The Inc. 500

Brief profiles of 15 Inc. 500 companies and their founders.

Visit the Inc. 500 site, which includes a fully searchable database of winners from 1983 to the present

Company Profiles

1 GEORGE LEWIS

Cogentrix

"When I started this company, I had to learn finance at the age of 54. I had to look good in the eyes of all these bright and shiny M.B.A.s."

The Company Cogentrix is the first company to take the number-one spot on the Inc. 500 for two years in a row.

Credit in part the huge leap in revenues the company had from 1985 to 1986 -- from $133,000 to $17 million -- when its cogeneration facilities began full-tilt production of electricity for utilities and steam for manufacturing com-panies in three North Carolina cities.

Lewis founded Cogentrix on the premises that coal burning can be cleaner than its image and that the supply of coal is more stable than that of oil or gas, a proposition certainly borne out this year.

The Founder Lewis was "born and dragged up in the streets of Brooklyn," son of a teacher and a draftsman. He took his street smarts to Con Edison and then two engineering firms before starting his company.

Despite its size, Cogentrix is a family business: Lewis holds 52% of the equity, and the other 48% is held by his three sons, who are managers.

46 DONALD EMERY
Reference Software International
"I think I was always fascinated but intimidated by the idea of running my own company. I never had that natural affinity."

The Company As a marketing professor, Emery encouraged his students to use word processors. "The papers looked nicer," he says, "but there was still incredibly bad writing, grammar, and spelling." So Emery and partner Bruce Wampler founded a company to solve those problems. They first developed a pop-up dictionary for computers; later came a breakthrough program, Grammatik, which flags awkward phrases in text.

"Most people who don't write for a living don't realize that the skill of writing really is in the revision stage," says Emery. "This program makes it easier to do that."

The company's next step: marketing French and German grammar checkers in Europe.

The Founder Emery did a stint at R. J. Reynolds before getting a Ph.D. in marketing. In 1975 he began teaching; he's now on sabbatical from San Francisco State University.

"Despite all my education, I am a very, very bad speller," he says.

89 RON ZWANZIGER

MediSense

We were close to running out of cash a number of times. Compared with that, nothing today is very difficult."

The Company When Zwanziger and three other students at Harvard Business School founded their bio-technology company, in 1981, their strategy was to invent and tinker with 10 products. Surely, they figured, one would hit big.

In 1984 MediSense began honing in on one product -- bio-sensors used by diabetics to read their blood-sugar levels. Then the money began pouring in: $60 million from investors so far, used in large part to develop an extensive international direct-sales force. Revenues from the user-friendly line hit $30 million last year, up from just $2 million two years previously. Zwanziger plans to take MediSense public in early 1991.

"A company with a sales force worldwide is a better company in the long run," he says. "And we make more money this way."

The Founder Zwanziger grew up in Cyprus, then was educated in Great Britain. He received an engineering degree from Imperial College at London University before attending Harvard Business School.

108 CLEMON H. WESLEY
TEXCOM
"Schools teach African Americans to go out and get 8:00-to-5:00 jobs. Very little suggests to them that they might want to start their own businesses."

The Company TEXCOM, a telecommunications and engineering services firm, takes advantage of the 25 years Wesley spent in the army by pursuing contracting work for the military. Now, with the changing political climate, the company pursues more private-sector jobs. "The whole world is retrenching," says Wesley, "and in this marketplace people are doing whatever it takes to win jobs."