We have partnerships with universities,”…

Like most founders of fast-growing startups, Manny Medina spends a lot of time worrying about office space. It started when his then-20-person Seattle sales software company, Outreach, moved into a large office with what seemed like plenty of room to grow. Business boomed, and he started hiring—until his landlord refused to issue key cards for his new employees. It turned out that Medina had signed a lease with a certified green building that imposed strict limitations on the number of occupants per square foot. So he rented a floor in a building across the street—on the opposite side of a busy intersection. “People would literally not walk across the street for a meeting,” he recalls. Outreach ultimately moved four times in three years as its headquarters swelled to 250-plus staffers.…

TUITION REIMBURSEMENT LOYALTY PROGRAM 401(K) MATCH SUPPORT GROUPS OFFSITE SOCIAL EVENTS Workers of the World, Enjoy A record number of companies clamored for recognition in our fourth annual Best Workplaces survey. In a tight labor market, they’re out to nab top-performing employees by making life on the job ever more rewarding. After attending high school in Frankfort, Kentucky, Angie Lienert was too independent-minded to go to college, or even to hack working at a local factory. One day, on a break from her job at a gas station, she grabbed a chili dog and a cigarette and met up at a picnic table with some friends who were home from college. “That’s when it dawned on me: This is my life. My entire life is working at a gas station,…

FINANCIAL PLANNING TUITION REIMBURSEMENT PROFIT SHARING 401(K) MATCH PAID VOLUNTEER PAID FAMILY LEAVE ONSITE CAR DETAILING When Keith Byrd and Travis Burt left their 20-year careers at UPS to start Transportation Impact, they knew they’d be spending a lot of time on the road. “If we’ve got to be on a plane,” says Byrd, “we might as well live in paradise.” That would be on the beach at Emerald Isle, North Carolina. The company first operated out of a broom closet in the surf shop Byrd owns there. The founders created a three-pronged business plan: Negotiate shipping rates for small packages on behalf of clients; conduct audits to fish for refunds from shippers; and ship freight. The plan seems to be working: Revenue reached $40 million last year. Paradise has…

While economists quarrel over where the U.S. is in the current economic cycle and politicians fight over fiscal and monetary policy, the state of the American workplace is strong. Inc. and Quantum Workplace conducted America’s largest national research effort for Best Workplaces, collecting data on nearly 2,000 companies. The biggest takeaway: Organizational health, as measured by employee sentiment, is at an all-time high. The nominations included workplaces of all sizes and in all industries. Each nominated company took part in a deep employee survey, conducted by Quantum Workplace, on topics including trust, management effectiveness, perks, and confidence in the future. We gathered and analyzed the data. Then we ranked all employers using a composite score of survey results, and came up with 346 Best Workplaces (for a complete list, go…

ONSITE FITNESS STOCK OWNERSHIP FLEX HOURS GAME ROOM Origami Risk takes its team-focused culture to a logical conclusion—tying compensation to how well the team performs as well as to how well the individual performs. That has a tendency to weed out any slackers pretty quickly. “Almost all of the successes at Origami are team events,” says Robert Petrie, the co-founder and CEO. The premium on talent is typical for a startup, but Origami Risk is hardly that. A decade on, the company, with headquarters in Chicago, has 275 employees across seven U.S. offices plus London. It’s more of an attitude that has lived on. “This was a business tilting against windmills,” says Petrie of taking on rivals such as Aon in those early days. “That led to solidarity, because we…