Leadership feels like a grind most days. You find problems faster than you can solve them, and there are never enough hours in the day.
Once in a while we have to stop and celebrate how far we have come. We have to celebrate our success!
Full Scale made the Inc. 5000 again this year, five years in a row now, at No. 4,272. It is the 12th time a company I founded has landed on that list, since 2010.
What I love about the Inc. 5000 is it isn't "pay to play."
Many business awards are a receipt, not an award
Every few weeks somebody emails us about an award. Best staffing firm, top outsourcing partner, fastest-rising whatever. You read three paragraphs down and there it is: three thousand dollars, and congratulations, you won.
That is not an award. That is a purchase with a trophy attached.
The Inc. 5000 is different in the only way that counts. Nobody can buy their way in. You get on by growing revenue over three years, and the numbers get verified. You send Inc. your financials, you sign off that they are right, and they check. You are not making this crap up. You either did it or you did not.
There is no category for effort. There is no judging panel who liked your submission essay. There is just what the company actually did, measured against every other company that also did it.
That is why it is the one I actually think is cool.
What it says out loud to your team
It feels good to be a winner.
A long time ago I learned that one of the most important things to my employees was knowing one simple thing:
Are we winning or losing?
Nobody wants to lose. But more importantly, nobody wants to lose their job. Nothing is more important than job security to most people.
Winning the Inc. 5000 is a good way to remind your team members that we are all winning.
Half my job as a founder is cheerleader. I run around telling everybody they are doing a great job and to keep doing what they are doing. This list helps me do just that!
This is another year to remind everyone that Full Scale is a Great Place to Work. Our employees took the survey themselves and certified us as a literal Great Place to Work, which is another awesome award I am proud of.
It also does real work for the business
But it isn't just about what your employees think.
People want to do business with companies that are winning.
When a client is deciding whether to trust you with a team of engineers for the next three years, an outside organization saying you are one of the fastest-growing private companies in America carries weight that our own marketing never will.
Nothing beats third party proof, and showing up on the Inc. 5000 is exactly that.
It also gives you a reason to talk to people.
This week I get to email every client we have and say thank you, we grew because you trusted us. That is a better message than anything a sequence tool has ever written. Recruiting gets easier too. Good engineers want to join a team that is going somewhere.
I learned a long time ago that marketing is mostly about making noise. The Inc. 5000 is a great thing to make some noise about!
I went deep on all of this with Ryann Dowdy on an episode of Startup Hustle, back when Full Scale made the list for the third time. Same argument, more of the details on the pay-to-play stuff and how the awards actually help a growing company.
Watch: Why the Inc 5000 is a Big Deal.
Twelve times, and the part that surprised me
The first one was VinSolutions in 2010, No. 447. We were 89 people doing about eight million a year in revenue. We were just getting started on what turned out to be a wild rollercoaster.
Still on my office wall. VinSolutions at No. 447, 672% growth on $8.2 million.
VinSolutions went on to make it five years straight. Stackify made it in 2019 and 2020, and that first one was the fun one: No. 379, the 50th fastest growing software company in the country, up 1,216% over three years. Full Scale has made it every year since 2022. Twelve listings across three companies over 16 years. That is genuinely crazy. 🤯
Here is the part I did not know until this year. I went digging through Inc's own honoree data and found that VinSolutions kept making the list after I left, all the way through 2014, ending at about $71 million in revenue and 489 people. Also crazy.
If you are growing, apply
Many people make the mistake of simply not entering their company for the Inc. 5000 every year. It does cost a $395 application fee.
The reality is that making the list is not that hard to do.
You need to be a US-based private company, independent and for profit, at least three years old, with at least $2 million in revenue last year. Then you need roughly 70% growth over three years to scrape onto the bottom of the list. That is real growth, but it is not unicorn growth. Plenty of companies clear it and never fill out the form.
Most people probably don't apply because they aren't growing 1,000% a year. But that is my point. You don't have to be to make the list.
The form takes a few minutes to fill out. You submit revenue numbers you already have in QuickBooks.
Worst case, you do not make it and nobody knows. Best case, you get a great reason to stop and celebrate with your team.
The part that is not about the ranking
I have been doing this for 20 years and I still find the same thing to be true. The wins that stick are the ones you share out loud with the people who earned them.
Our team in the Philippines did all the real work. Thanks to our 200+ clients over the last few years that trusted us to scale their development teams.
If you have not stopped to celebrate in a while with your team, find a reason to!
