Profiled herein are five such companies that have met the CR100 criteria by enjoying significant revenue growth over the course of a four-year window.

Luck will always play a role in business. One can be sure, however, that the more successful a business is, and the longer it has been successful, the less a role that luck will have played in that success.

 

Core Values Drive Lockton

This year, our 23rd of keeping score of Ingram’s CR100 competition, Lockton Companies makes the list for an incredible 17th time. This is all the more surprising given that Jack Lockton launched his insurance company in 1966 in the basement of his parents’ home when he had yet to turn 25.

In 1966, thousands of young entrepreneurs were starting businesses in equally humble surroundings, but it was surely not luck that got Lockton off the ground floor.

By the time his insurance brokerage made the first Corporate Report 100 in 1986, Lockton had moved the firm well beyond the pale of luck. Indeed, it is likely that 90 percent of the other 1966 start-ups had found their way into history’s proverbial dustbin by that time.

In its basement years, Lockton focused on the construction industry. Basement or no, Lockton understood that construction is a no-nonsense business with nearly zero tolerance for error or bad faith. Given that grounding, literally and figuratively, the firm developed its character, a character that has endured even beyond Jack Lockton’s untimely death a few years ago.

Today, Lockton offers an impressive range of insurance, surety and risk-management services to a broad range of clients throughout the world. Although the client list has expanded, the core values have remained the same: a commitment to solving problems, serving clients, and encouraging innovation.

In 1986, Lockton Companies boasted of gross revenues of nearly $7 million. In 2007, those revenues topped $727 million, a real dollar growth over those 21 years of roughly 5,300 percent. Luck, as the reader might intuit, has little to do with a climb of such consistency.

Dean Davison, Director of Communications for Lockton, attributes the firm’s continued success to “organic growth with the addition of new clients and expanded work with existing clients.” Davison adds, the bedrock of this growth is “high retention.”

SKC Grows With CR100

SKC Communications Products was launched the same year as the Corporate Report 100 and, to its great credit, made the list this year for an impressive 15th time.

SKC has navigated itself onto the vanguard of a telepresence revolution that is still gathering momentum. For most people, the idea that the “world is growing smaller” every year is mere cliché. For SKC that notion has meant real opportunity. The company has helped pioneer the notion that you don’t have to be anyplace any more.

SKC’s technology solutions help its clients create a virtual workplace by transporting audio and visual images electronically to and among specific and targeted audiences. Its core businesses consist of Plantronics headsets, Polycom and TANDBERG video-conferencing systems, custom room A/V integration, Avaya IP telephony solutions and VBrick streaming solutions.

Other technology companies have attempted to do what SKC is doing so well. The difference, suggests Marketing Director Melea McRae, lies in SKC’s commitment to “providing unparalleled service and support.”

 

VSR Reliable in CR100

VSR Financial Services makes the Corporate Report 100 for its 10th time, a noteworthy accomplishment for a company that, like SKC as well, is no older than the Corporate Report 100.

A full-service securities broker/dealer, VSR provides a service that, superficially at least, differs little from that offered by many other firms. The real difference, says Donald Beary, the firm’s executive vice president, lies in “the value, service and reliability which we provide to our representatives, allowing them to continue growth of their business.”

This is more than just talk and certainly more than luck. VSR boasts the lowest rep turnover rate in the industry, less than one percent per year. In a business that is powered by its sales staff, the retention of good people inevitably translates into continued good growth.

 

9 and Counting for CyDex

CyDex, Inc. finds its way onto the Corporate Report 100 for the ninth time in its 15-year history. A specialty pharmaceutical company, CyDex focuses on the development and commercialization of drugs specifically designed to address limitations of current therapies in selected established markets.

Success at CyDex has come not just from developing new drug applications, but from doing so with a keen eye on risk, costs and timelines. Growth should continue strong into the future. As CFO Allen Roberson notes, “The company has also entered into several licensing agreements with new customers.”

 

Worldwide a Global Leader

More often than they should, companies boast of being a “global leader” in this or that, but Euronet Worldwide is one company that doesn’t need to boast. The Leawood company has emerged as a genuine global leader in the field of secure electronic financial transactions. The fact that it employs 2,500 people in 20 countries lends credence to the “global leader” claim.

Today, Euronet operates one of the largest independent ATM networks in Europe and the largest shared ATM network in India. It is also the world’s largest processor of prepaid mobile airtime and the third-largest global money transfer company. Not too many Kansas companies can make comparable boasts.

This year, Euronet makes the Ingram’s Corporate Report 100 for the ninth time. A University of Missouri grad, Mike Brown co-founded the company in 1994 and has served as chief executive ever since.

In the year 2000, Brown made the Ingram’s cover in an ambitious photo that showed Brown in surfer gear with several other young CEOs riding the high tech wave. The others got caught in the curl. Brown rides on. That was not luck.

 

Common Ground

There are a few common threads running through the success of all five of these companies. One is a certain prescience, an ability to imagine the future and a willingness to pursue it heartily.

A second is loyalty—a loyalty to staff, a loyalty to customers, a loyalty to vendors, and a happily beneficial reciprocation.

The third is focus. Not all waves break the way even the best manager anticipates. Those who survive the upset that follows are the ones who know where they are going and have the will to get there. Luck be damned.