Ingram's July 2026

Corporate Report 100

The Incredible Shrinking Growth Rate Kansas City’s fastest-growing companies aren’t growing like they used to. Why?

Four straight years of Corporate Report 100 data reach the same uncomfortable conclusion: The fastest growing companies in this region aren’t growing the way they used to, and the reasons trace back to the same macroeconomic forces that have reshaped every other corner of the economy over the past five years. Start with the raw numbers. Track every company that qualified for the CR100 list in 2019, then check what happened to its revenue over the following three years. Repeat that exercise for the 2020, 2021 and 2022 cohorts, and a clear line emerges. Companies that made the list in 2019 posted average (mean) revenue growth of 22.8 percent annually through 2022. The 2020 cohort did almost identically well, averaging 22.8 percent growth through 2023. Then the bottom drops out: the 2021 cohort, tracked through 2024, averaged only 15.4 percent annual growth, and the 2022 cohort, tracked through 2025, came in at 15.8 percent. Median growth—a less distortion-prone measure, since it isn’t skewed by a handful of outliers—tells the same story in smaller type: 13.1 percent and 17.1 percent for the first two cohorts, vs. 11.6 percent apiece for the more recent ones. The share of honorees outright shrinking during the period nearly doubled as well, from 8-9 percent in the earlier cohorts to 14-17 percent in the more recent ones. True hypergrowth —companies expanding more than 50 percent a year, every year, for three straight years—became rarer too, falling from 13 percent of the 2019 cohort to just 6 percent of the 2022 cohort. Whichever way the data gets sliced, the direction is the same: the engine that produces Kansas City’s fastest-growing companies is running at meaningfully lower RPMs than it was four years ago. The timing lines up with a story regional business owners have been living through in real time, not just

reported revenue, kept climbing. None of these figures are inflation-adjusted, so a portion of the deceleration this data shows may actually understate how much real, volume-driven growth had already slowed by 2022-23. Second, and more consequentially for the later cohorts, higher rates choked off the cheap capital that fast growing companies depend on to fund

reading about after the fact. The 2019 and 2020 baseline cohorts caught the up-cycle of the pandemic economy on the way in. Paycheck Protection Program loans and other emergency lending kept payrolls intact through the worst of the shutdown; the Federal Reserve had pinned interest rates near zero; and a historic run of stimulus checks, enhanced unemployment benefits and mortgage

Whichever way one slices the data, the direction is the same: the engine that produces fastest growing companies here is running at meaningfully lower RPMs than it was four years ago.

forbearance kept consumer spending floing even as headline unemployment spiked. Housing, home services, logistics, e-commerce fulfillment and remote everything tech all caught tailwinds that had nothing to do with normal business cycle timing. Companies positioned in the right lane rode that wave straight through the 2021 and 2022 revenue years —which is precisely the window this data captures for the earliest two cohorts, and precisely why they look so strong. Then the wave broke. Inflation, dismissed as “transitory” through most of 2021, proved durable enough that the Federal Reserve launched the fastest rate-hiking cycle in four decades starting in March 2022, taking the federal funds rate from near zero to above 5 percent in roughly fourteen months. That shift shows up twice over in this data, in two different ways for two different cohorts. First, for the 2021 baseline cohort, some of its still-respectable-looking growth was arguably never real growth at all—inflation passing straight through the top line, with unit volumes flat or even falling while prices, and therefore

expansion—inventory, staffing, new locations, equipment financing. That cap- ital crunch fell hardest on exactly the kind of companies this list is built aro- und: small, young, high-growth bus inesses without the balance sheets to self-fund growth the way larger incum bents can. A separate cut of this same dataset makes the link explicit. Split any baseline cohort by company size, and the smallest quarter of companies has outgrown the largest quarter in every single year measured, without exception—but the size of that gap has been narrowing. Smaller companies are still growing faster than bigger ones; they’re just not pulling away by nearly as much as they used to, a pattern entirely consistent with rate sensitive small businesses losing some of their structural growth advantage once money stopped being free. Two sector-level cases put a face on the mechanism. Health-care staffing firms that spiked during the pandemic’s crisis staffing era offer the starkest example: Favorite Healthcare Staffing grew rev enue from $143.9 million in 2019 to $1.64 billion by 2022, only to fall back to

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July 2026