Inc. Magazine March/April 2022

“I WILL DO everything in my power to personally hurt you.” It was spoken with enough anger that I did one of those movie-scene things and took the phone from my ear to look at it before pressing it, nervously, back to my cheek. “I promise you, Scott—and you talk to anyone who knows me—I am not going to take kindly to this. I will ruin you and ruin Inc.” No, it was definitely not the kind of call one gets every day, and its intensity, turning from initially cordial to quickly, existentially threatening, brought a chill to an otherwise warm spring day. The man on the other end, who shall remain nameless, had learned that Inc.’s editors and journalist Scott Eden were working on a story about the murder of a cannabis entrepreneur.…

HAVING WORKED on an oil rig off the coast of Louisiana, Paul Chittenden knows firsthand the sort of cast-iron backbone that’s required to wrestle heavy, oil-slick equipment in harsh conditions. That’s why, when naming his oil and gas workgear company in 2012, he settled on the name Bad Ass Work Bags—a tip of the hard hat to the tough trade. He did wonder, only briefly, if that name might be too vulgar. Google Ads thought so, and banned Bad Ass Work Bags from participating on its ad platform, forcing Chittenden to get creative. He printed up stickers with the tag-line “the toughest bags for the toughest men,” and handed them out to his buddies, who passed them along to their friends. As one roughneck after another slapped the brand’s sticker on…

When Mike Salguero met Michael Jellinek at a company offsite, he knew he’d finally found someone to help him work through the issues that affect how he interacts with people daily. A licensed psychiatrist and executive coach, Jellinek has now been working with Salguero twice a month since the latter founded high-end meat subscription service ButcherBox in 2015. Salguero credits Jellinek with, among other things, helping him better communicate with his team: “It’s about understanding who I am, what’s in my own head, what my triggers are, and being aware of how they consciously play out during conversations.” According to the Institute of Coaching at McLean, a Harvard Medical School affiliate in Belmont, Massachusetts, 70 percent of people who receive coaching benefit from improved work performance and more effective communication skills. Here’s…

A LITTLE EXTRA CUSHION Back in 2012, Kurt Seidensticker struggled to run without experiencing joint pain. He pored through medical journals and realized he needed to replenish his collagen, a type of protein that helps connective tissue cushion joints and becomes harder to produce with age. Further research revealed the supplements on the market didn’t contain enough glycine—an amino acid vital to collagen synthesis. So he self-funded a factory in Chicago to produce his own collagen peptide supplements, launching Vital Proteins in 2013. Within a few years, he’d nabbed the endorsements of Jennifer Aniston and influencers like Katie Wells—who runs Wellness Mama. Aniston joined the company as chief creative officer in 2020, and last year, Vital Proteins earned almost $500 million in revenue. Think of it as supplemental income that’s also…

“Stress has been a part of my life for a long time. I began my career on Wall Street as a credit derivatives trader, and I was at Ground Zero with my husband on 9/11. He developed an autoimmune disease that lasted for three years, during which time I was his caretaker. This was followed by years of intense work and travel when I was a brand manager for Starbucks International. Those travels took me to Japan, and over time I fell in love with the country’s beauty and culture, especially the focus on connection with nature, on being in the present moment, and the emphasis on generosity, community, and artistry. Being there helped me find peace, and I was even able to heal my skin from stress-induced dermatitis by using…

Amber Venz Box was a designer and personal shopper-turned blogger when, in 2011, at the age of 23, she founded the influencer-commission network RewardStyle. By 2021, the Dallas-based company had expanded into a global influencer-marketing platform, rebranded as LTK (short for LikeToKnowIt), and earned a valuation of $2 billion. As the company morphed, so did the founder’s sense of its purpose. “I grew up believing that success should be highly visible. And my professional experience prior to LTK was in communications. So, in the company’s early years, I needed to have press and awards, to have celebrities using our products, and to have the right investors. I’m embarrassed to say that early on, almost half my time was spent working maniacally to achieve those things. Then, a few years ago, I was…