In this tutorial, Joe Apfelbaum walks through his annual process of acquiring the Inc. 5000 list of the 5,000 fastest‑growing U.S. companies and transforming it into a richly‑enriched, actionable database using spreadsheets and AI tools. He imports the raw list into a spreadsheet, parses leadership names, and creates searchable Google links. Using ChatGPT‑generated formulas he splits first and last names, then manually adds initial LinkedIn URLs, emails, and phone numbers for a sample record. He demonstrates how to save profiles to Evvii AI, generate AI‑written summaries, and craft personalized connection messages. The core of the workflow is an AI‑driven automation that scans the sheet for rows marked “yes” and, in batches of 100, automatically populates missing fields such as company website, location, industry, employee count, revenue, founding date, social media links, headlines, titles, photos, funding history, engagement likelihood, language, gender inference, and LinkedIn connection status. He explains how the automation leverages ChatGPT scripts to check existing connections and trigger outreach campaigns—congratulatory messages for already‑connected CEOs and tailored outreach for new prospects. Joe also outlines plans to package the fully‑enriched list as a premium offering through Evvii Pro, including additional scrubbing against elite networks (Vistage, EO, YPO, Tiger 21, BNI) to surface deeper relationship opportunities. Throughout, he emphasizes that AI enables scaling relationship building, turning a massive list into a high‑value, relationship‑focused asset.
Chapters
Every single year, I'm really passionate about analyzing the Inc. 5000 list, and this year is no different. The list just came out. What is the Inc. 5000 list? It's the list of the 5,000 fastest-growing companies in the US. My goal is to analyze each company, identify who I know, who I don't know, who I need to congratulate, and what are the trends going on on the Inc. 5000 list. So you can actually look through the entire list over here. The thing is, if I want to analyze it, it's much easier for me to analyze it and enrich it Using a spreadsheet. And so I took the entire list, put it into a spreadsheet right over here. You see that by rank, I have the company name, the leadership name, the company LinkedIn URL, the company Twitter, Facebook, their city, state, zip code, their metro area, their growth over 3 years. So this company here had a 90,000% growth. And then their business model, the description, who their clients are, areas of impact, the article, or, you know, like whatever information I can find about them, I post. And then what I'm going to do is I did a, I did a little, a little ninja move over here and got their first name separated using, using a formula that I got from ChatGPT, gave me the formula. I'll show you what I did. I said, I said, in T1 I want to see the first name and in C2 I want to see the full name. And basically it just gave me the formula. So that's kind of like how I broke that down, first name, last name. And then I'm slowly enriching all these over here. So man, I did the first one just manually, got their LinkedIn URL, their email address, cell phone number. And then I put this little Google search link here, which I'm going to do for all of them. What does a Google search link do? I'm going to copy the Google search link, Ctrl+C, and I go like this and I go Ctrl+Shift+Down and Ctrl+V. And basically when I click on any of these Google search links, it automatically searches the guy's first name, his last name, his company name. So like this person over here, I pull it up, I see we're second-degree connected. I want to connect with him. I press connect, I press add note. I can add a template from here. Okay. Or I can generate it. It'll write it, it'll write me the, you know, the exact thing. Your leadership, I don't know. I'd love to connect. And I'm gonna write congrats on making the Inc. 5000. I'd love to connect. Okay, so now I just sent Brian a connection request here, but it came directly from, from the list and I used AI to help me do that. So now I'm gonna use artificial intelligence to help me enrich the rest of the list and I'm gonna show you how I do this real quick. So if I have this over here, first of all, I should really save this guy's information. Oh, so this is the CEO that I got. Save him to Evvy AI just like that. So now I can summarize his profile with AI. You see that? I'm using artificial intelligence to write a summary about who he is. You see, this is all the bullet points where he went to school, like all this information about him. And then I'm going to reach out to him and say, hey, listen, dude, you know, you have 3,000 followers. And congrats on hitting the Inc. 500, but you haven't really been posting. And speaking of EY, I'm going to ask one of my EY connections to kind of make an introduction for me. Anyway, bottom line is I need to enrich this now. So how do I do this? There's a lot of, there's a lot of missing data here. There's a lot of missing data points. It's all missing. So how am I going to do this? The answer is I'm going to use AI automation to help me do this. So this is something I teach in our community. And I absolutely love doing this. I'm going to go here, turn on this automation here, which is looking through the spreadsheet for anybody that says the word yes. You see that? So if it says yes, it's going to go ahead and enrich it, and it's going to just do one at a time. So every time I hit yes, it goes ahead and enriches one. You see it finds one yes and it enriches. But what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to go in here and I'm going to say, Do 100 at a time, okay? Do 100 of these at a time. I'm going to press save and I'm going to run it and it's basically going to go ahead and it's going to start enriching. It's going to go through every single person on the list over here and just start enriching them one at a time. So what am I enriching? I'm enriching LinkedIn URL, email and phone I'm not doing yet. I'm going to do email and phone for the right people, but website, city, state, industry, employees, revenue, when they started their company, their function, the phone number to the company, their company LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, a short description about the company, the headline of the person's LinkedIn, their title, their photo. I have every single person's photo. So if I wanna make a separate proposal for each person or send a separate email or place them on a website, I got their photo and their logo here. I got the CEO's Twitter, Facebook, and all this information. Now I'm gonna have AI fill in all the blanks there are going to be a lot of blanks from big data. But I have the company city, state, zip, how likely he is to engage, the language of his company, the last amount of funding that the company got, you see what series it was and everything. What other information am I getting here? Some other information. I'm going to have an AI summary. I'm going to find out their LinkedIn connections. I'm going to use AI to help me find out their gender. And the gender is probably going to be based on their first and last name, just like, you know, try to identify that real quick and see if it's what the likelihood is. And I'll basically tell the AI if it's not likely that they're, if you're not 100% sure, just give it a score or something or just say not sure and it'll say not sure. So connected to Joe. So I'm gonna, I have all my connections, a list of all my connections. I'm gonna have Excel, do a script. I ain't gonna write it. I'll have ChatGPT write the script that will automatically determine which of these people, because I'm getting all their LinkedIn URLs. So I'm gonna have AI just quickly check to see who I'm connected to and who I'm not connected to yet. And the people that I'm connected to, I'm gonna run an automatic campaign to congratulate them because I'm already connected to them. So I can just run one quick message that says, hey, congrats on the Inc. 5000 list. You know, I see you made it again. And I'll be able to quickly see. And for the people that, you know, there are going to be some people that need to be manually enriched over here that we can't find their stuff, which is totally fine. For those people, I'll just quickly do a Google search or I'll give it to my team. But it's much— it used to be that I would pay somebody an hourly rate to go through the entire list. And now look, it's, you know, it already did this 100. I'm going to do another 100 now just to kind of show you how it does another 100 here. Here's another 100. Here you go. So, now it's going to continue doing it, you see. So, I only do 100 at a time just to kind of see if I'm failing, if it's not working. Because every single time it tries, it runs an operation. And these operations are not cheap. So, you see it's doing it over and over and over. And it'll continue doing it as much as I want it to do it. So, I have 5,000 records that I want to go through here. And I want to be going through all the records one at a time. And kind of going through them and building the relationships with these people and getting to know them. But as you can see, this is a really powerful way for you, like once you have this knowledge of how to do this, then you can have fun. You know, the Inc. 5000 list is my target market. These are the people that I do business with. These are the people that have successful companies. And I've been working this list for the past, I don't know, 12 years or so. Yeah, I think this is the 13th year I'm analyzing the list. And so I have all the lists of every single year, and I'm probably going to make it available. Okay. to people that sign up to Evvii Pro if they prepay for the year or something. I'm thinking about making this available. So if you're interested in the list, just write interested and I'll let you know more about Evvii Pro when it comes out. I don't want to just give you a list. I want to give you a list that's actually enriched. So I'm going to work on enriching the whole thing first and making sure that I get really good data. And then if you have any suggestions of what else I can do with this list, how I can improve it, I'm also going to scrub this list against like, you know, Vistage, EO, YPO, Tiger 21, BNI. And other factors to help be able to facilitate getting all these people's information to figure out who they really are and what they're really about and what other relationships I can build with them. So this way I can build relationships on scale. That's really the key when it comes to AI. It's about building relationships on scale and being able to connect with the right people. In the right places at the right time. So hopefully this is helpful for you, just watching me do this. And, um, yeah, thank you for watching and I appreciate you. And let me know if this is interesting to you and you want to learn more. If you want to join our community, I'd be happy to teach you how to do these types of things. Anyway, talk to you soon. Boom. Thanks for watching. If you enjoyed this video, give it a like, leave a comment, and let me know what you think of what I'm up to.
