100 fastest growing inner city businesses

10. Emma
10. Emma
2009 Revenues: $11.4 million
5-year Annual Growth Rate: 72%

CEO:
Clint Smith
Location: Nashville, TN
Year Founded: 2002

About the business:
After leaving a failed dot-com business in 2002, Will Weaver and Clint Smith decided to build a new company that was more than just a "cool" idea. They came up with Emma, which is an abbreviation of email marketing, which is what the company provides to small and mid-size businesses, nonprofits, and agencies.

Emma's revenue was negatively hit by the recession, but its losses were offset by the many new accounts it opened for clients looking to move away from larger, more expensive systems to cheaper email marketing solutions. More than 30,000 organizations around the world use Emma to power their email campaigns and surveys.

--By Eno Alfred and Rachel Hitch


The Initiative for a Competitive Inner City (ICIC) defines inner cities as core urban areas with higher unemployment and poverty rates and lower median incomes than their surrounding metropolitan statistical areas. For the 2011 list, ICIC received more than 2,000 solicited nominations using its database of small businesses and through the support of its nominating partners, including the U.S. Conference of Mayors, Staples, and the Small Business Administration. Companies were ranked by compound annual growth rate (CAGR) based on their revenue over the five-year period between 2005 and 2009 (the last year for which complete data was available).
Last updated May 18 2011: 5:14 PM ET
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