People love lists. Consumers like the top 10 lists — top 10 tourist attractions, top cities for retirement, restaurants, US News & World Report’s list of top universities are all popular and a hit every year.
The same holds true in the business world where we find a number of top business lists with some of the most popular that include:
- Fortune 500 (and 1000) – this popular list ranks the largest US public companies by annual revenue. Fortune also publishes a Global 500 list which are public companies located in any country – again ranked by total revenues.
- Forbes private – this list of approximately 240 companies represents the largest US private companies ranked by revenue.
- The Forbes Global 2000 ranking is based on a composite score from equally-weighted measures of revenue, profits, assets and market value. These are global public companies.
- FT – the Financial Times publishes a series of top 500 lists that are generally based on market value (market cap) which means they are public companies.
- Inc Magazine publishes the Inc 5000 which ranks companies by revenue growth. Most of these are private companies, many are smaller. The revenue is self-reported as the private companies don’t report their revenues publicly.
Beyond these, any number of special lists are published. You can find a list of top companies in most geographies – for example, the Globe & Mail published the top 100 companies in Canada.
Additionally, most industry oriented publications & web sites often publish ‘top’ lists for their industry. Some have a decidedly parochial view of markets – for example, one publications about retailers listed Apple in its top 10. Essentially, one can find a list about almost any topic – Prosales, for example, produces an annual list of top Building Material Dealers.
One of the key things we focus on with the Global 5000 is trying to locate & review as many of these lists as possible and adding as many companies as applicable. Takes a lot of research work and detail de-duping and constant tracking.