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Being recognized on the Inc. 5000 is a prestigious honor for companies. After all, companies on the list offer a unique look into their success with the USA’s economy’s most dynamic segment, independent small businesses. 

The list recognizes the innovative achievements of the local companies making sustainable jobs and growth. It categorizes companies as per the percentage range of their annual revenue over two years, the number of employees, location, with special recognition for minority or women-run companies. 

Click here to know the complete list for 2021.  

Whether you like it or not, the list has got one thing that you can’t deny: variety. 

If you go through the whole list, you will find numerous businesses that you never believe could exist, let alone flourish. A water tower cleaning company worth 25 million USD (1), anyone? 

Today, we will look at some of our favorite companies listed in Inc 5000 and show you various business opportunities to take on their success. 

Fashion for Cancer Patients

Care+ Wear (2) is a fashion brand with a niche audience, cancer patients. It has a team of 11, and they have made about 34 million USD selling a line of adapting apparel and accessories specifically for people undergoing long-term cancer treatments. 

Patients undergoing chemotherapy often need to have a port-a-cath implant underneath their skin (3). The “port” makes it easier to get medicine; however, it is hard to access beneath typical clothes. And since the treatment can take up to three to six hours at a time, it can be a hassle for patients. 

Care+Wear offers port-accessible shirts and hoodies with zippers on the chest, allowing easy and comfortable use. 

The fashion industry often overlooks people with medical requirements, and brands such as Care+Wear are making a name by providing adapted clothes that also look good. 

There are multiple opportunities you can explore in this area, including: 

• You can partner with movie franchises or sports brands to create an affinity marketing play to build adapting clothes that boost morale, like superhero port-accessible jerseys or shirts. 
• You can also offer adaptive undergarments with front or side closures to make it easier for the globe’s over 75 million wheelchair users to dress (4). Even though brands like Slick Chicks are innovating in this area, men often don’t have any stylish options (5).
• There are generic pregnancy pillows that make as much as 1.2 million USD a month, as per Jungle Scout. You can rebrand something similar and cater specifically to patients who experience pain trying to sleep.  

Upcycling Plastic

Fair Harbor (6) is a sustainable swimwear and clothing brand for men and children. They have made their clothing line with recycled materials. As per the company, to this day, they have upcycled over 10 million plastic bottles and have made a revenue of over 18 million USD last year (7). 

And as we recently discussed in our story, Soaring Eco-Friendly Trend is Paving Infinite Ways for Entrepreneurs to Capitalize; multiple companies are focusing on innovative products that meet customers’ demands while also helping reduce plastic waste. 

This US-based company, Bureo, recycles abandoned fishing nets and turns them into products like skateboards, frisbees, sunglasses, apparel, etc. So far, the company has collected 3.5 million pounds, about 1.5 million kg to date. Even bigger names such as Adidas, American Express, and Tesco have started taking sustainability efforts to differentiate themselves from their counterparts (8).

Today, every company has to expand or grow with minimum environmental impact, which has led to the limitless potential of the sustainable industry. 

As per a report Fortune Business Insight recently published (9), the worldwide green technology and sustainability market will increase from 11.43 billion USD in 2021 to 41.62 billion USD by 2028 at a 20.3% CAGR. There are multiple opportunities you can explore in this area, including but not limited to:

• Recycling post-consumer and post-industrial HDPE materials and reengineer them into heavy-duty, wood-alternative building materials, e.g., Tangent (10)
• Upcycling electronic waste and extract rare earth metal, Blueoak Resource is one such company aiming to convert e-waste into a sustainable metal source (11)
• Creating new materials that act like their plastic-made counterparts but biodegrade quickly, Solutum, an Israel-based company, is pioneering in this area, building entirely new ranges of products with biodegradable materials (12). 

Automating Healthcare

From enhancing patient experience to improving medical procedures, automation would drive the healthcare system forward post-pandemic. There are multiple upshots of automating healthcare functions. One such company is nirvanaHealth (13); it uniquely blends deep healthcare domain expertise with proven platform-building experience to deploy RPA, robotic process automation. 

It creates a digital workforce of software bots that perform core business tasks and drive automation leading to lower operating costs, enhanced accuracy, and system-driven compliance. The company claims to reduce administrative costs by up to 30% and medical costs by 20% via its enterprise healthcare automation. 

Despite spending over 2% of its GDP on public healthcare, most Indians still have to opt for private healthcare, which can be quite heavy on the pocket because of low quality and poor infrastructure (14). The data we found on this subject indicates urgent needs for easy-on-the-pocket, time-saving solutions that can improve the overall healthcare quality for both hospitals and patients in India.

There are multiple opportunities to improve the country’s healthcare via solutions like AI, ML, big data that offer services like insurance claims management, appointment scheduling, hospital management, medical data structuring, optimal care delivery, etc. 

FeatSystems (15), an Indian startup, offers automated appointment schedules via RPA using robots that check the most convenient time, location, cost, doctor availability, and other factors and book appointments for patients appropriately. It also sends automated notifications to the patients in case of appointment cancellation. 

Other prominent names in the space include:

• Olive: RPA hospitals like authorization management, invoice processing, inventory management, vendor contract management, periodic reporting, etc
• HospitalIQ: Offer insights on hospital management across different operations with the help of an AI using structured and unstructured data
• CloudMedX: RPA to eliminate the need for manual data inputs via analytical techniques such as big data, NLP, evidence-based medicine, ML, helping doctors and medical experts to pay increased attention to patients. 
• EnterBridge: RPA for insurance claims management to ensures fair prices, increased transparency, and ease regulatory compliance

Overall, India needs advanced technologies in its healthcare system to empower patients, healthcare providers, and supplies. Businesses can use personalization to their advantage and upshot preventive models for patients. AI, AR, VR, 3D printing, and Robotics are key technologies currently used in the industry. 

At present, startups in the country are leveraging these technologies to build a domestically relevant and unique digital solution to address the nation’s healthcare challenges. Consequently, these companies have now become an integral part of the healthcare system. 

According to a recent report from RBSA Advisors (16), the Indian health tech market would grow at a 30% CAGR over FY 2022 to 2023. The report also suggested that it would reach over 50 billion USD by 2033.  

The Indian healthcare segment comprises six segments, pharmacy, telemedicine, wellness, fitness, healthcare IT, personal health management, home healthcare, and analytics. It is worth about 2 billion USD today, less than 1% of India’s overall healthcare industry. 

Car Washes

Coldwater Capital (17), on 27th position of this year’s Inc. 500, making over 12.7 million USD with a portfolio of 14 local car washes and an application called Coinless (18). It helps car washes switch to contactless payments.

One of the biggest car wash players in the USA, Mister Car Wash (19), went public in June this year. Notably, the firm has a market capitalization of about 5.5 billion USD. In March, they had over 344 locations and more than 595 million USD in net revenue over the previous year, with 76 million USD in net income. 

In India, the car wash business has been gainful consistently for quite a long time. And with the rising interest among millennials and recently joined workforce Gen Z keeps on purchasing used or new cars; this business is set to boom in upcoming years, too (20, 21).

In addition, the business has progressively evolved into a car wash and detailing business that offers services like washing, cleaning, sanitizing, beautification, coating, restoration, and rejuvenation. 

Similar to other nations, the car washing industry is also fragmented in India, indicating plenty of room for newcomers to join the space and become a part of this industry’s gleaming bright future.

Apart from starting your own traditional car washing businesses like conveyor-style car washes, there are two more opportunities you can consider:

• Waterless Car Cleaning Services: One of the prominent examples is Wype (22). People will love your smart, eco-friendly way of cleaning their cars with no additional damage to paint and auto parts.
• On-demand Car Cleaning Services: This California-based startup, Washos (23), is disrupting the industry with over 1k bookings on its app and a revenue of over 700k USD. The company has created a platform car wash with details of all its services with secure in-app payment and booking on its mobile app and website. Users can book an on-demand car cleaning service and conveniently pay via a secure channel. Another prominent example includes Go Waterless (24).
• DIY Car Washing Kits: In addition to running a car wash startup, you can also offer a range of waterless car cleaning solutions, microfiber cloths, polish, etc., to your customers or DIY enthusiasts.

Help Build Passive Income Portfolio

We have seen people taking unusual ways to save income, taxes, and generate side or passive income. 

Rent to Retirement (25) is one such company that allows people to generate passive income via investing in real estate. The company thoroughly researches the best markets and maximizes the combination of equity and cash flow, and helps people enjoy all the benefits of real estate investing without any headache. 

You can apply a similar business model to other areas too and help people build passive income like peer-to-peer lending, advertising on cars, homes, shops, etc., 

Those with experience and know-how can also offer active subscriptions or newsletters to help people build and manage their passive income portfolios.

Rucha Joshi, currently managing a team of over 20 content writers at TimesNext is fueled by her passion for creative writing. She is eager to turn information into action. With her hunger for knowledge, she considers herself a forever student and a passionate leader.