The Inc 500 Hall of Fame
To make the list once requires unbelievable revenue growth from a company. To make the list more than once is an even greater feat -- for the larger you grow, the higher the revenue bar rises just to keep pace. In recognition of companies that have managed explosive growth over long time periods, we created the Hall of Fame. So far, 61 companies have been inducted after mak-ing the list five times. This year, four new businesses win the laurel: QSS Group (#313), Spectrum Communications Cabling Services (#323), Nav-igator Systems (#386), and ATX Forms (#497). In addition, Linksys (#226) and Monitronics International (#365) join the 12 other Inc 500 companies that have made the list a remarkable six times.
42 % of the Inc 500 CEOs surveyed expected substantial sales growth in 2002.
Can't Knock the Hustle
Lots of entrepreneurs get their start in business by working their way through school -- but typically not grade school. Yet that's the story of Tom and Richard Seeman. The cofounders of Staff One (#14) grew up on welfare in a family of 12 children. They shared clothes and roller skates "kid after kid after kid," Richard says, and ate at a restaurant only when McDonald's offered cheap cheeseburgers to children with lots of A's on their report cards. Both brothers worked at their Catholic grammar school, mowing lawns and sweeping hallways to help defray the cost of tuition. Today Richard marvels at how un-aware he was that his circumstances were so very desperate. "There were places we wanted to live that were ghettos even then, and we thought they were heaven," he says. --Cara Cannella
79 % of the Inc 500 CEOs surveyed said that if they had to do it all over again, they would start their business with partners.
Don't Call Me Daughter
At Esoftsolutions (#52), an IT-services provider based in Plano, Tex., Sheldon Arora's four-year-old daughter, Madison (pictured above), is sort of the office mascot. She began going to work with Pop eight months ago. At first she worked at the end of his desk, mostly drawing. But that turned out to be a distraction for Dad, so he moved her into her own cube, complete with a laptop with Internet access. Now Madison has begun to mimic her coworkers. "She comes by and says 'Hi,' the way you and I would come into the office, and goes straight to her cube," Arora says.
When Madison grows up, perhaps she'll follow in the footsteps of Marina Hatso- poulos, the founder of Z (#56). Like Madison, Hatsopoulos has a father who is an entrepreneur, though a much better known one: over a 40-year period, George Hatsopoulos grew Thermo Electron into a $2-billion conglomerate best known for letting employees develop autonomous business units, many of which have been spun off. Ironically for him, one "intrapreneur" that he couldn't hold on to was his own daughter, who worked in the company's acquisitions division before striking out on her own. She left, she says, because she feared being labeled the beneficiary of nepotism. "People were kind of assuming that I was there for the wrong reasons," she explains. --Bridget Behling
51 % of the Inc 500 CEOs surveyed said that large corporations were their primary source of revenues.
Double Take
One of the great growth niches in recent years has been the sports-nutrition-bar industry, which has spawned several Inc 500 companies, including Powerbar, Clif Bars, and Balance Bars. But the latest nutrition-bar business to make the list -- ZonePerfect Nutrition (#307) -- might not have grown so quickly if it were not for fellow list maker Sweet Productions (#74). ZonePerfect has been outsourcing production to Sweet Productions for years, reports ZonePerfect CEO Chris Baker. But the moment of truth in the relationship between the two companies came in 2001, when Baker asked Sweet Productions CEO Paul Schacher to bear the heavy cost of doubling his capacity in order to accommodate ZonePerfect's projected surge in sales. Schacher agreed to make the investment in his facility. The rest is Inc 500 history. --John Courtney
Free -- For a Price
Sometimes the sale you forgo is the one that makes all the difference. That was the case for Dave Garcia, the founder of Network Management Resources (#136), who won a high-powered mentor simply by being neighborly. One day in 2000, a consulting business moved into offices in the same building as Garcia's. After offering to help the owner of the business hook up his T1 line, Garcia discovered that his new acquaintance was Timothy Price, who had recently retired as president and CEO of the telecom juggernaut MCI. Refusing payment for the Internet connection, Garcia proposed that Price reciprocate by meeting him over the occasional cup of coffee to talk over Network Management's strategies, opportunities, and problems. Today Price remains a member of Garcia's advisory board. --John Courtney
44 % of the Inc 500 CEOs surveyed said that winning new customers was substantially more difficult this year.
A Different Kind of Gas Grill
If viewing the world from a different vantage point is one of the hallmarks of entrepreneurship, Bill Johnson was already prepared for company building by the age of 10. By that time, he was well on his way to seeing all the lower 48 states from the cab of an 18-wheeler. Johnson's father, a long-haul furniture mover, took Bill with him on jobs during the summer. In his son he instilled a gritty work ethic. Earning only one dollar an hour and having to buy his lunch each day, Bill, the president of Alden Systems (#121), became pretty inventive and disciplined with money. A bootstrapper even then, he packed hot dogs in a cooler and cooked them wrapped in aluminum foil on the truck's motor. "It was cheaper than buying a hot dog at a rest stop," Bill says. "And it was fun." Fun in a diesel-tasting kind of way. --Mike Leonard
