Here, Frequency Can Be a Friend … or Foe

PUBLISHED JULY, 2023

The history of the Corporate Report 100 tells us a lot about the gap between the visionary and the person able to execute that vision.

They are not always the same person.

Nowhere does that show up quite as clearly as in the ranks of the 10 fastest-growing companies each year. In nearly four decades of discerning the region’s growth leaders, we at Ingram’s have developed a sort of sixth sense about the potential and the pitfalls that go hand in hand for these companies: “Making the CR100 is an impressive achievement; making it two years in a row is rare, and even more impressive. But making it three years in a row could be a warning sign that things might soon get out of hand.”

That, however, is not always the case. Especially for Randy Klindt. He’s the founding partner of Conexon, the rural internet-infrastructure provider, and CEO of its subsidiary, Conexon Connect. And he has steered Conexon into a rare position: A fourth straight Top 10 finish. 

Being in the right place at the right time has been a huge benefit: A fresh tranche of federal funding to expand rural internet is likely to keep Conexon on its growth arc for a while. 

“We have more successful projects than all of our competitors combined,” he says. “We keep our head down, work hard, and ensure our client success. The bigger we become, the more our successes begin to speak for themselves.”

Neither is the triple-Top 10 alarm sounding for Dan Duffy or Ben Bolan, who are taking a third consecutive bite of that apple. Duffy heads up United Real Estate Group, the parent of various real-estate sales platforms and the region’s biggest residential realty enterprise. Bolan is the CEO for Sethmar Transportation, the freight-brokerage specialists who soared to No. 1 on the list in 2021.

For Duffy, the continuing mon-ster growth tracks to the ability of his leadership team to stay ahead of new technologies that serve brokers facilitating home sales, and to expand into nearby or related silos once the organization has developed a mastery of existing service lines.

At Sethmar, said Bolan, growth is intrinsically tied to finding the right people and rewarding them for their contributions—retaining talent has been a key to the firm’s success. 

Two more companies posted back-to-back Top 10 finishes this time around: last year’s No. 1, Hawaiian Bros Island Grill (No. 2 this year), and IT services and staffing provider EDZ Systems, No. 4 last year and 10th this cycle. 

With their success, half of last year’s Top 10 found their way back to the top of the charts in 2023.

Elsewhere in this year’s CR100, we see the gravitational pull of having the region’s biggest private company on the list—Dairy Farmers of America—in the way it skews growth percentages for the full field. Excluding the $24.5 billion revenues and DFA’s 55.06 percent growth from the full 2023 field bumps those numbers for the remaining 99 down to $36.75 billion in revenues, but sends the combined growth rate up to nearly 90 percent.

And for a 19th year, Lockton Companies makes the list. That’s an increasingly difficult challenge as the company’s baseline revenues continue to climb—it’s on a trajectory to hit $3 billion in 2024 or 2025. If it can maintain that pace, it could potentially threaten the company with more CR100 appearances than any other, the late, great Cerner Corp., which had a run of 22 years in the field before its acquisition by Oracle Corp.

While fast growth of this scale tends to be the province of young companies bursting out of the gate, this year’s field includes six entities that are well into their second century of operations. In addition to Lathrop GPM, whose predecessor was formed 150 years ago, we have Spencer Fane (founded 1879), Burns & McDonnell (1898), Westlake Hardware (1905), McCray Lumber (1908), Seaboard Corp. (1918).

Even a United Real Estate Group, which rocketed into the Top 10 stratosphere three years running, is on the verge of a centennial at the spry age of 98; its corporate history began in 1925.

Anyone studying business sectors of CR100 firms in recent years may have discerned in this year’s field the impact of rising interest rates throughout 2022. Among the sectors hardest hit with top-line growth? Banking, which was shut out this year.

This year’s field accounts for slightly over 92,700 jobs, but a single company—Seaboard Corp.—accounted for nearly a fourth of that total, with 23,000 on the global payroll.

By some measures, the overall health of growing companies held steady from the previous year. The growth percentage for No. 100 this year, Custom Truck One Source, was just a hair behind No. 100 from 2022. The number of companies experiencing triple-digit growth was up slight, from 59 last year to 62 this cycle.

The interesting thing about measuring growth over a four-year period is the way major fluctuations in any one company’s numbers are smoothed out. But a lot is riding on chance—whether a steep decline occurred in a baseline year or in the two years that followed. In those cases, recovery during a fourth-year can provide some extra oomph! to companies seeking to make this ranking.

So things will really start to get interesting next year, as 2020 be-comes the baseline. The pandemic era absolutely wrecked the top lines of many companies across the nation; next year’s CR100 will provide the first four-year glimpse of how strong many of those have come back—and it will even tell us, by omission, who still has a long way to go.

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