Innholdsfortegnelse for Spring Mar/Apr 2020 i Inc. Magazine

Mesh cap backward, face unshaven, Chip Gaines talks with the bluster of a guy at a party who has a story, or a colorful analogy, for everything—which he does. Joanna, his wife and co-founder of the couple’s rapidly expanding media and retail brand, Magnolia, sits beside him with an occasionally bemused expression, her black hair tumbling around the shoulders of a creamy sweater as she looks for opportunities to steer the conversation. Two full years before they shocked their fans by announcing the end of their hit HGTV show, Fixer Upper, they already knew they were going to have to leave it. The move would be risky. It was late 2015, and the Gaineses were in only the third season of the show that had transformed their lives almost overnight,…

A BUSINESSMAN’S ROCKY ROAD If Baskin-Robbins had merely given us Jamoca Almond Fudge, it would have been enough. But the in-law entrepreneurs who founded the chain in the 1940s also turned the franchising model into a veritable military operation: Baskin-Robbins was among the first food companies to offer shopowners standardized products created at a central location. It grew from a handful of California-based scoop shops in the late 1940s to about 500 nationwide in 1967, when it sold to United Fruit Company for a tidy sum. But, just months later, defeat was snatched from the jowls of victory when Burt Baskin died of a heart attack at age 54. Irv Robbins’s son John, who turned his back on running the family business partly because of what he saw as the…

MILK BOTTLES 1874 The invention of the glass milk bottle launches a rental market. The model begins to decline in the 1960s when refrigeration tech improves. CARS 1916 Joe Saunders launches ride sharing and car rentals with a single newspaper ad offering his Ford Model T for hire (driver optional). Subscription car rentals hit the road in 2000 with Boston’s and Seattle’s Flexcar. The two later merged, and Zipcar now operates in over 500 cities worldwide, with more than one million members. BOOKS 1930S The number of paid rental libraries in the U.S. peaks at 50,000 before the model is replaced by the 1,687 free public libraries built with Andrew Carnegie’s fortune between 1883 and 1929. DIAPERS 1938 Jim O’Neil and Warren Childs fill their car with cloth diapers and…

Don Lessem is a stickler for accuracy. His company, Dino Don, fields 205 rentable robots, mostly dinosaurs, in zoos, aquariums, and museums worldwide. He also sells them. They’re full-size—a 120-foot-long Argentinosaurus is heading to the Leipzig Zoo in Germany—because “part of what’s cool about our dinosaurs is how big they are,” he says. And you won’t see any nonsense like a Hadrosaurus with webbed feet. “If you’re a 6-year-old or a scientist—the two most knowledgeable groups of people—you know that is wrong,” he says. The former journalist fell hard for the big beasts in 1988, while reporting for The Boston Globe. He launched his company in 1993 with a traveling exhibit that corrected inaccuracies in the movie Jurassic Park, on which he had served as dinosaur adviser. For years, Lessem…

Technology’s outsized role in almost every aspect of modern-day life and business is evident everywhere you look, and its fundamental role has shifted. As Tom Hammond, Paychex vice president of corporate strategy and product management observes, “We’ve quickly moved from being a tech-enabled to a tech-dependent society. This monumental shift has accelerated over the last few years, and HR technology has followed suit.” Technology’s penetration of the HR space has been a boon for small and midsize businesses (SMBs), and it holds even more promise going forward. “The rapid evolution of the HR tech space has made—and will continue to make—access to technology more affordable and less complex to deal with,” says Kim Billeter, EY Americas people advisory services leader. “Multiple platforms in the marketplace supporting the full lifecycle of…

Hospitality UNNAMED HOTEL PROJECT Hotel construction in Waco has lagged the uptick in tourism. So last year, the Gaineses began renovating a three-story, 1928 building five blocks from the Silos. It is their first hotel—following the three Magnolia vacation homes they renovated with their signature neutral color palette, shiplap walls, and salvaged pieces. Real Estate MAGNOLIA REALTY Started in 2009, this real estate agency run by Chip now operates in six markets around Texas (including Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio) and has some 100 agents representing commercial and residential properties. Restaurants MAGNOLIA TABLE, MAGNOLIA PRESS, SILOS BAKING CO. Dining options at the Silos include the Magnolia Press coffee shop and the Silos Baking Co., which Joanna believes could grow into a chain. A few minutes south, Chip and Joanna also…

GREEN THUMB In 1998, Hunter was running his own illegal growing operation when an FBI raid cost him 12,480 cannabis plants and six years in federal prison. This year, his Santa Rosa, California-based company will legally process 146,000 pounds of cannabis and hemp. CHILL PILL In 2019, CannaCraft collected $46 million in sales—a little under half of its revenue—from CBD tinctures, topical creams, vape cartridges, beverages, and these discrete gelcaps, which sell for up to $4 each. Most of its remaining sales derive from products containing the mind-altering compound tetrahydro cannabinol, better known as THC. UNDER PRESSURE Every product begins as dried flower—or biomass, as it’s known in the industry. First, a CannaCraft employee stuffs biomass into an extractor, which is then pressurized using carbon dioxide. (Other producers use ethanol.)…

This story is about a man who is no longer here. So let’s start with a man who is. Brian Larsen describes the features of the gleaming stainless steel equipment that is rapidly filling the new manufacturing space of his company, RestoraPet. Every week, the direct-to-consumer business ships several thousand bottles of its supplements, which improve the health and energy of aging animals. A machine running the length of one bright-green wall will be able to churn out around a million units a year once a custom 250-gallon mixing vat is delivered. Larsen leads a quick tour of the glassed-off lab where he is developing a horse spray—intended to promote wound healing—for a client. Contract manufacturing—now just 5 percent of the business—is rising along with RestoraPet’s profile. “I give them…

Torstein Hagen was 54 years old, recovering from prostate cancer, and reeling from a multimillion-dollar loss in his failed takeover attempt of a large Dutch shipping company when a buddy made him an offer: Want to buy four Russian riverboats? Hagen, a former shipping and cruise company chief executive, was born in Norway, educated at Wesleyan and Harvard Business School, and, by the mid-’90s, eager to control his own empire. Although his activist-shareholder coup in the Netherlands flamed out dramatically, he’d also sunk some money into the then-booming Russian equities market. His shares yielded $5.5 million—coincidentally, almost enough to buy those riverboats. Also coincidentally, a company he’d formerly helmed, Royal Viking Line, had become so anemic that its name was up for grabs. A couple of friends chipped in roughly…

Farm-to-Table Rent the Chicken offers the joys of farming with no strings attached. Prices vary by location, but on New York’s Long Island, $1,000 gets you two hens, a coop, and 100 pounds of chicken feed for the summer. Simply buying a dozen eggs each week would be cheaper, but would they be as fresh? ALLISON KOPF Founder and CEO of Artemis, a Brooklyn-based agricultural software company. PRISCILLA TSAI Founder and CEO of Cocokind, a San Francisco-based skincare brand. Does CEO likability strengthen company culture? NO My company has a core value: “We’re a team, not a family.” I believe strongly in creating a culture in which we choose to work alongside our teammates because they are the best at what they do. YES You can’t force everyone to like…

STARTUP NEIGHBORHOODS Salesforce, Angie’s List, and email-marketing software giant ExactTarget are all within blocks of one another in downtown’s Monument Circle, 1 a neighborhood packed with tech startups. There’s no significant cost premium to locating in the heart of the city, which allows many companies to be close to the action. Indy’s $96 million, IndyGo Red Line 2 is a bus rapid-transit route that connects downtown to trendy Fountain Square. The HGTV-featured neighborhood has become a haven for creative startups that want to bypass the parking shortage downtown. Just northeast of Indianapolis is Fishers, a suburb that has spent the past five years wooing tech companies by lowering taxes and raising new office buildings. Nearly 600 members have joined the new 52,000-square-foot co-working space Launch Fishers, while the Indiana IoT…

Randy Ludacer likes tweaking classics. As a graphic and packaging designer, he’s designed a package for coat hangers that resembles a shirt, a puzzle cube-like box that holds souvenir candies, and a pasta sauce label whose barcode wraps around a fork like spaghetti. But he had no client or market in mind when he was fooling around on the web one day and thinking about egg cartons. Why not, he wondered, make a carton for a baker’s dozen of eggs? Not that it would have any practical benefits. After all, he had no egg farms as clients. He quickly realized that supermarket shelves weren’t made for odd shaped cartons. Still, it would be great publicity for Beach, the New York City branding and package design firm he owns with his…

Latinx entrepreneurs have been starting companies at a record clip. From 2009 to 2019, a 34 percent increase in startups by these founders has made them the fastest-growing startup demographic, by a long shot. The number of startups by white entrepreneurs, by comparison, has decreased 6 percent. So it would be reasonable to believe that Latinx employers—who are concentrated in growth industries such as transportation, construction, and leisure and hospitality—would also be enjoying funding and sales growth in the same proportion. But they aren’t, and that’s both a mystery and a shame. Only 3 percent of these founders have reached the $1 million mark in annual sales, according to the Stanford Latino Entrepreneurship Initiative (SLEI), part of the Graduate School of Business. That’s just a third of the numbers for…

For a city of 138,000 people, Waco has had an outsize history of bad headlines. In 1953, a devastating tornado killed 114 people. The Branch Davidian siege of 1993 ended in an FBI raid that left 76 dead. More recently, Waco played host to a sexual-assault scandal at Baylor University and a biker shootout. But today, says Carla Pendergraft, the Waco Convention and Visitors Bureau director of marketing, “those images are being replaced by Chip and Joanna Gaines.” Before Chip and Joanna, Waco’s biggest tourist attractions were a museum dedicated to the soft drink Dr Pepper, another museum about the Texas Rangers lawmen, and Baylor football. But on October 30, 2015, the Gaineses opened Magnolia Market at the Silos, and everything changed. That month, the city had 54,787 visitors; the…

THE MENTEE Maya French She co-founded Koia, a plant-based shake line that brought in $8.2 million in 2018—enough to land her company at No. 187 on Inc.’s 2019 list of the 5,000 fastest-growing private companies in the U.S. This year, she expects revenue to quadruple. THE MENTOR Daymond John Scrappiness, hustle, and a knack for creative marketing propelled him from the streets of Queens in New York City to the fashion world as the founder of Fubu—and later to Hollywood as a judge on ABC’s hit show Shark Tank. “Our numbers in conventional retailers aren’t as strong as our numbers in natural. They’re two different customers.”—MAYA FRENCH In this mentor-mentee pairing of our Founders Project, Fubu clothing founder and Shark Tank star Daymond John sits down with Maya French, co-founder…

We are a nation of neophiliacs. We worship the new, whether it’s fashion, cinema, gadgetry, or, especially, business. Why else would a new company like Harry’s that sells an old product like razors command a $1 billion valuation for $100 million in sales while Procter & Gamble took an $8 billion charge to its Gillette Shave Care business last year? Startups are all about future sales and profits, and we all get caught up in their stories. No one loves startups more than Inc., but in our second annual Private Titans list, we salute those privately held firms that are no longer ingénues but nevertheless are superstars. In our worship of what might be, we can forget what some companies have already accomplished, evolving and growing for years, or decades,…