The Inc 5000 List is a ranking of the fastest growing privately-held companies in America. The list is ranked according to revenue growth percentage when comparing 2010 to 2013. I took data from this list to show performance across key metrics, such as revenue, growth, and number of workers. Using Tableau, I’m going to make visualizations to be able to easily understand the data.

I previously wrote a similar article about a coffee chain, El Café Grande. Give it a read!

I broke this down into four major parts: industry, company, state, and city. Let’s kick things off by taking a look at the industries.

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For this horizontal bar graph, I took the individual percent each industry made in revenue and compared it to the whole. For example, health has the largest revenue with over $22B in revenue, equaling 10.23% of the total industry combined revenue. I used a color mark to indicate each industries revenue. The vertical line represents the average percent of total revenue each industry made. It’s at exactly 4%.

We can clearly see that health, energy, IT services, and business products and services are making the most amount of revenue, hence taking up higher percentages of the total industry combined revenue. In total, we have eleven industries that are beating the average of 4%, which is 44% of the industries. Now, let’s switch our focus from revenue to growth.

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This treemap illustrates the eleven industries that have the highest growth rates. Note, these eleven industries are not the same exact industries that have higher than 4 percent of total industry revenue. The different shades of blue indicate the industries growth, the higher the growth the larger the size. I filtered the growth measure to only show industries with a higher than a 100,000 growth rate. The first number below the industries name is the growth rate, and the following number is the number of years on the Inc. 5000 list.

By looking at this chart, we can see consumer products and services dominance in terms of growth. Energy has been on the list the shortest out of the bunch, with only 322 years. IT services, health, financial services, business products and services, and energy are the only industries that are in both graphs. Let’s go a step further, and look at companies.

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I used a highlight table to indicate the top company in each industry with over one billion dollars in revenue. The colors indicate the revenue, as well as the number.

As you can see with the darker red, the real estate industry had the company with the highest earnings. Pacific Union Real Estate made over five and a half billion dollars. In total, there are 15 industries that have a company with over one billion dollars in revenue, and three industries have multiple companies. Energy has the most, with 5, followed by health, and then logistics and transportation. But what companies are growing the fastest?

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This packed bubbles chart tells us that Fuhu is growing the fastest. We can tell this because the size of these bubbles shows the sum of growth. The colors of the bubbles represent different companies, as indicated by the legend on the right. Below the name inside the bubble is the growth rate. I filtered for the ten fastest growing companies. No company is on both the fastest growing and highest revenue list.

Now to switch things up, let’s take a look at how revenue and growth impact states.

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I created a symbol map to illustrate each state’s revenue and growth. The color mark represents the revenue of each state. The number below the state’s abbreviation is the growth rate.

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Right away, my eyes gravitate towards the darker shades of blue, California and Texas. California has a high growth rate (thanks, Silicon Valley), but Texas does not. Actually, Texas has a lower growth rate than West Virginia and Maine.

This probably means that Texas companies (Oil?) make a plethora of money, but are at the mature life cycle stage. On the other hand, West Virginia and Maine companies are popping up everywhere and growing rapidly, but aren’t established enough to bring in a lot of revenue.

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Here we have each state’s best performing industry in terms of revenue. I made another highlight table to break it down. The colors and number indicate the revenue in that state.

Energy in Texas is booming! It brings in over 9.3 billion dollars, while the second highest earning industry is Real Estate in California. Oddly enough, advertising and marketing is North Dakota’s highest earning industry in terms of revenue. The real question is, what the heck are they advertising in North Dakota? To take this a step further, let’s look at cities.

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I created a scatter plot to show the cities who make the most money and have the most companies. The color shows revenue, which I changed to 4 steps. I filtered the cities to only appear if they have over one billion dollars in revenue from their companies.

An outlier in this graph is New York. It has the most companies and third most revenue from companies. San Francisco and Houston have slightly more revenue from companies than New York. However, New York is the only state with more than 100 companies on this list. How about the number of employees?

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For the final graph, I compared the number of workers in each city to the growth rate. The darker the shade of blue, the higher the growth. I organized the bars, number of works, in descending order. I filtered the numbers of workers by a minimum of 5,000 workers.

Chicago has the most amount of workers, followed by Santa Ana (Orange County, CA) and Pittsford (a suburb of Rochester, New York). New York City has the most growth, yet it only has the sixth most employees. Smaller business and startups are impacting New York.

Overall, the data from the Inc 5000 list showed interesting insights in regarded to performance across revenue, growth, and popularity. The Inc 5000 List is a ranking of the fastest growing privately-held companies in America. We saw how much revenue and growth is in California, Texas, New York, and even Virginia.

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