Ambit Energy Tops Inc. 500 list

Dallas retail electricity company Ambit Energy has ranked first in this year’s Inc. 500 list of fastest growing private companies.

Ambit produced $325 million revenue in 2009, up from $1.6 million in 2006, giving it a three-year growth rate of more than 20,000 percent.

Ambit CEO and co-founder Jere Thompson Jr. said the company expected to place well in this year’s rankings.

“We had a very low denominator and staggering growth — we knew we’d be up there,” he said.

When he learned Ambit ranked first overall, he said, “We high-fived each other and tried to go back to work.”

Thompson said the company’s strong growth during a recession was due to to its up-front investment in building a system that could grow quickly.

“Early on we recognized that we are a data processing company,” Thompson said. “We spent a year developing our systems. We wanted to be certain our back-office systems were working great.”

Thompson, Ambit co-founder Chris Chambless and other Ambit executives built telecommunications businesses in the early days of that industry’s deregulation, so they all had experience in managing “hypergrowth,” Thompson said.

Ambit has 305 employees in downtown Dallas and a Plano call center. It uses a direct sales model similar to Mary Kay cosmetics and has 75,000 independent sales associates.

The 29th annual Inc. 500 is in the September edition of Inc. magazine, which hit newsstands and the Internet on Tuesday.

Read more: Ambit Energy tops Inc. 500 list - Dallas Business Journal 


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