Innholdsfortegnelse for May/June 2023 i Inc. Magazine

As you read this, we've just wrapped up hosting a few hundred entrepreneurs at Inc.'s Founders House, which we brought down to Atlanta. Among good discussion and great networking, we toasted upstarts in the local startup community with our 30 Under 30-ish recognition program. We'd asked wellrespected business people, founders, academics, and others in the 404 to help our in-house experts with nominees, and I'm pleased to say we ended up with a group you'll hear a whole lot more from one day— the people creating, or supporting the creators of, our future. It's a good list. We waffled on the age thing a bit, but drawing a hard line at having to have been born only after May 1993 seemed a bit arbitrary, so, yeah, we kept it youngish…

Q: In your experience, what's been the hardest thing about being a founder? A: You're always learning to pivot. There's a lot of learning by doing it the “wrong way” when you are paving your way. —MIRANDA CULLEN, OWNER, INSIDE STORIES Survey Says Q: What's the worst lie you've ever told to help your company survive or grow? A: On the phone with a new national retailer, they asked if we were EDI-capable and we said yes … while Googling “What is EDI?” —JESS MISNER GEORGE, CO-FOUNDER, ZESTT ORGANICS Q: What's the biggest myth about being an entrepreneur? A: That if you're not succeeding, you're not working hard enough. There are so many variables that affect the viability of a startup or small business. Having a good idea and a…

When I became CEO of United Airlines, in 2015, the company was in crisis. We were trailing competitors on every metric, and a stalled merger with Continental had led to botched negotiations with labor unions. To get to the root of the problem, I launched a listening tour to talk directly to employees. Their input informed my comeback strategy for United, which I recount in my new book, Turnaround Time. One of the most important pieces of feedback came from a flight attendant, who said, “Oscar, I'm just tired of always having to say, ‘I'm sorry.’” I understood immediately. Cutting costs had put employees in the impossible position of having to always apologize to customers, for big things like delays, but also for seemingly small stuff, like bad coffee. How…

ONE OF THE BENEFITS of having served as self-proclaimed Chief Big Ass of the fan company I founded—and being Founding Contrarian of an investment company—is that I'm frequently asked for business advice on things like funding and operations. But there's one subject in particular that seems to consistently be on everyone's mind: how to deal with the com petition, the monster lurking beneath every entre preneur's bed. I've often said that everything you need to know about business can be found in Aesop's Fables, and, sure enough, Aesop focused several of his tales on competing forces—as in “The North Wind and the Sun,” which describes a contest to determine the more powerful of the two, and ultimately teaches that gentleness is more persuasive than brute force. Perhaps the best-known of…

Lumin Digital CEO Jeff Chambers took four weeks off in 2022. The 49-year old founder promises to do better this year: He's booked five weeks in vacation spots from Lake Tahoe to Hawaii. His company, which runs an online banking platform for credit unions and community banks, is heading for another year of 25 percent growth—evidence that his team clearly can function without him. “It's like we have 180 CEOs,” he says. “I'm OK with that.” Although Lumin is a five-year-old tech startup whose cloud-based platform and weekly, zero-downtime upgrades give it a competitive advantage over legacy sys tems, the company actually isn't built around the technology. “We said let's go build a company that can build a better experience for employees and customers,” Chambers says. “We can make investors…

A Aboldco Acceleration Partners AccountingDepartment.com Accredible Achievelt ACI Transport Addigy Adtechnacity Advance Transportation Systems (ATS) Affinity AgBiome Agency Elevation Aimpoint Digital Alation AlertMedia All American Entertainment Allego Alloy Allstacks AIITech Services Alma AlphaSense AltaVista Strategic Partners Altos American Truck & Rail Audits AM Specialty Insurance Group Amy Porterfield Analytic Vizion Andworx Antenna Group Appfire Applause Apploi Ariel Group Asana ASAPP Assura The A Team Consulting Athletic Brewing Company Atrium ATTN Agency Audley Consulting Group Avex Designs Avicado Construction Technology Services Avyance Awardco Aware Awes.me Axonius B Babylist Backblaze Baldwin & Obenauf BambooHR BaseCap Baylnfotech Beachfront Beam Becker's Healthcare Bedrock Beehive Strategic Communication Belle Communication Bellmont Partners Bellwether Asset Management Benchling Benepass Berry Appleman & Leiden (BAL) Bespoke Sports & Entertainment BetterUp BeyondTrust BigPanda Biller Genie Bishop Fox Bitly Bit-Wizards BizStream…

At the end of World War II, U.S. military officials knew they had a problem: Military communication was a mess. Communiqués about Japanese landings would get mixed up with messages about what officers had for breakfast. Politics plagued the military branches. Meanwhile, the U.S. faced a new and imposing threat from the Soviet Union. ✕ So, like any entrepreneur, President Eisenhower set to work finding a solution. In 1958, his administration created, within the Defense Department, the Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA, and sought the brightest minds in academia to solve its communication problems. They envisioned a future when computers talked to one another through a network— one that would enable military officials to trade tactical updates and scientists to share research. The project was called the Arpanet. ✕…

Fifteen Percent Pledge Black-owned businesses really are the heart of the Black community. In May 2020, they were hemorrhaging—there was data that showed 40 percent of Black-owned businesses were projected to close as a result of the pandemic, and 90 percent didn't get access to the first round of PPP money. On top of conversations about what was needed to stop what happened to Mr. Floyd from happening again, I wanted to make people cognizant of Black communities from a financial perspective. To engage major corporations to make meaningful, long-term change in the Black community, I created the Fifteen Percent Pledge, and asked major retailers like Whole Foods, Target, and Sephora to commit to buying 15 percent of their products from Black-owned businesses. It would be good business for everyone,…

In December 2021, Vishal Garg fired 900 of his employees on a Zoom call. To make matters worse, the founder and CEO of New York City-based mortgage lender Better.com also called those employees “unproductive” thieves of company time. Public criticism of Garg went viral, and his board ordered him to take a month-long break from his role. Garg has since apologized, returned as CEO—and fired thousands more employees. Here, Garg analyzes his errors. In 2020, we grew 900 percent and made $500 million in cash profit. Low interest rates led to a surge of mortgage refinancings, and Covid meant customers didn't want to go to a physical location to get a loan, so they were all coming to us. To keep up with demand, Better went on a hiring spree.…

PHOTOGRAPHY BY ROB WILLIAMSON ROB WILLIAMSON “You can reduce a lot of risk by being extremely thoughtful about the strategic nature of your bet,” says Aaron Levie. He's not talking about blackjack. Rather, the CEO of New York City-based cloud content management platform Box is talking about his use of game theory—the study of mathematically strategic decision-making—to make critical business decisions and gain a competitive edge. “Understanding your competition's incentives and how their businesses run is really important, because that teaches you what to do as an alternative,” says Levie. For instance, when building Box in the early days, Levie saw that his larger competitors were focusing resources on specializing their own platforms and technology products. To capture an unaddressed market, he took the opposite approach, making Box compatible with…

I WOULDN'T HAVE thought that a book about an obscure school of ancient philosophy would put me in the manufacturing business, but life is full of surprises. Several years ago, after writing a book called The Daily Stoic, I started an email list that delivered one philosophical meditation each day. From there, I expanded the business into prints and then into an e-commerce company that sells all sorts of physical products—statues, coins, printed books—all over the world. The Daily Stoic Store is a small business in the sense that there are only six or seven of us in the office every day—and yet it's not really small at all, ranking in the top 1 percent of all Shopify stores. The result has been a surprising thrust into a world I…

FOR A WHILE in October 2020, Bobbi Brown simply stopped taking calls. Even close friends didn't know what she was up to, tucked into a storage-closet-turnedoffice within her husband's production studio. If she'd opened her mouth to the wrong person, she could have been in breach of contract. It was nerve-racking, but also—she'll admit it now—the right kind of electrifying. 1round her neck hung a tiny gold chain with a charm she'd had made reading “10/20.” It was the expiration date of the noncompete agreement she'd signed 25 years before, when her eponymous cosmetics company was acquired by Estée Lauder for some $75 million. In the years she'd been prohibited from all but touching another beauty brand, Brown had spent more than two decades doing something else almost unheard-of: staying…

Corporate Ink Boston THE BENEFIT Every other Friday off COMPANY SIZE 10-24 employees It was the 18th hole, and victory was one stroke away. Melissa Africano watched from the sidelines as her mentee, Cole Struble, stepped onto the green, lined up his putt, and with a delicate tap rolled the ball home for a 17-over-par 89. And just like that, Struble was champion—a feat he would not have accomplished without Africano. And she, in turn, could not have played her part were it not for a workplace benefit. In 2022, Africano, who lives in New Hampshire, joined Boston-based tech PR firm Corporate Ink as a remote employee. She did so in part for the company's flex Friday employee benefit, which allows its 19 employees, divided into two groups, to take…

A duffel bag full of mementos and retirement gifts commemorating a career in the CIA sat slumped behind a doorway for months, hidden in plain sight. It was November 2022, and Emily Hikade's husband, Chris, had dropped his bag of spy paraphernalia there after retiring from the agency that prior January. Emily had left the CIA in 2018. She and her husband had worked at many of the same far-flung international embassies, in nine countries across three continents, both as American “diplomats,” for more than a decade—but they'd never spoken about the reality of their lives to anyone outside the agency. But now it was time. Not only were they both free to step out of their old identities, but Hikade had also built a new one that needed her…

The Coven A lot of people will say we haven't made progress in the past few years, but that would be a disservice to the millions of Black people who've been working to drive change. Black and Brown people have always done for themselves what systems won't. We consistently rely on ourselves and our communities to launch and sustain our businesses, our dreams, and our careers. Everyone else is always just catching up. For a Black woman, fundraising is insane. The numbers are dismal. Investment in founders of color rose slightly in 2020, but now it's back down to record lows. It's going to take time to change the stats. A lot of new funds are popping up that are focused on gender-lens investing or diversity-lens investing, or are run…

Worxbee It feels like a lot of the promises made three years ago cycled back to the same response: “We're going to invest in business programs for minorities, because there's no way they know what a P&L is.” By the end of 2021, most Black founders I was talking to, we were like, “I don't want to take another program for a while.” Programs have been shoved down our throats, based on this assumption that because we're not taking on major investments and don't have the access other people have, we don't know how to run a business. But in a lot of ways, Black and Brown founders are more innovative, because of how we have to walk through life. We just need access to the contracts— what keeps our…

A decade after founding the eyewear disrupter Warby Parker in 2010, co-founders and co-CEOs Dave Gilboa and Neil Blumenthal knew an IPO was probably inevitable. The New York City-based company had raised $535 million from investors, and they had no interest in selling. So in 2021, Warby Parker held a direct listing on the New York Stock Exchange that valued the company at $6.8 billion. We caught up with Gilboa, who's out to prove that going the direct route—popularized by the likes of Coinbase, Slack, and Spotify—was the right move for Warby. In a direct listing, companies can go public without taking further dilution. It's also a much more democratic process, in which any investor can participate. Neil and I would often get emails from customers who wanted to know…

MENTEE Seth Goldman, co-founder, Eat the Change. Seth Goldman, 57, brewed his first batch of Honest Tea in his kitchen back in 1998. He was a first-time founder, just two years out of business school, and he knew he needed experience on his board. He found it in Timberland CEO Jeffrey Swartz, though the advice he received took more than 20 years to sink in. When he joined my board in 2000, Jeff told me: ‘Build the brand like you're going to own it forever.’ At the time, I thought he was talking about the brand, but he was also talking about reputation. I spent a decade scaling the business and in 2011 sold it to Coca-Cola. Then, in May 2022, I got the news that Honest Tea was discontinued.…

Today, retail's biggest buzzword is omnichannel: an approach to commerce that involves both online and brick-and-mortar channels to create a seamless customer experience. It's a simple concept that requires a robust supply chain, keen logistical planning, and smart customer research to make work. But countless brands say it's all worth the effort. “The customer doesn't care where you are. They just want to love the brand, and they're going to buy it wherever they are,” says Andy Dunn, co-founder of the New York City-based men's clothing brand Bonobos. While that sounds simple, implementing an omni chan nel retail strategy—whether through brand-owned stores, retail partners, or both—can be messy. Here's our quick guide to getting started, informed by insights from top brands including Away, Harry's, and Reformation. • DIVERSIFY YOUR CHANNELS…

AT SOME POINT, every business leader has a realization: Things aren't getting done, and you're the problem. While this has happened many times in small ways over the course of running my health care staffing marketplace, Actriv Healthcare, one stands out. A few years ago, I asked my assistant to research information I needed for an important client meet—ing the next day. “Yeah, just get it to me by midday,” I had said, or words to that effect. When you're running a startup, things are moving so quickly it can be hard to slow your messaging—and communicate precisely. But the next day, when my assistant brought the information to me at 12:15 p.m.—well, I had actually needed it before noon. A small difference? Sure. But I'd wanted to showcase key…

Bobbi Brown is building an independent beauty brand for the second time—more than 30 years after founding her eponymous first one. Here she explains what she's learned along the way, from unique approaches to problem-solving and managing crises, to knowing what doesn't need to be done. —As told to C.L.-C. Be the person who solves the problem I realize that I love the challenge of doing things I've never done before. I love diving into what I don't necessarily have experience in. I certainly don't have the business education. But what I do have is common sense, and I like to cut through a lot of the noise and find simple solutions that make more sense to me. My thought process is really simple: When there's an obstacle people are…

The Midtown Group Washington, D.C. THE BENEFIT One-month paid sabbatical every six years COMPANY SIZE 25-49 employees Jesse Barkers missed his native country of Ghana. He also missed his grandmother, who had raised him there. A payroll manager at the Washington, D.C.-based staffing firm the Midtown Group, Barkers had returned to his home country only once since immigrating to the U.S. in 2007, at the age of 23. In 2022, he had the opportunity to return for an extended stay and to bring his wife and family. Barkers has five children, ranging in age from 1 to 25. None had ever before visited Ghana, where they were able to meet the woman who raised Barkers, attend the local schools, and cook food and play music with their aunts, uncles, and…

The Phillips Group Anaheim, Calif. THE BENEFIT Vacation reimbursement pool COMPANY SIZE 5-9 employees Nick Ceja's heart was pounding. It could have been the altitude, but probably it was the internal pressure, mounting with each step, as he and his girlfriend, Silvia, approached the summit of their vacation hike in Colorado's Rocky Mountains. How would he sneak the bright-pink ring box from his backpack? Once they arrived, though, he found a way. Then he dropped to one knee and asked her to marry him. Silvia's hand flew over her mouth, but her answer was clear. Ceja's engagement story wouldn't have had nearly the picturesque backdrop were it not for a novel new benefit at the Anaheim, California-based accounting firm where the 29-year-old tax associate works. In 2021, the Phillips Group…