A List of What's Unique About The Inc. 500

We love lists and rankings.  My daughter's college just sent out their alumni magazine and the cover was festooned with their latest rankings on the various publications that list and rank colleges and universities.  The local newspaper does an annual best of the county and some local companies work very hard to generate the votes to allow them to claim that they are "One of the Best of the County."  Whenever I write a blog that has a numbered list of points, I get more readers and more comments.  We love lists.

So with that in mind, I present to you the 11 things that make the Inc. 500/5000 interesting and a top list among lists!

1. The Inc. 500 recognizes and ranks private companies.  Private companies are...well...private.  They don't have the public reporting requirements that publicly-traded corporations do.  Because of that, it is harder to get information on these companies.  Each year the Inc. listing provides a peek behind the private boardroom doors.
2. The Inc. 500 has more.  If you pour over the list of the 500 fastest growing companies and just haven't had enough, you can go online and find 4500 more companies, similarly ranked and similarly laid out for inspection.
3. The Inc. 500 has longevity.  This is the 32nd annual list.  It started out as the Inc. 100, expanded to 500 shortly thereafter and has been the Inc. 5000 for the last several years.
4. The Inc. 500 is a positive sign of the times.  The Inc. editors headed this year's 500 list with the statement "Five hundred reasons to be optimistic about leadership, innovation, and the health of the American dream."  In the American mindset, business growth has always been a sign that things are going well.  If we look at the growth represented by the Inc. 500/5000, things are going very well!
5. The Inc. 500 seems attainable.  We are talking about companies that a few years ago were operating out of someone's garage or basement.  We are talking about leaders who started companies by maxing out their credit cards and asking their friends and relatives for a financial vote of confidence.  Only 15% of the Inc. 500 got their start-up capital from venture capital or angel funding. 71% used personal savings.  This is grassroots stuff. This is how we would all have to do it if we were starting a business.  
6. The Inc. 500 is about superstars and no-names.  And often the no-names beat out the superstars.  Yeah!
7. The Inc. 500 is about individuals as much as it is about companies.  Related to #5 and #6, many of the companies on the Inc. 500 (and even more on the Inc. 5000) are on the list because of the dreams, determination and drive of an individual.  As important as Steve Jobs was to the resurgence of  Apple, it is impossible to say that it was just because of him.  He was the conductor, but he had an orchestra to conduct.  Many on the Inc. 500/5000 list are like conductors of one-man bands.
8. The Inc. 500 is about the American Dream.  Actually it is about entrepreneurial dreams which I think goes well beyond the shores of the United States.  While the list focuses on US private companies, it is easy to see that the entrepreneurs behind those US companies come from all over the world.
9. The Inc. 500 is understandable.  Inc. uses a simple, straightforward formula for calculating its list.  Agree or disagree with the value of listing companies in terms of growth (I questioned if it was the best measure of company success in my last blog) you can understand how the rankings are determined.  This simplicity is one of their strengths.
10. The Inc. 500 is about growth, not size.  There are some pretty small, regional companies on the list.  There is a good chance that you may do business with a company or two on the list.  It is guaranteed there are several companies on the list that you have never heard of, or never will hear of again.
11. The Inc. 500 is constantly changing.  By its very nature, it is hard for companies to sustain the level of growth that puts them on the Inc. 500 for very long.  Because of that, the Inc. 500 avoids the type of list stagnation that plagues many lists.  For example, the company that topped the Inc. 500 in 2012, Unified Payments, is at #2374 on the 2013 list.  The company that topped the list in 2011, Ideeli, is not on the list in 2013.  That doesn't happen with regularity on the Fortune 500 or the Forbes list of wealthiest individuals or US News and World's top colleges and universities list.

Next blog I will have a few final observations from the Inc. 500 list.