It’s been a good year for us at 97th Floor. Between being named to Inc. magazine “50 Best Placed to Work in 2016,”, a nod to our focus on employee engagement and culture, and today being announced on Inc. magazine’s 35th annual Inc. 5000, the most prestigious ranking of the nation's fastest-growing private companies, we’re feeling fine.
And why shouldn’t we be? After all, companies such as Microsoft, Dell, Domino’s Pizza, Pandora, Timberland, LinkedIn, Yelp, Zillow, and many other well-known names gained their first national exposure as honorees of the Inc. 5000.
The 2016 Inc. 5000—unveiled online at Inc.com and with the top 500 companies featured in the September issue of Inc. (available on newsstands August 23)—is the most competitive crop in the list’s history. The average company on the list achieved a mind-boggling three-year growth of 433%.
Our’s was 218% and we rank 1706 in the overall lineup of privately-held companies.
The Inc. 5000’s aggregate revenue is $200 billion, and the companies on the list collectively generated 640,000 jobs over the past three years, or about 8% of all jobs created in the entire economy during that period. Companies are ranked according to percentage revenue growth when comparing 2012 to 2015. To qualify, companies must have been founded and generating revenue by March 31, 2012. They had to be US-based, privately held, for profit, and independent—not subsidiaries or divisions of other companies—as of December 31, 2015. The minimum revenue required for 2012 is $100,000; the minimum for 2015 is $2 million. As always, Inc. reserves the right to decline applicants for subjective reasons.
"The Inc. 5000 list stands out where it really counts,” says Inc. President and Editor-In-Chief Eric Schurenberg. “It honors real achievement by a founder or a team of them. No one makes the Inc. 5000 without building something great—usually from scratch. That’s one of the hardest things to do in business, as every company founder knows. But without it, free enterprise fails.”View the complete Inc. 5000 list here.
"I always felt strongly that by building a company that focused on the work—both as it relates to the client and to team work—that the rest would take care of itself. Being recognized as an Inc. “50 Best Places to Work,” while making the Inc. 5,000 fastest growing list in the same year is great proof of that,” said Founder and CEO Chris Bennett.
