A record of the people who actually built it.

In the year before this began, two things happened that did not seem connected.

The first: a friend who runs an £18m logistics business stopped picking up the phone for three weeks. When he finally answered, he said the words “I haven’t told anyone this” and then described a near-collapse that he had handled, alone, in silence, while continuing to host investor calls in the same room.

The second: I went to a dinner where the keynote was given by a man who has never employed anyone and who used the word “entrepreneur” forty-one times in eleven minutes. The room — full of people who had collectively created several thousand jobs — applauded politely and looked tired.

The Owners’ Index started in the gap between those two events.

There is a class of person in this country who creates the wages, takes the risk, carries the team, and reads about themselves in the papers as either a hero or a villain depending on the month. The middle reality — that most of them are neither, and that the work is hard, lonely and dignified — does not get written down anywhere. There are rich lists. There are forty-under-forty lists. There is no list of the people who simply built something and kept it running.

This is the attempt at that list.

It is not a network in the usual sense. It is a record. One book, once a year, of the people who actually built it. We verify the entries. We hold the room small. We do not let the room be diluted by people whose business is talking about business.

The flagship is a physical annual because the form matters. A book is something you can keep on a shelf for thirty years. A feed is not. A book closes when it is full. A feed never closes.

Edition I is capped at five hundred entries. The list will be slow to fill, because it should be.

If you are one of the people the Index is for, you already know it. The application is open. We would like to hear from you.

— The Editor