The 1991 Inc. 500(Introduction)

Introduction overview of the Inc. 500.

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

America's fastest-growing private companies

* * *

It's déjà vu all over again. -- Anonymous

"Business failures, layoffs, battered P&Ls, and loan defaults . . . " -- thus began our introduction to the very first Inc. 500 list, nine years ago. It went on: "While the headlines continue to blurt bad news, American business winds up 1982 sputtering about Reaganomics and straining to justify optimism about the year ahead."

If the sputtering these days is no longer about Rea-ganomics and is concerned instead with shrunken business and consumer buying power, the unavailability of credit or capital, national budget deficits, global uncompetitiveness, and (did it slip past the first time?) the unavailability of credit or capital, there's still plenty of sputtering nonetheless. And optimism? Now as then, there's more of it in the headlines than on the streets. It's little wonder we feel, as the Inc. 500 list celebrates its 10th anniversary, that we've been here before.

Still, comparisons between our first ranking and this one reveal differences worth mentioning. In 1982 the typical Inc. 500 company posted a five-year growth rate of 571%, a walk in the park compared with the Class of 1991's hard-sprinting 1,467%. The typical '82 listee wouldn't even have placed 500th this year.

Another key contrast? Productivity. The Class of '82 averaged $60,446 in annual revenues per employee. This year's typical employee at an Inc. 500 company generates more than twice that -- $133,986 a year.

Beyond those facts, and others charted on these opening pages, our 1991 Inc. 500 special report contains --

* Who's Number One. This year's top-ranked juggernaut is Gateway 2000, the South Dakota mail-order computer maker with the cowhide-inspired boxes. If you haven't yet encountered the company's rustic packaging, you likely soon will; Gateway topped the list with $275 million in 1990 sales (up from $1 million in 1986) but expects to hit $600 million in 1991. How? Find out in [Article link].

* Lessons from the List. Forget the Big Picture. (Too often the Inc. 500 has been likened to a macroeconomic crystal ball.) What the list reveals best are practical tactics and market intelligence that company builders can exploit right now. In three features -- "Hot Markets," [Article link]; "Growth Strategies," [Article link]; and "The Founders," [Article link] -- we examine the list from three different perspectives. We draw some conclusions; you'll want to draw others for yourself.

* The Inc. 500 Survey. The CEOs of this year's ranked companies were queried on a variety of matters; on each page of the 500 list you'll discover the findings. Included among them: an assessment of entrepreneurial obsession; a surprising note of antifamily-business bias; and a vote of confidence in American employees. (The problem is managers, say the CEOs, not the people who work for them.)

The list itself begins with [Article link].

This year, as in each of the nine before, we again have unearthed no shortcuts to reaching the 500. You'll spot plenty of managerial tips, true -- but there are no surefire business plans or can't-miss entrepreneurial résumés. If that's the bad news, however, then the corresponding good news is that there are so many routes to a place on the list. In that most democratic (small d) of traditions, you can get there from anywhere. Anyone, doing almost anything, can make the 500. Even in times when the word recession seems more and more anxiously linked with the phrase double dip.

Of course, there's nothing new to seeing some companies achieve hypergrowth during a period of general economic malaise. Just do what Jake Morse, founder of then-18th-ranked Marliss Industries, in Jonesboro, Ark., claimed to be doing about the recession of 1982: "We've chosen not to participate."

Too glib by half? Maybe. But this year again, on the '91 Inc. 500, he has a lot of company.