New England’s 50 fastest-growing companies

The Boston Globe’s inaugural list of New England’s Fastest-Growing Companies captures this madness, highlighting businesses that expanded their sales and revenues at a breathtaking pace during the bust-to-boom period of 2020 to 2023.

The fastest-growing company on the list — which is ranked by compound annual growth rate — is the tour operator Old Sod Travel of Hingham, which increased revenues by more than 2,200 percent, or 23 times, over that period. The next company, Marlborough tech firm Cloud Bridge Solutions, boosted revenues nearly 1,600 percent, or 17 times. No. 3, Ardent Fitness, a builder of custom gyms, grew nearly 1,300 percent, or close to 14 times.

The list was compiled for the Globe by Statista, a market research and data analysis firm. Statista contacted more than 2,000 companies headquartered across the six New England states. Additional companies were reached through advertising and news coverage in the Globe and invited to apply. To qualify, companies had to generate a minimum of $100,000 in revenue in 2020 and $1.5 million in 2023 and share their annual revenues from those years.

Although the list is not comprehensive, it is representative, capturing the strength and diversity of the New England economy. The 50 companies — small, large, and midsize — hail from sectors ranging from agriculture to technology, construction to financial services, manufacturing to health care. Most are privately held, but several publicly traded companies made the cut, including DraftKings, the fastest-growing company in the “over $50 million” revenue bracket.

Overall, these companies were able to provide what customers wanted, when they wanted it. Some were in the right place at the right time. Others spent years building to the moment.

Still others have done it again and again over decades. Global Partners, for example, began as a single truck delivering heating oil in Greater Boston in 1933, grew to become one of the Northeast’s largest fuel distributors, and doubled revenues from 2020 to 2023.

Nearly all these companies have some things in common: They found ways to adapt to changing markets, create better products and services, and tap the talent of the region’s workforce, universities, and research hospitals. And they did it at a time when success was far from guaranteed.

As Michael Goodman, professor of public policy at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, puts it: “The recipe for growth and prosperity has long been finding ways to extract value and opportunity, even in difficult times.”

So how do you go about building a fast-growing company? It starts by solving a problem, says Peter Cohan, associate professor of management practice at Babson College.

Long before the recent e-commerce boom, Symbotic realized that supply chains needed to become faster, nimbler, and more efficient. The Wilmington robotics company, founded in 2007, automated warehousing with robots, artificial intelligence, and other technologies to sort, pick, and move items out the door faster.

Walmart became Symbotic’s biggest customer, and its growth exploded from 2020 to 2023. Symbotic’s annual revenues soared nearly 1,200 percent to about $1.2 billion.

During that period, Digital Onboarding recognized that small banks and credit unions were losing customers and members because they hadn’t adapted their competitive advantage — personal relationships — to the digital age. The Boston tech firm develops widgets and other digital tools that make it easier for banks and credit unions to connect with customers and members, sign them up for new products and services, and ultimately keep them banking at the community institutions.

“We are helping community banks and credit unions get their edge back,” says CEO Charlie Kroll. And with those institutions as customers, Digital Onboarding’s revenues nearly quadrupled from 2020 to 2023.

Others had to win over customers in very different sectors. The Devens-based company Little Leaf Farms took on a fresh problem — namely, that packaged lettuce is not that fresh. By the time lettuce, primarily grown in California, is picked, processed, and shipped, it can be more than a week old when it gets to the supermarket.

Little Leaf grows lettuce in high-tech greenhouses in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania that allow it to harvest, package, and deliver lettuce to stores within about 24 hours, says CEO Paul Sellew. That innovation, in turn, has delivered revenue growth of 50 percent a year, supported by the company’s loyal following and strong marketing among grocers and restaurants.

There’s another factor that helps sales take off, Babson’s Cohan says. Sales explode when customers recognize the value of a product and talk it up. In other words, it goes viral.

Ardent Fitness, which designs, builds, and installs home and commercial gyms, launched in 2020 and rode the health and fitness boom spawned by the pandemic. The Lenox company — the fastest-growing company in the “under $5 million” revenue bracket — says word of its custom fitness centers spread quickly as it landed clients such as rapper Wiz Khalifa, The Country Club of Fairfax (Virginia), and an executive who wanted a high-end gym for his Caribbean island vacation home.

“We haven’t relied heavily on marketing,” says Paul LeBlanc, CEO of Ardent’s parent company. “Most of our growth has come from referrals and repeat customers.”

When customers are satisfied, word gets around.

A company doesn’t have to be a startup to grow quickly. Lantheus was founded nearly 70 years ago with technology from the Manhattan Project, the World War II program that ushered in the nuclear age.

The Bedford company produces low-dose radioactive substances, known as radiopharmaceuticals, to diagnose and treat disease. One product, an imaging agent brought to market in 2021, pinpoints prostate cancer.

The product has generated about $2 billion in sales since its launch, says Paul Blanchfield, Lantheus’s president. The company’s overall revenues nearly quadrupled from 2020 to 2023 to about $1.3 billion annually, and Blanchfield expects more growth as the company prepares to introduce a new product to pinpoint Alzheimer’s disease markers in the brain.

F.L.Putnam Investment Management Company, formally incorporated as an investment advisory firm in 1983, traces its roots all the way back to the early 20th century. But the Lynnfield firm is growing rapidly today by expanding its client services, says CEO Tom Manning. For example, the company recently added “due diligence” services to help its individual and institutional clients assess alternative investments such as private equity and private credit.

Centreville Bank of West Warwick, Rhode Island, is also having a growth spurt — at 197 years old. The community bank has invested heavily in technology in recent years, tripled its branches to 22 from seven, and increased its total assets to nearly $3 billion.

For Tom Casey, founder of Old Sod Travel, 2020 didn’t seem like the right time for his business at all. He had just acquired another tour company in 2019 to expand European offerings when the pandemic shut down travel worldwide, forcing him to postpone more than 250 trips and obtain a Paycheck Protection Program loan to stay afloat.

But when restrictions began to lift in 2021, he says, travel came back with a vengeance. His customers, many of them well-off retirees with limited years to travel, were determined to make up for lost time, booking trips at an average cost of about $20,000. With money like that at stake, Old Sod Travel works to stay laser-focused on delivering an unforgettable experience. “For a lot of people,” Casey says, “these trips are a very big deal.”

Meanwhile, revenues at Feast & Fettle, a service that delivers family meals cooked in its kitchens, grew tenfold between 2020 to 2023, a surge that began during the pandemic when people avoided restaurants and grocery stores and ate at home. It’s the fastest-growing company in the $15 million to $50 million revenue bracket. CEO Carlos Ventura says the East Providence, Rhode Island, firm is still growing rapidly by catering to busy families.

Also benefiting from the stay-at-home trend was Tilson, a construction and engineering firm that designs and deploys fiber-optic networks. Revenues at the Portland, Maine, company more than doubled from 2020 to 2023 as work-from-home employees and their companies sought faster internet connections and greater capacity for videoconferencing and other applications.

In general, businesses prospered from 2020 to 2023, aided by massive pandemic relief spending and rock-bottom interest rates, says Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s. But now, conditions have changed. The Trump administration is slashing spending, imposing tariffs, and attacking immigration, which is crucial for New England’s labor force. Economic indicators showed consumer confidence falling sharply in February and hiring weaker than expected.

New England, meanwhile, faces its own set of challenges, including an aging population, a tight labor force, and sky-high housing and energy costs. The question is whether the Trump administration policies that economists say could raise costs, worsen labor shortages, and shrink funding to universities and research hospitals will add to these challenges, and what local governments can do about it.

Area businesses are optimistic, if unsettled, says Christopher Geehern, executive vice president of public affairs and communications at Associated Industries of Massachusetts.

But for all the uncertainty of this new era, New England can — as the fastest-growing companies show — still count on what Geehern calls this region’s greatest strength: “Intelligent people coming up with new ways of making products and providing services.”

Methodology

New England’s Fastest-Growing Companies is a list of 50 companies in the region that achieved a high percentage growth in revenues between 2020 and 2023.

Application Phase: The project was advertised online and in print, allowing all eligible companies to apply between October 2024 and January 2025. In addition, through research in company databases and other public sources Statista identified more than 2,000 companies in New England as potential candidates and invited them to participate in the competition by email. The submitted revenue figures had to be certified by the company’s CFO, CEO, or a member of the Executive Committee.

Criteria for inclusion in the list: To be considered, a company had to meet the following criteria:

• Revenue of at least $100,000 generated in 2020
• Revenue of at least $1.5 million generated in 2023
• Independent company (not a subsidiary or branch).
• Headquartered in New England
• Revenue growth between 2020 and 2023 was primarily organic (i.e. not through acquisitions).

Calculation of growth rates: The calculation of growth rates is based on the revenue figures submitted and certified by the companies. The compound annual growth rate (CAGR) was calculated as follows:

((revenue2023 / revenue2020)^(1/3)) - 1 = CAGR

Evaluation and quality assurance: All data reported by the companies was processed and checked by Statista. Missing data (such as employee numbers) were researched in detail. The minimum compound annual growth rate required to be included in the ranking this year was 8.4 percent.

Rob Gavin can be reached at rob.gavin@globe.com.