A residential tower and shops in downtown Evanston. Photo: Eric Fredericks from Rancho Cordova, CA, United States / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0
Acquirent LLC, an Evanston company that runs outsourced sales operations for other businesses, appeared on the Inc. 5000 in August 2014, its third consecutive year on the list of the country’s fastest-growing private companies.
How the list works
Inc. magazine compiles the ranking each year from privately held companies, ordering them by percentage revenue growth over a three-year period. Because it measures growth rather than size, the list tends to favor younger companies and those starting from a small base. Evanston has produced a steady handful of honorees, which is notable for a city of roughly 75,000 people. Making it three years running generally means a company sustained that growth rather than posting one strong year.
The company
Acquirent is headquartered in the Chase building in downtown Evanston and had about 100 employees in 2014. It hires, trains and manages sales teams on behalf of clients, a model aimed at companies that want sales capacity without building a department themselves. Its client list, by the company’s account, runs from midsize firms to Fortune 500 corporations. Patch reported that Acquirent ranked No. 1,561 on the 2013 list with 77 employees.
Acquirent later expanded beyond Evanston. It acquired LeadJen, an Indianapolis lead-generation firm, in a deal whose terms were not disclosed, and it lists an office in Carmel, Indiana. The company also made the Evanston 100, the Evanston Chamber of Commerce’s list of 2014’s top business stories.
Acquirent was one of a handful of Evanston firms to show up on the Inc. 5000 over the years. Patch noted in 2012 that it was joined by ConsumerBase, Converged Communication Systems, Iconic Development and The Evanston Group.
Other Inc. 5000 honorees in 2014 ranged from consumer brands to service firms, and the list is read mostly as a snapshot of which private companies are scaling fastest, not a ranking of the largest. For a downtown Evanston office tenant, the practical measure is headcount: the 100 or so people Acquirent employed in 2014 worked from a single downtown address.
Sources: Patch, the Indiana Business Journal and Acquirent’s website.
Daniel Okafor covers business, startups and the Innovators section for The Evanston Edge.
