In 2025, Indevtech landed on two of Inc. Magazine's lists in the same year. We came in at #4,442 on the Inc. 5000 — the magazine's annual ranking of the fastest-growing private companies in America — based on three-year revenue growth of roughly 70%. A few weeks later, we were named to the Inc. Best Workplaces list, which is something else entirely: it measures what your staff says about working for you when nobody from the C-suite is in the room.

We were the only Hawaii company on the Best Workplaces list this year. One of just a handful from the state on the Inc. 5000.

I'd like to tell you we earned both awards because of some bold, perfectly-timed bet. A pivot. A new product line. A whale of a client win. That's the script — every Inc. 5000 profile follows the same arc, and ours was supposed to too.

It didn't.

There was no single thing. There was no quarter where we bet the company. There was no viral moment, no breakthrough product, no client that made or broke us. There were just twenty-five years of doing the same work, deliberately, day after day, and eventually the people whose job it is to count revenue growth noticed.

That's the whole story. I think it's the better one.

What the Inc. 5000 measured

The Inc. 5000 is a revenue-growth award. The math is straightforward — three years of audited financials, a percentage growth calculation, a ranking against every other applicant in the country. It is, mechanically, the most objective business award there is. You either grew or you didn't.

Seventy percent over three years sounds like the kind of number a company hits by acquiring another company, or by riding a sudden wave in their market, or by closing one transformational deal. We didn't do any of those things. We just kept doing what we've always done — supporting Hawaii businesses with their IT, retaining the clients we earned, adding the next one when the work justified it, and refusing to chase growth that would compromise the culture or the service.

Slow and boring is, it turns out, also a strategy. It just doesn't get written about, because nobody wants to read a profile titled They Showed Up Every Day For Twenty-Five Years.

What the Best Workplaces measured

This one's different. Best Workplaces isn't decided by a CEO or by Inc.'s editors. It's decided by the staff. Inc. partners with Quantum Workspace, an outside firm, to send anonymous employee surveys directly to the people who work at each applicant company. Quantum tabulates the results. The CEO never sees them. We didn't see ours. We just got told we made the list.

You can't fake your way onto this list. You can't buy your way on. You can't write a check or polish a press release. Either your team says good things about you when they don't have to, or they don't.

I'm proud of the Inc. 5000 because it's evidence that the business is healthy. I'm prouder of the Best Workplaces nod because it's evidence that the people are. Those are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where most "fast-growing companies" eventually crack.

Inc. ran a feature on us in July under the headline This Is the Best Place to Work in Hawaii. The reporter asked what we did to earn it. I told her about the aloha spirit — about making sure our team has the room to take care of family, because here, family comes first. I talked about the things we offer: 100-percent employer-paid healthcare and 401(k) plans that include profit sharing, flexible PTO so people can show up for the people who need them, free Costco memberships, a digital badge system that lets staff redeem peer recognition for things that actually matter to them. (One of our techs saved his points for over a year and used them to buy bunk beds for his daughters. That's the kind of small story that tells you everything about a workplace.)

Add to that list: unlimited snacks and drinks, a nap room for anyone who needs to reset midday, and a 3D printer in the office that any staff member can use to make whatever they want in their free time.

Most of these things cost very little. None of them are revolutionary. What they have in common is that they were chosen on purpose, by people who actually thought about what would make this a place worth coming to. Most of that thinking was done by Kemis, our Chief Operating Officer and Head of Staff, who treats workplace culture as a discipline rather than an HR function. The award belongs to her and to the team as much as it belongs to anyone.

The gala in Phoenix

In October, Kemis and I flew to Phoenix for the Inc. 5000 Conference & Gala — two days of leadership conference followed by a black-tie ceremony where the honorees collect their awards.

What I didn't expect was how much of the value of the trip wasn't the award. It was the room. A few thousand founders, all of whom had spent the last three years doing some version of the same hard, specific, lonely work. Some of them had been at it for decades. Some of them — the company that ranked #1 was a three-year-old AI startup that had grown from nothing to numbers most companies don't see in a lifetime — had compressed all of it into a sprint. Different paths, same room.

There's something that happens when you're surrounded by people who have actually built things. The conversation is different. Nobody's pitching. Nobody's posturing. Everyone in there knows what it cost to get there, so nobody has to perform it. You just trade notes with people who get it. Twenty-five years in, that turns out to be a rare thing, and a useful one.

We met another Hawaii honoree at the gala — Tiana Gamble and Jodi Rea from Goodmerch Supply, who landed on the Inc. 5000 alongside us. It was good to be reminded that we weren't the only ones flying back to the islands with a trophy in carry-on. There aren't many of us out here doing this work at this scale, and the few who are mostly know each other by reputation. Putting faces to those reputations was a real gift of the trip.

What this lets us do next

I don't believe in resting on awards. They're nice. They're earned. They go in the trophy case next to the rest of the trophies that don't make the company any better tomorrow than it was yesterday.

What the awards do — what I think they actually mean — is they confirm that the strategy is working. The strategy being: take care of the staff, do excellent work for the clients we have, refuse to chase growth that would compromise either of those things, and trust that the math eventually works out. For twenty-five years it has. For the next twenty-five, we plan to keep doing it the same way.

Mahalo to the team. Mahalo to our clients, every one of whom is part of why these awards exist. And mahalo to Inc. for noticing.

We'll see you at the next gala.