The 1995 Inc. 500 Almanac

	at founding	in 1990	in 1994
CEO	73	83	90
Cofounders	40	16	19
Investors	14	21	26
CEO's Family	13	44	45
Employees	3	10	25

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Technology Is Everywhere
In earlier times computers found homes in places where numbers had to be crunched -- such as accounting departments. Our findings show that technology has flowed into other areas of Inc. 500 companies, thanks both to company builders' getting smarter about technology and to an explosion in easy-to-use software. Here are the percentages of companies that identified a specific area as benefiting most from technology.

	in 1990	in 1994
Accounting	41	25
Sales/Marketing	31	41
People Management	5	6
Manufacturing	5	6
Strategic Planning	3	2
Inventory	3	7
Other	9	10

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Inc.'s Best-Seller List
Memo to Stephen Covey: you're habit-forming. (More than one Inc. 500 company swears it now lives by your principles.) These are the books that Inc. 500 CEOs say have made big differences in the way they run their businesses:

1. Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen R. Covey

2 . The Discipline of Market Leaders, by Michael Treacy

3. Reengineering the Corporation, by James Champy and Michael Hammer

4. In Search of Excellence, by Tom Peters

5 . The Great Game of Business, by Jack Stack

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Role Models
We asked Inc. 500 CEOs which companies they use as benchmarking models. Here are the names that came up repeatedly:

1. Hewlett-Packard

2. Microsoft

3. IBM

4. Wal-Mart

5. Southwest Airlines

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Love/Hate?
We never asked for a corporate Antichrist, but we got it from several respondents: the company they love to loathe is none other than Microsoft -- number 163 on the Inc. 500 list a decade ago.

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In Five Years' Time, I'll Be . . .
on the beach? Not quite. One of our findings should vaporize any charges about entrepreneurs being get-rich-quick schemers: more than 90% mean to be busy into the new millennium -- building the company. Here's a breakdown of where the Inc. 500 CEOs expect to be five years from now:

In the same role as now: 53.3%

Out. I'll have sold the company: 4.8%

Out. I'll be starting another company: 3%

In the same role, but the company will be public: 24.9%

Delegating responsibility to professional managers: 11.9%

Out. I'll have passed the company to the next generation: 1.1%

Out, and the company will be public: 1%

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INC. BOOK OF RECORDS
The 10 Largest Growth Companies

Name	Size*
TTC, Illinois	$565.5
Ma Laboratories	497.6
VisionTek	300.4
PNY Electronics	275.3
Future Tech International	265.1
I-Net	234.4
Payroll Transfers	229.1
Logistix	221.4
Vincam Group	191.8
Viking Components	177.3
DPR Construction	174.8
*Annual revenues, in $ millions

The Top 5 Job Creators

Name	1994 Payroll
I-Net	2,500
Atlanta Legal Copies	1,650
PageMart	1,200
PIA Merchandising	1,186
Mastech Systems	1,025

The Honor Roll
Here are the companies that have been on the Inc. 500 list five times:

Name	1995 Rank
Anstec	286
Knowledge Systems	409
Lai, Venuti & Lai	357
Morningstar	172
Saturn Electronics & Engineering	404
Ameristar	100
Telamon	397
U.S. Computer Maintenance	408