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Our team learned recently that PartnerHero has been named to this year’s Inc. 5000 list of America’s fastest growing private companies. This is a big deal, but not because it means PartnerHero is one of the most successful private companies in the country, or because we’re joining exclusive club of Inc. 5000 alumni that includes organizations like Patagonia, Under Armour, Microsoft, Intuit, Zappos, and fellow Boise-based brand, ConvertKit.
More importantly, making the Inc. 5000 list is external recognition of all the hard work that the PartnerHero team has put in to get to this point. Building a business isn’t easy. There are long nights, moments of self doubt, and plenty of times when the downs outnumber the ups. Making it to a point like this – when a national magazine recognizes your company as the 1,296th fastest growing company in the country – is only possible because of perseverance and ingenuity from the entire team.
PartnerHero was not built for rapid growth. When we started the company in 2014, we opted not to follow the traditional BPO playbook. Sure, we could have raised a bunch of outside money, staffed up a few soulless call centers, and aggressively sought big, enterprise clients. But we resisted that siren call, precisely because we believed strongly that there was a better way.
PartnerHero isn’t in business just to make money and grow. We exist to change the game.
Instead of courting investors, we obsessed over our culture. Instead of going after big, publicly traded companies, we found ways to extend the benefits of outsourcing to startups. Instead of treating frontline associates like a commodity, we made them part of the team.
We’re at the forefront of a sea change in our industry. Outsourcing is available to more companies than ever because we normalized things like short-term contracts. Prospective partners ask us about quality before they ask us about cost, because we led the charge in putting customer experience first. And we have industry-leading team retention rates because we make investments in our employees’ empowerment and career growth.
A funny thing happened along the way – even as we put our focus on culture, quality, and serving the needs of our partners above growth and scale, we’ve managed to grow at an impressive clip. Being on the Inc. 5000 is a testament to the hard work of our amazing team, as we said, but it’s also validation of our way of doing things. We hope the rest of our industry takes notice.
One of our core values at PartnerHero is to “Be Humble,” so bragging about our place on a list like this one just isn’t in our DNA. But celebrating each other and all the hard work we’ve put in to get on that list is absolutely something we’re excited to do.
We’re extremely proud of what we’ve accomplished at PartnerHero. We’ve brought together thousands of talented people from dozens of countries to deliver exceptional CX services to some of the most recognizable brands in the world.
And you know what? Making the Inc. 5000 list for the first time isn’t a culmination. This isn’t a goal we had on a list and now we’ve checked it off. We believe this is a beginning. As excited as we are that we’ve come this far and as proud as we are of our team’s accomplishments, we’re even more excited about what the future holds for PartnerHero.
There are big things coming and our team is ready for them. Watch this space.
-Heather and Shervin, founders
