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IBJ this week honored 25 fast-growing companies in central Indiana, crowning Linkage Logistics Inc. the fastest of them all with two-year growth of 610%.
The firm, which had $9.77 million in revenue in 2022, is one of several logistics firms on this year’s list. But its co-founder, Dan Lindsey, said what makes his company different is the way it develops relationships.
“We approach our carrier relationship with a holistic, longer term, more strategic approach as opposed to merely a transactional arrangement on a load-by-load basis,” Lindsey said.
You can read more from Lindsey and all 25 fast-growing companies in the supplement inside this week’s IBJ and at IBJ.com.
But I also want to tell you about a key behind-the-scenes staffer who helps make Fast 25 come alive.
Terry Sowka is IBJ’s hard-working list researcher. If your company or organization has ever appeared on any of IBJ’s 70-plus lists (think Largest Accounting Firms, Largest Employment Agencies or Most Difficult Area Golf Courses), you have Terry to thank for the list being published at all!
Terry, who came to IBJ about eight years ago, contacts companies about IBJ lists and collects information that she checks, ranks and then compiles into lists that run in IBJ, at IBJ.com and in The Book, our annual compilation of lists and year-in-review stories.
That’s what she does for Fast 25, too. And thanks in part to her hard work identifying companies that might qualify, we had a record number of submissions in 2023 (which, of course, created more work for Terry).
Anyone who has dealt with Terry—and there are hundreds of you out there—knows that she is meticulous and thorough. (I know, I know, some of you might have thought a time or two that she’s a little too thorough with all her follow-up questions and parsing of information. But that’s her job!)
Terry is so focused on accuracy that, recently, she sheepishly came to me and said she needed to publish a correction—and was devastated that it would ruin her goal of going the entire year without a single fix. Of course, that’s what we should all aim for, but if you look at our lists, you’ll see that each one is packed with dozens of names and titles and sometimes hundreds of numbers. And so, a correction from time to time is not a failure.
In this case, however, the mistake wasn’t even Terry’s fault. A company that hadn’t submitted information in the past provided her with incorrect numbers for its revenue. Terry didn’t catch it—which I wouldn’t have expected her to do. This was a private company, and our system relies on people to be honest.
What’s remarkable, though, is that Terry caught the mistake weeks later, when the same company provided information for another list. Terry remembered the previous submission and it struck her that both submissions couldn’t be correct. So she went back to the previous list and found the company had made a mistake. That was the correction she needed to run.
Rather than being frustrated that Terry made a mistake, I am delighted she’s so thorough that she detected the company’s error. She’s an example of what we strive to do every day at IBJ—present accurate information in a way that helps people and companies make decisions.
Congrats to our Fast 25 honorees and to people like Terry who make it happen.•
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Weidenbener is editor of IBJ. Reach her at lweidenbener@ibj.com.
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