HdG Business Named Among Fastest Growing

HAVRE DE GRACE, MD — Havre de Grace is home to one of the fastest-growing companies in America, according to Inc. The weekly business magazine recently released its annual "Inc. 5000," a list of the top private revenue generators for 2019, and one in Havre de Grace earned recognition.

To make the Inc. 5000 list, companies must have been founded and generating revenue by March 31, 2015; be privately held, U.S.-based, for-profit and independent as of Dec. 31, 2018; and have minimum revenue of $100,000 in 2015 and $2 million in 2018. They were ranked according to the percentage revenue growth from 2015 to 2018.

"The companies on this year's Inc. 5000 have followed so many different paths to success," says Inc. editor in chief James Ledbetter. "There's no single course you can follow or investment you can take that will guarantee this kind of spectacular growth. But what they have in common is persistence and seizing opportunities."

The top spot on the Inc. 5000 list this year went to advertising and marketing company Freestar, which is based in Phoenix, Arizona, and grew 36,680 percent in the past three years. Its niche is in online ad sales. Next up was logistics and transportation firm FreightWise in Tennessee, which grew 30,548 percent from 2015 to 2018.

Pendant Automation in Havre de Grace also made the cut. The engineering firm grew 387 percent in the past three years, according to Inc. Its 2018 revenue was $3.4 million.

Based on Young Street, Pendant Automation is a systems integration and automation firm that was founded in 2006 by Rob Ward, who also teaches electrical theory and programming classes at Harford Community College.

"We checked in this year at number 1080 on the list, an improvement from number 2484 last year," according to a blog post from Pendant about the honor. "But if your company culture has curiosity as a cornerstone....you learn, and learn, and learn some more. It’s not always perfectly clear that what you are learning will be useful. You do it anyway because, well, curiosity. And then you look back once in a while and realize that something happened while you pursued the things that interested you. You grew. And your business grew, too."

Here are the top 10 fastest-growing companies in the United States, according to Inc.:

1. Freestar — Phoenix, Arizona
2. FreightWise — Brentwood, Tennessee
3. Cece's Veggie Co. — Austin, Texas
4. LadyBoss — Albuquerque, New Mexico
5. Perpay — Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
6. Cano Health — Miami, Florida
7. Bear Mattress — Hoboken, New Jersey
8. Connected Solutions Group — Mechanicsville, Virginia
9. Providence Healthcare Management — Cleveland, Ohio
10. NOM — Los Angeles, California

"The beautiful thing is, when you start making people more money and helping them run their businesses better, they typically have pretty big mouths," says David Freedman, the co-founder of the No. 1-ranked Freestar, a company that sells solutions and services that help publishers make more money online by perfecting advertising operations.
Freestar had a revenue of $36.9 million in 2018.

Patch reporter Gus Saltonstall contributed to this report.