Fast 50 clarifications

When we put one of our issues to bed with our major rankings such as the , I always feel a mixture of relief and anxiety.The relief is that a lot of hard work is over, but the anxiety is wondering, what did we miss? What went wrong?With the Fast 50, our mistakes mostly consisted of transposed letters and a couple out of date Web addresses. Because all of the information is entered into our system by hand, it is easy for these kind of mistakes to happen.While most of the mistakes would fall into the minor category, one made a company look bad; I deeply regret that.When entering the information for Centuria Corp., we put in the wrong revenue number for 2006. The correct number is $578,318. We entered a much lower number, making it look as if the company was on the verge of bankruptcy. They are not.Luckily, the calculation for the ranking used the 2007 revenue number, which was correct. Centuria's spot at No. 47 with a 67.3 percent compound annual growth rate since 2003 is correct.I regret our error, and we'll run a correction in our next print issue. We're also looking at ways to improve our quality assurance.To be completely frank, one of the tough things about our annual rankings is that there seems to be some sort of mistake each year. We adjust our processes and eliminate that mistake. I don't think we've ever made the same mistake from one year to the next. But other mistake seems to find us. Maybe it is just human nature.But we'll keep trying to be perfect.