The Inc. 500 Paradox

Intridea made the Inc. 500. There was a moment of real pride, and then a quieter moment sometime later when I found myself asking what exactly the list had measured.

The answer is revenue growth rate and nothing else. Not profitability, not durability, not whether the work was good or the people were thriving. Growth rate, over a window. And the window is the trick.

The paradox is that the list selects for the thing least likely to continue. Growth rates like that are almost definitionally a phase, not a property. A consultancy that quadruples has usually done it by saying yes to everything, hiring ahead of quality, and letting the founders’ attention become the company’s scarcest resource. The award arrives precisely when those bills are coming due. Skim the alumni of any year’s list a decade later and the pattern is plain: some graduated into real companies, plenty flamed out, and a long quiet middle simply shrank back to whatever size actually suited them. The list captured them all at the same instant and called it the same achievement.

What the growth years cost us at Intridea is the part only I can write. When a services company grows fast, every new project either upholds the bar or lowers it, and the founders can’t be in every room anymore. The thing that made clients hire you in the first place, the taste, the standard, is exactly what growth dilutes.

The fairness this post owes the other side: chasing the list isn’t irrational. Growth is the easiest thing to measure and the easiest thing to sell. Recruits want to join a rocket, acquirers want to buy one, and momentum is real, it compounds in ways a steady-state firm never experiences. A company that never pushes past its comfortable size never finds out what it could have been. Some of what I’d now call overreach was also how we found the ceiling, and there was no way to find it that didn’t involve hitting it.

But the deliberately small firm, the one that stays at twelve people and turns down work that doesn’t fit, has quietly figured out something the list can’t see: that a business can be an instrument for a good life and good work rather than a score. There’s no award for that. Which tells you more about awards than about businesses.

I’m glad we made the list, and I’m not sure I’d optimize for it again, and I’ve stopped trying to make those two sentences agree. The more interesting question is the one I can’t answer from here: whether I’m currently chasing some newer milestone with exactly the same blind spot, and won’t see it until the quieter moment arrives on schedule, a few years late, the way it did last time.