Innholdsfortegnelse for October 2019 i Inc. Magazine

You will notice something a little unusual about this month’s cover: Our featured CEO, the Wing co-founder Audrey Gelman, was photographed when she was eight months pregnant. As best we can tell, this is the first time that a visibly pregnant CEO has appeared on the cover of a mainstream business magazine. In some ways, that historic omission is not too surprising: Until recently, there were relatively few women CEOs anywhere. And those women who did make it to the top rungs of the corporate ladder had often been forced to choose between motherhood and their careers. One male tech CEO in 1992 lamented his college-graduate daughter’s options in a speech entitled “A Pregnant CEO—in Whose Lifetime?” The answer, as this cover makes abundantly clear, is “ours.” Beginning on page…

“I always tell people: Don’t snort that cocaine yet.”—Rebecca Minkoff on accepting venture capital. For more, see page 38. It’s a lot to bite off when a company embraces a value that states: “We are in business forever.” So far, though, Elkay Manufacturing, the Downers Grove, Illinois–based producer of residential sinks, high-end plumbing, and commercial kitchens as well as bottle-fill stations and water fountains, has taken some profitable steps toward realizing that ambition. Consider: Next year will be its 100th anniversary. “When they recruited me, I really wondered about that ‘in-business-forever’ line, as everyone does,” says CEO Tim Jahnke, who joined the company in 2007 after 22 years at Newell Rubbermaid. “When discussions got serious, I came to realize that it wasn’t the typical BS that companies put up on…

Eleni Gianopulos spent more than 15 years selling her handmade sugar cookies to a famous gourmet grocery chain. Then Dean & DeLuca stopped paying its bills. By January 2018, Gianopulos, founder and owner of New York City–based bakery Eleni’s Cookies, realized that she might never be paid for $86,000 worth of 2017 custom holiday orders. “No one in the accounting department was answering phone calls,” she recalls. “They were not returning emails, there was no correspondence.” Gianopulos would learn that Dean & DeLuca was in financial trouble, and the company made headlines this year by closing stores and reportedly stiffing other vendors. But she had already sued the chain, and ultimately settled for half the debt in 2018. (Dean & DeLuca declined to comment.) An unpaid $86,000 purchase order might…

The process known as gavage is hard to describe in a way that doesn’t sound unpleasant, though what I observed at Hudson Valley Foie Gras in July did not seem to unduly distress the birds. Three times a day, a worker enters the in-barn but open-air pens holding about 10 ducks each, checks every duck’s gullet to make sure it’s fully digested its last feed, inserts a thin rubber tube down the duck’s throat, and dispenses liquid feed. Then the tube is removed and it’s on to the next duck. The feeding takes about five seconds per bird. Animal-rights activists and foie gras foes call this process torturous. Foie gras producers, and some outside observers, however, argue that duck physiology is made for this; unlike humans, the birds have thick…

Jaime Schmidt SUPERMAKER She sold her personal care business. Now she invests in ventures of underrepresented entrepreneurs. 1 Suzy Batiz POO-POURRI Her product is the answer to a problem that everyone has but nobody wants to talk about. 2 Tiffany Masterson DRUNK ELEPHANT She just wanted her product to be effective. Now, she has Sephora’s fastest-growing skincare brand. 3 Christina Stembel FARMGIRL FLOWERS With a lot of pluck, she has bootstrapped her way into the male-dominated flower-delivery industry. 4 Talia Frenkel THIS IS L. With a buy-one-give-one model, her company, now owned by P&G, makes period products available to girls and women who once had to do without. 5 Holly Thaggard SUPERGOOP! She’s leading the mission to end skin cancer with her line of mineral sunscreens. 6 Mariam Naficy MINTED…

Olivia Ramos DEEPBLOCKS Ramos had master’s degrees in architecture and real estate development, but it wasn’t until she had worked in those industries for a decade that she saw a need for software that could merge demographic, zoning, financial, and market data all in one place. Using her Deepblocks A.I. software, developers and brokers can pull together a feasibility analysis for any parcel of land in 20 minutes instead of the usual two to four weeks. Real estate pros in 1,100 U.S. cities are already using the software. Ideally, the savings will flow through to property renters and buyers. Ramos says: “Perhaps we can lower the cost of living.” —HANNAH WALLACE Jennifer Fitzgerald POLICYGENIUS Former McKinsey consultant Fitzgerald spent the financial crisis advising big, flailing insurance companies. So, naturally, she…

In 2014, Facebook made some changes that affected your business model. What happened? We’d been taking orders directly in the Facebook News Feed, and it was vital to our business. But when Facebook switched over to a pay-toplay platform, it closed the funnel so suddenly. Our sales went down something like 50 percent in a month. You’d raised venture capital from some powerful investors. How did your board react to the problems? I was this great story of an unlikely entrepreneur with no pedigree who was teaching herself as she went along. Everyone thinks that’s amazing when things are going well. But as soon as the wheels fall off, they see someone who doesn’t know what they’re doing. So the board decided to bring in some more seasoned executives. They…

ASK, DON’T ORDER “Jumping in cold with a request that customers tell the world how much they like your products or services is a huge mistake,” says Michael V. Pantalon, a clinical psychologist and researcher at Yale School of Medicine and author of Instant Influence: How to Get Anyone to Do Anything—Fast. Your request to “Like us on Facebook!” takes too much for granted and can come off as an order. Pantalon suggests a softer approach, such as “I’d like to ask if you’d consider speaking with me about getting word out about the brand.” EMPHASIZE THEIR AUTONOMY If customers are willing to speak well of you, encourage them to express themselves however they like, advises Pantalon, while underscoring that how they respond is totally their decision. Don’t try to…

Not long ago, I was presented with a routine, even boring, workplace problem. We redesigned a part of our website, and altered some basic functionality. Some colleagues learned of the change only when they went online, and were baffled by the new flow. And so began a tempest: Why was this change made? Who had given the OK? And wasn’t the old way better, anyway? This was just one small huff in the long history of conflicting opinions. But as a company grows, and decisions get more distant from the people who have to execute them, a different kind of conflict emerges. These disputes may seem like they’re about a single decision with a specific adverse effect (the wrong redesign). But they’re actually disagreements about process (Why wasn’t I consulted?),…

Four years ago, Alyson Saxe ran into an old friend at Costco, who—upon learning Saxe had children—inquired whether she worked outside the home. Saxe explained that she’d founded a PR agency. “My friend said, ‘How great! You’re a mompreneur!’” recalls Saxe. “‘You get to work and have time for your kids and family!’” Saxe was surprised her friend made that distinction. The term mompreneur, she believed, bore the whiff of ambition sacrificed to work-life balance. “It’s like I’m being bucketed into this category of a person who is just trying to keep her foot in the door and earn a little money,” says Saxe, who recently raised north of $2 million for her second company, the brand-management platform IrisPR, based in Phoenix. “I work every bit as hard as male…

In the boardroom or the cutting room, these women are changing the way we dress ourselves—and modernizing a $300 billion market. Twenty years ago, Rebecca Minkoff moved to New York City at 18 with dreams of starting a fashion label. In the months after the 9/11 terror attacks, Minkoff’s “I love NY” T-shirt put her on TV and in fashion magazines. Four years later, her namesake label’s “Morning After Bag”—a $600 leather carryall—became a milestone purchase for the upwardly stylish. The longtime bestseller gave Minkoff the revenue she needed to expand her brand’s apparel offerings and add a footwear line. Alongside the company’s CEO, her brother Uri, Minkoff went on to steer her business through the Great Recession and become a social media pioneer. Today, she has a $100 million…

JUDI SHEPPARD MISSETT JAZZERCISE Those fitness classes you go to? She basically invented them. At age 75, Judi Sheppard Missett is still dancing, still teaching, and still CEO of Jazzercise, the ur-dance-fitness company she founded and that celebrates its 50th anniversary this year. She also has a new book: Building a Business With a Beat. Created when Jane Fonda was better known for Barbarella than for aerobics, Jazzercise today is a $100 million business with more than 8,500 franchisees, and it cracked the Inc. 5000 in 2010, at the ripe age of 41. The company not only forged fitness culture for women—It’s fun! It’s easy! It’s social! We don’t judge!—but also has helped thousands of women become business owners, some of whom have launched multiple studios to teach the program.…

When Linnea Roberts retired in 2016 from Goldman Sachs, where she’d been a managing director, she didn’t intend to become a startup investor. At a dinner the next summer, she met Bertha González Nieves, co-founder of tequila company Casa Dragones, and was surprised to learn González Nieves had no female backers. Roberts promised to find her 10 great female investors. “I started reaching out, and the level of consternation and doubt on the part of the women I spoke to was incredible,” says Roberts. “The next day, my husband had dinner with a bunch of his buddies, and in a night raised five times what I was trying to raise.” Some of her husband’s success may have had to do with the fact he is George Roberts, the R in…

I was at a bar with some friends recently, and, since we’re nerds, our conversation turned to Libra, Facebook’s proposed digital currency. Some were adamant that it will be a safer bet than Bitcoin. And, since Libra is backed by Mastercard, Visa, and PayPal, they said this blockchain-powered currency would be easier to use. I told them I didn’t agree, because Libra isn’t simply digital currency. Facebook and its 20-plus partners are building a payment platform to integrate with our daily lives. Soon, I said, I expected its authentication to be biometric—we’d have our faces scanned rather than sign our names. And what matters isn’t currency but data. A payment platform that connects purchases with locations, behaviors, relationships, employment, dining habits, and favorite memes? Libra could wield extraordinary predictive powers…

When the recession decimated the corporate-gift-market accounts of the Goulet Pen Company, founder Brian Goulet sought out new ideas—and customers—at a fountain pen show near his Richmond, Virginia, home. “It was a revelation, seeing all these fanatical people in fishing vests with pockets stuffed with fountain pens,” says Goulet, who quickly realized that pen fans represented a community that he’d missed. He wrote a new business plan, going from pen maker to online fountain-pen retailer. He began to participate in online message boards and forums, and also created a large social media presence, a newsletter, a blog, and more than 1,800 how-to videos, along with interactive, live-stream ones, generating hundreds of comments daily. With revenue in the low eight figures after growing 25 percent in 2018—his wife, Rachel, is co-owner…

One day in 1960, the schools closed in Adams town, Pennsylvania, in Lancaster County, as much of the population spilled out onto the streets to greet visiting royalty. Roy Rogers, America’s famous singing cowboy, had come to town to personally thank the good folks who made his hats. Bollman Hat Company owns some of the world’s hottest brands, including Kangol and Helen Kaminski. And wearers of hipster fedoras have recently stirred demand. But the factory—which occupies half-a-million square feet across eight buildings connected by catwalks and tunnels—operates much as it did when Rogers stopped by to say howdy. In fact, production has hardly changed since 1868, when George Bollman, the son of German immigrants, set up shop in a former whiskey distillery on Main Street. Well, electricity has been added.…

“It’s about knowing when to avoid risk,” says Alexandra Fine, CEO of Dame Products. “I’m not good at spinning fire behind my back, so I don’t. In business, if I’m not good at something, I’ll ask someone more capable to do it.” Fine and co-founder Janet Lieberman, an MIT-trained engineer, began manufacturing ergonomic sex toys for women in 2014 after crowdfunding $575,000 in 45 days. They’ve sold more than 150,000 units to date. Melding Traditions Poi, which means “ball on a string,” was developed by the Māori of New Zealand, perhaps as a training exercise. It has since evolved into a performance art that uses a variety of media—including fire. Fine first practiced poi with LED lights after learning how on YouTube. Later, she learned to spin with fire in…

“I decided to sell my kidney.”—Lisa Q. Fetterman, co-founder and CEO of Nomiku, upon coming up $20,000 short for her first sous vide cooker prototype CLARA SHIH Co-founder and CEO of Hearsay Systems, a software company for insurance and financial services Can setting goals for employees make them feel like you don’t trust them? Without clearly defined goals, employees can feel they aren’t getting enough support, especially junior ones. It’s like telling someone who’s never played tennis, “You can go pro.” There are foundational skills; there is a right way to hold the racket. Training is not micromanaging. How do you find employees who can be trusted with more autonomy? You often have to make a bet on people who are early in their careers. They’re just as smart but…