● ● ● ● ● ● SEPTEMBER 2019 ● INC. ● 17new services for existing partners, and the ceaseless feeding of
the flywheel that, in his book Good to Great, management guru
Jim Collins famously proposed as a metaphor for naturally
occurring momentum. Here’s how that works: Urgently has
developed a network of more than 9,000 towing and 80,
roadside-assistance companies. The better those small busi-
nesses perform, the more dispatches Urgently sends them.
Other providers see their peers’ businesses growing and
want to sign on. That gives Urgently a larger, more attractive
resource with which to tempt corporate partners. And those
new partners, in turn, create additional revenue for the road-
side providers. “Everyone wins the more momentum we get,
and the flywheel spins faster,” says Spanos, the company’s
CEO and co-founder.
Innovation remains, perhaps, the purest driver of fast
growth. New products stoke customers’ curiosity, then enthu-
siasm, and then the expectation of more new products. That’s
where things can get challenging.
“The way you keep up triple-digit growth, even at nine-
plus figures of revenue, is to have a core business that is grow-
ing 80 percent and a bunch of new business lines that are
growing at 2,000 percent,” says Stuart Landesberg, co-founder
and CEO of Grove Collaborative (No. 87; 3,665 percent), a
$104.1 million company in San Francisco.
Subscription-based Grove sells natural home and personalcare products, roughly half of which it creates. Recent intro-
ductions include tree-free paper products made from bamboo
and sugarcane and a reusable glass dispenser for laundrydetergent. To ensure new products keep swelling that top line,
Landesberg has cordoned off innovation, which he calls the
company’s North Star, into a silo operating free from quarterly
pressures. “We’re not like the giant CPG businesses,” he says,“where innovation means making the hole in the toothpaste
tube 10 percent bigger.”
essica Legge and Kimberly Lexow have been
talking recently about the public markets’
appetite for Beyond Meat and, potentially,Impossible Foods. Those companies’ next-big-
thing-ness “perks up the ears of people like us
in the food business,” says Legge, co-founderwith Lexow of $6.9 million Sifted (No. 188; 2,099 percent),
which provides lunch programs prepared by its own chefs for
corporate clients. The Atlanta-based company has plenty ofrunway to grow: It is in just six markets and is
eyeing another 24. “I think there’s an opportunity
to increase our services to these amazing officeswe enter every day,” says Legge. “What else can
we take off the plate of the office administrator?
Are there other food offerings they need?”
But the blinking yellow light of others’ failures,at now-defunct venture-backed competitors
SpoonRocket, Munchery, and Maple, keeps the
founders’ enthusiasm in check. They are boot-strapping Sifted, and have insisted on profitability
from day one. “In the event we did decide to raise
money, we would be throwing gas on the fireinstead of burning through cash while trying
to figure out a sustainable model,” says Legge.
Sean Flood also reads some high-flying startups’trajectories as a cautionary tale. His company,
$8.4 million Gotcha (No. 277; 1,572 percent), based
in Charleston, South Carolina, provides electric-bike, -scooter, and -vehicle rideshares through an
app. It is an industry bestrode by colossi: Scooter
makers Bird and Lime have hit multibillion-dollar
valuations, and Uber and Lyft are getting intobike- and scooter-sharing. “The challenge has been
not getting caught up in the fray of this high-
growth space,” says Flood. “It is really easy to lookat the unicorns and say, ‘I’m going to do what they
do and be worth a billion dollars.’ I think there
is huge risk to that.” (Justifying his caution: Lyftand Uber initially struggled in the public markets,
while Bird, Inc.’s 2018 Company of the Year,
reportedly has seen revenue slip amid high losses,according to a July article in tech publication the
Information. Bird founder Travis VanderZanden
but the excitement lies in
or