What our Inc. 5000 number doesn't show

Alloy landed at No. 2,386 on the Inc. 5000 last week. Third year in a row, up 430 spots. I'm proud of it. I also want to say something about it that didn't belong in a press release.

The Inc. 5000 ranks companies on revenue growth from 2022 to 2025. Which means the number we announced is a report card on decisions we made three and four years ago. Almost nothing we've built in the last twelve months shows up in it at all. That work gets graded in 2028.

I find that clarifying rather than deflating. You can't manufacture a number like this in a quarter, so it's real. But it also means the interesting question isn't how we got here. It's what we were actually doing while we got here — and most of that doesn't photograph well.

Here's the honest version.

The thesis held. The conditions changed.

When we started, we were focused hard on the technology sector. I pushed to keep us there, and for good reason — focus was the strategy, and it worked the way focus is supposed to work. We built real depth.

Then the conditions moved. Interest rates climbed through 2023 and into 2024, leverage disappeared, and a lot of our clients — private-equity owned, legacy SaaS — found themselves in a genuinely hard position. AI accelerated at the same time, which made product defensibility harder to argue. None of that was a referendum on the strategy. It was the ground shifting underneath a strategy that had been working.

What it did expose was concentration. When your client base sits in one sector and that sector has a difficult couple of years, depth stops being only a strength.

So we adapted, and we did it without walking away from the thesis. Because the thesis was never really "technology." It was complexity — complex brands, complex customer stories and complex experiences they're trying to bring to life. That's the through-line, and it turns out it lives in healthcare and financial services and civic institutions just as much as it lives in software.

We're well diversified now, and I'd argue we're closer to the original idea than we were before, not further from it. We still lean hard on deep domain expertise, because the industries with that kind of complexity are the ones where human creative intelligence paired with the right tools produces something neither could produce alone.

Nobody had the blueprint.

The harder work wasn't strategic. It was structural, and it was unglamorous.

As we brought capabilities and teams together, we had to rethink our systems, our processes and our entire org design. Not because we got bigger — that part's manageable. We had to rethink them because we were trying to build a way of working that no organization had a blueprint for. So we had to reimagine one, based on where we believed the industry was going rather than where it had been.

That meant a common way of running finance, HR, onboarding, lient workflows and communications — everything, all at once, across teams who each had their own perfectly good way of doing it already.

And here's the part I underestimated: you also have to loosen some of the guardrails you were proud of. New types of clients arrive; new types of assignments and new cultural routines that are precisely what made those teams great in the first place. You want to welcome those into your DNA — that's the whole point — but absorbing them takes time to normalize.

In the moment, all of that just feels like change. Sometimes it feels like pain. The payoff is real and it comes later, but nobody living through month four of a systems migration is thinking about the payoff.

I've written to our team about integration in three phases. First you're minimizing disruption and getting people and systems online. Then you're tactical — tools, billing and learning new ways of working. And then somewhere in there, if you've done it right, comes the moment where you realize your shared chemical makeup is stronger than what you had before. Things start clicking into place.

You cannot rush to phase three. I've tried.

The proof wasn't the ranking.

Earlier this year we defended agency-of-record on one of our favorite accounts. A client we'd grown alongside for more than eight years.

Anyone in this business will tell you that defending as the incumbent is the hardest thing you do. The odds are against you. Everyone else walks in looking like a shiny star, because everyone else arrives with ideas unburdened by knowing which ones will hit a wall. Your own domain knowledge — the thing you earned — can actually work against you. It makes blue-sky thinking harder. Worse, you get evaluated for what the client has always known you for, not for what you've become.

We won. Against players considerably bigger than us.

We won because the team reimagined who they could be, and then showed the client an organization they hadn't met yet — new capabilities, new talent and new ways of working, all of it pointed at their business. That's the proudest moment we've had this year, and it's not close.

It's also the clearest evidence I have that the hard structural work was worth it. The very things we'd spent two years assembling and normalizing are what let that team stretch to a height they couldn't have reached alone.

We're building for what comes next.

And what comes next — if I had to compress it — requires talent and technology, combined in ways the traditional model doesn't allow.

Not technology instead of people. Not people resisting technology. A team built to thrive in complexity, able to integrate across capabilities that used to sit in separate buildings and able to tell that story well enough that a client can see it.

We get better every month, every quarter and every year. That's been true from the beginning and it's what we demand of ourselves going forward. Our clients should expect nothing less.

The 2028 number is being decided right now. That's the one I'm watching.