Innholdsfortegnelse for Winter 2021/2022 i Inc. Magazine

It was spring, and the day had started sunny. But now, as I stood alone in a dim pool of light in a near-empty parking lot of the corporate headquarters of one of the world’s largest hotel groups, it was raw and windy, with gray clouds scuttling across the night sky. The wellness startup I had co-founded, poured my time and money into, even authored a patent for, had just beaten two dozen others to win a global innovation competition. The win had set the stage to install our service in thousands of rooms, spas, and gyms around the globe. It should have been a glorious, celebratory moment, right? A validation of the prior two years of work. But with the warm congratulations of winning behind me and my co-founder…

In 1983, I was managing Twisted Sister, the band I’d co-founded 10 years earlier. We’d played thousands of shows by then but couldn’t get a record deal—DJs wouldn’t even put us on the radio. So we started buying up commercial spots, during which we’d play our songs. It was money well spent. When we performed on a British TV show called The Tube, Mick Jones of the band Foreigner happened to be on the same episode—and he’d heard our songs on the radio. Foreigner was signed to Atlantic Records, and Mick told AR’s president, Phil Carson, to check out our performance. Phil offered us a record deal the next night. The business lesson there was clear: Opportunity is mostly preparation. Read more in my unorthodox guide to enterprise, Twisted Business:…

Kimberly McGlonn knows the power of a good story. In July, the education PhD and English teacher-turned-entrepreneur won first prize in the Small Biz Challenge, hosted by Inc. and the UPS Store. In doing so, she secured $25,000 for her company, Grant Blvd, a Philadelphia-based sustainable apparel startup that makes and sells upcycled clothing and accessories. And what set her apart in the competition was universal—deft improvisational skills and fluency with her business and its mission. “It’s about owning your ‘why’ and using your business to align with your life and your sense of purpose,” McGlonn says. “Not only will you attract people who respect what you’re aspiring to build, but you’ll attract loyal customers as well.” But the ability to spin a good yarn was only part of what…

Charis Jones is the CEO and chief designer of Sassy Jones, a Richmond, Virginia-based fashion and beauty company. In addition to landing Sassy Jones on the Inc. 5000 multiple times, the self-taught designer-entrepreneur is a 2021 Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year, a Tory Burch Foundation Fellow, and a winner of HSN’s “The Big Find.” Scaling Sassy Jones to No. 24 on Inc.’s list of the 5,000 fastest-growing private companies in America this year, with nearly $15 million in 2020 revenue, has been one of the great joys of my life. But at some point, in 2019, I felt I’d brought it as far as I could alone. I needed leaders, strong and experienced ones, to help me take my online jewelry and accessories company to the next level.…

When the media company Ozy unraveled last fall, its CEO, Carlos Watson—the would-be wizard of Ozy—stood accused of inflating performance, inventing partners, and looking the other way when his co-founder impersonated a YouTube exec to potential investors. It wasn’t, however, the first time a funding-hungry, win-at-any-cost entrepreneur would take preposterously desperate measures: Cook the books? Check. Conspire to traffic cocaine? Hey, it’s financing! Dress like Steve Jobs? Sadly, yes. Take a look at some who crossed the line from unbridled hype to “Let me explain, Your Honor.” Luckin Coffee GRINDING THE NUMBERS If you’re running China’s biggest domestic coffee chain, with nearly 3,000 cafes, opening stores faster than Starbucks, and poised to go public, you can pretty much sit back, sip your cappuccino, and enjoy the sweet whirring of the…

1999 Saeju Jeong, 19, starts South Korean heavy metal record label BuyHard Productions. 2002 Inspired by his father’s dying words, Jeong pivots his dream from music to health care. 2002 – 2004 Jeong enters the South Korean army as an IT specialist. 2005 Jeong moves to NYC and meets Artem Petakov, a Ukrainian immigrant software developer. 2007 Jeong and Petakov create WorkSmart Labs and their first prototype, a stationary-bike gamification accessory. 2008 PretaKov leaves Google to go full time with Jeong; they raise funding from acquaintances to build prototypes for other gym equipment. 2008 Jeong and Petakov launch CardioTrainer, one of the first apps in the Android marketplace. 2010 After learning that users are using their app to count steps, the duo launch calorie-counting app Calorific. 2011 WorkSmart Labs changes…

N°4418 2021 Ranking 62% 3-Year Growth 5,000+ Commercials Produced Annually 1M+ Leads Generated Annually Long-time Little Rock, Arkansan, meteorologist Ron Sherman was doing daily television weather reports when he started his advertising agency with his wife, Sheila Jumper, in 1986. But the strategy he created for his clients was so successful, he soon joined the agency full time. The telethon-format commercials appeared during popular movies on weekends. He would travel from Little Rock to various locations to do unscripted, live commercials, inviting viewers to call for more information. Then he tracked the ads’ effectiveness by watching how often the phones lit up in the next room. “It was real-time metrics,” says Ron Jumper, CEO of Ron Sherman Advertising and the son of Ron Sherman, whose real name is Steve Jumper.…

Fifteen years ago, only 8 percent of health care facilities were using electronic health records (EHR). Today, that number has ballooned to more than 95 percent, according to the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology. But what happens to the old data that resides in an older legacy computer system? The answer, Triyam founder and CEO Sudhakar Mohanraj discovered, was frequently nothing. DIGITAL HEALTH CARE DATA PIONEERS While working on a health care IT project, Mohanraj says he “came across a customer in North Dakota that had moved out of legacy systems into new software, but they still had the legacy server sitting there so they could retain the data.” The Triyam founder immediately recognized the business opportunity that customer situation represented, as well as the wide-open…

The digital banking market is pretty crowded these days. Your company is on pace for nearly $100 million in revenue in 2021. How does BM Technologies succeed there? We have a direct-to-consumer strategy, but we also allow nonbanks and large brands to launch their own digital banks-so we’re essentially B2B2C. We have higher education institutions as our clients, allowing us to reach one in every three college-bound students. In all, we have about two million account holders, and we’re one of the first neo-banking fintech firms to be profitable. How did you know it was time to go public? We were incubated by a larger bank and always knew we’d have to divest from it. We were open to many options, whether that was going public or a merger. We…

In 2015, James Eberhard needed a bow tie. He had a wedding to attend in Brooklyn, and nobody, not even the “super hipstery” hotel he was staying at, had one. “I thought there’d be some type of community sharing,” he says—a Zipcar for bow ties, if you will. There was not. So he launched an app—Fluid Share (which quickly changed its name to Fluid Market)—that allowed users to rent anything from tools to recreational gear. On day one, someone rented a truck. Eberhard, finding the truck-rental business especially dysfunctional, leaned into that early signal and in 2018 rebranded his Denver-based company to Fluid Truck, which now offers 24/7 access to hundreds of vehicles with an hourly, daily or weekly pricing model. The company closed a Series A round of $63…

IN 2015, serial entrepreneur Jeb Banner found himself burned out by a constant stream of emails, texts, and phone calls—and fantasizing about what it would feel like to completely unplug. So, that summer, the founder of Indianapolis-based creative agency SmallBox scheduled a weeklong solo trip to the woods in northern Michigan, and left his computer at home. In the woods, he wrote songs, read books, and found a renewed sense of presence. “Becoming more present,” he says, “allows you to notice things— the energy in a conversation, the small signals that may point to something bigger, the trends that are emerging—which allows you to lead in a more effective way.” That first week in the trees gave Banner the inspiration to start his current company, board-management-software maker Boardable, and it…

Eric Edwards is cofounder and chief executive officer of Phlow, a public benefit pharmaceutical corporation. He previously co-founded pharmaceutical company Kaléo, where, among other roles, he was responsible for overall scientific strategy and pharmaceutical development programs. Following an unprecedented year for the pharmaceutical industry, including leaps in vaccine technology and supply chain shortages, Inc. asked Edwards to share his vision for the future of pharmaceuticals. How will the pharmaceutical industry change in the next five years? For more than 50 years, many of our most vital medicines have been manufactured in countries where labor costs are low, raw materials are inexpensive, and environmental protection regulations are few. But now, several factors—including ongoing drug shortages, increasing concerns around the quality of essential medicines like antibiotics and pain relievers, and a desire…

Chid Liberty is an award-winning social entrepreneur and impact investor. He is a 2020 Ashoka & Ikea Dela Fellow and a 2018 C&A Fabric of Change Fellow, both awarded to social entrepreneurs pursuing system-level change in retail supply chains. In 2017, I was attempting to raise $5 million when I had an epiphany. From my office in New York City’s garment district, where I was surrounded by patterns and crumpled T-shirts, my goal was nothing less than improving the lives of cotton farmers and garment workers a world away in West Africa. After four years of running my ethical fashion company, Liberty & Justice, I had already created fair-wage jobs for hundreds of people and helped U.S.-based retailers like Bloomingdale’s, prAna, and Godiva source from thousands of small-hold farmers in…

Among the hundreds of companies facilitating crypto trading are neo-brokerages Robinhood and SoFi, which started with stocks, and crypto-first marketplaces that power the trading of new currencies. Here are a few of Coinbase’s fiercest competitors. Binance Founded: 2017 HQ: Decentralized The world’s largest crypto exchange by trading volume, Binance also has its own currency, Binance Coin. Founder Changpeng Zhao, who made his name developing high-frequency trading software for stockbrokers, moved the company out of China in 2017 because of that country’s increasing regulation of cryptocurrencies. In 2019, the company launched Binance. US after being banned briefly by the United States. (It’s still not permitted in several states.) Binance is expanding into new arenas, including launching Binance NFT, an auction-based marketplace for nonfungible tokens. Recent Daily Trading Volume: $35 billion on…

SPONSORED BY THE INC. 5000 HONOREES WHOSE PROFILES APPEAR IN THE FOLLOWING PAGES IF YOU’RE DOING the same thing today that you did yesterday, chances are it’s the wrong thing. No matter what industry you’re in, you’re facing a business landscape that’s constantly changing, evolving, getting disrupted-and fiddling like BlackBerry at an iPhone release party won’t get the job done. So if your business model isn’t set up right now for future success, you’ll need to continuously anticipate, evaluate, and adapt. And if it is... same advice. Of course, changes in strategy vary widely by kind and degree. Unless it’s early days for your company or something’s gone horribly wrong, you probably don’t need a full-on pivot from selling ice cream to developing bioweapons. In most cases, the sweet spot…

Entrepreneurs often solve challenges with strategy and hard work. But sometimes, their own minds are the roadblock. “You can do all the strategy you want, but if the brain is wired in an old pattern, the strategy will not play out,” explains Dr. Alok Trivedi, founder of the Aligned Performance Institute and creator of the Trivedi Process, a scientifically based approach to achieving a better life. WHEN THE BOOKS DON’T WORK Trivedi teaches entrepreneurs how to clear old brain patterns and rewire their business, wealth, and relationships. He discovered the process while running one of the biggest chiropractic practices in the country. On paper, he should have been successful. But in 2012, he lost his house during a divorce and struggled to take control of his life. He read personal…

Marco Santarelli bought his first investment property at 18, when he could qualify for financing. “I had an interest at a young age in financial freedom and entrepreneurship,” he says. In 2003, after his dot-com company failed with the stock market crash, Santarelli went back to real estate investing, buying 84 units in nine months. At real estate workshops, investors kept asking him for tips and mentorship. But Santarelli was too busy assessing his own deals. “That’s when a light bulb went off,” he says. Santarelli became a source for other investors, providing access to investment properties he wasn’t buying. That worked out so well he got his real estate broker license in California, founding Norada Real Estate Investments in 2004 to connect investors with curated turnkey properties in 25…

When pandemic demand led Pattern Brands, an NYC-based e-commerce retailer of items for the home, to double its team and hire 27 full-time employees in the past six months, co-founder Suze Dowling opted to speed up the process with an applicant tracking system (ATS). And why not? Ninety-nine percent of Fortune 500 companies have adopted such a system, the benefits of which include automating tasks such as followup emails, uploading resumes, and updating career pages with available roles. And a combination of software from HR tech companies Greenhouse and Lever can typically get the job done for around $150 to $300 per person hired. “It’s been vital to helping us scale with a pretty lean team,” Dowling says. Still, it’s not quite as easy as pushing a button and waiting…

“When I took on the role of supporting the overall e-commerce supply chain at Walmart, I found myself getting hyperfocused on details and metrics in the first six to 12 months. I’d never managed an organization of that size—more than 10,000 people—and I began to see that my role in moving the business forward should be less about digging into details and more about setting a cultural tone and communicating an overarching vision. I thought it was vital to help people understand how all the pieces connected. So I created this biweekly-to-monthly session that would bring an entire team together—anywhere from 100 to 1,000-plus people on a conference call across the country—and we’d take a single customer order and dissect its journey. In individual fulfillment centers, for example, they’d walk…

Big Ass Fans founder Carey Smith led the fan and light maker from $0 to its $500 million sale. He started working at age 9 and has never stopped. His “secret” to success is common sense, and he’s happy to share it. His firm, Unorthodox Ventures, focuses on finding small companies with big potential. Sooner or later, every TED Talker and self-appointed thought leader will expound on the subject of failure: how failure is essential, how to embrace it, even how to celebrate it. Many of them will trot out the old bromide “When one door closes, another one opens” to encourage you to see failure as opportunity. Hey—they’re motivational speakers. What are they supposed to say? Go sulk in your room for a year? What I might say is,…

THE CALORIE COUNTING CARDIO TRAINING STATIONARY BIKE GAMIFICATING STRESS REDUCING PSYCHO OPTIMIZING PEOPLE CENTERING WEIGHT LOSS SUBSCRIPTIONATING WHATEVER BEHAVIOR NEXT NEEDS CHANGING COMPANY NOOM CO-FOUNDER and CEO Saeju Jeong gets up in the morning in his Manhattan apartment near Central Park and blasts the kind of hard-driving heavy metal music that you might associate with mosh pits and death shrieks, not the perky weight-loss app his company is famous for. “It’s my routine of meditation,” he says matter-of-factly. “I take a heavy metal bath, let it wash over me. It’s the way I channel my mood, and then I am in the game, giving my every spiritual and physical energy to Noom. And then at night I listen to help me detox any unnecessary doubts. I just nail them with…

N°815 2021 Ranking 596% 3-Year Growth 203 Employees 2014 Year Founded Money is what drives business, but it also can provide insights if you can get it to talk. A desire to dig deeper into transactions is what led Orlando, Fla. brother-sister duo Suneera Madhani and Sal Rehmetullah to launch the fintech software company Stax (formerly Fattmerchant) in 2014. The idea came when Madhani was working as a door-to-door salesperson in the payments industry in 2012, selling terminals out of the trunk of her Volkswagen Beetle. “I saw we were moving towards a cashless society, and I thought there has to be a better way from an analytics standpoint,” says Madhani, Stax co-founder and CEO. “Data was living inside the transactions, but the payments industry was very commoditized. No processor…

Saying “That’s the way it’a always been” to Alex Kutsishin is like waving a red cape at a charging bull. There’s a good chance he’ll accept that statement as a challenge that your company, or industry, is due for a massive shift. And he’s just the person to make big changes. The dynamic CEO and founder of Sales Boomerang thrives on spotting opportunities and converting them into big gains for clients. That ability to sense a stagnant market primed for change led Kutsishin to start Sales Boomerang. While consulting for a mortgage marketing firm in 2015, he discovered a 10 percent sales conversion rate industrywide. Intrigued by that low number, he set out to learn where the other 90 percent of potential borrowers went. He found that 30 to 40…

From faster communication to a wider rage of services, broadband technology is revolutionizing the flow of information. When it comes to rolling out the cutting-edge technology, large cities have an advantage as enterprise providers like AT&T and Verizon focus on serving urban areas first. Rural America relies on smaller fiber-optic networks, but those providers often face challenges, such as lack of funding and engineering know-how. James Kyle, founder and CEO of Millennium, a broadband distributor headquartered in Delavan, Wisconsin, decided that focusing on smaller markets could have a bigger impact. Instead of simply supplying materials, Millennium evolved into a full-service consulting and resource company for growing fiber optic networks. This includes offering geographic information system (GIS) engineering, construction loans, equipment rental, and materials. “Millennium has created a dynamic group to…