Entrepreneurs these days play a mythical role in American culture. They're our risk-taking adventurers. Heroes of the new economy. And the Inc. 500 -- the nation's fastest-growing privately held companies -- are entrepreneurship incarnate, themselves the stuff of myth. You want life on the leading edge? Daring leaps into the unknown? Ask the founders of Inc. 500 companies how they got their start.
Or so we figured.
We certainly posed the questions. By way of an eight-page survey and dozens of follow-up phone calls, we asked Inc. 500 CEOs to recall for us how they came to create a company. We probed their background and experience. We asked them where they got the idea for their business, how they implemented it, and of course how they financed the whole thing. Given the mythology of entrepreneurship, we expected tales of inspiration and imagination, of boldly going where no man (or woman) had gone before.
So much for expectations. Instead of swashbucklers, we found hardworking, experienced businesspeople -- people such as Jim Hanahan, Bobby N. Frost, and the many others you'll meet on the pages that follow. Instead of life on the edge, we found them pursuing their fast-growing ventures in everyday industries, from insurance admin-istration to mirror manufacture.
And instead of iconoclastic individualists, the cowboy capitalists of America's dreams, we found people enmeshed and embedded in industries, with rich networks of contacts and colleagues they could draw on to help them build a business. For most, the secret of successful entrepreneurship seemed to lie not just in individual inspiration but in knitting a dozen different interests into one cooperative endeavor. Creating a company was a matter of knowing customers, suppliers, partners, and sources of capital. It was a matter of knowing a marketplace well enough to notice tiny fault lines of change -- fault lines that would one day become sizable niches in the business landscape.