The strong--and smart--survive.

There's nothing like an economic downturn to separate the pretenders from the contenders in business. Anybody can look like a brilliant business leader when the stock market is on a seemingly endless bull run and the economy is booming, but it's during periods of economic adversity that you discover

who really knows what they're doing--whether on Wall Street, in corporate America, or in the CEO offices of the small and mid-sized emerging businesses we count on to provide jobs and generate the revenues necessary to drive the economy forward. The historic and devastating economy of the past year has taken this Darwinian principle to its ultimate expression--weeding among even the contenders to identify the best of the best.

That is what you'll find in this issue of BLACK ENTERPRISE, featuring the 37th annual listing of the BE 100s: The Nation's Largest Black-owned Businesses. Certainly, our annual report documents the economic devastation of 2008--a year that saw the largest year-over-year drop in sales in the history of the top publicly traded companies. In black business, the impact of the carnage is most apparent in the wholesale restructuring of our annual listing of the largest black-owned automobile dealerships. For the first time in the two decades since we established the auto dealer list, we are not naming an Auto Dealer of the Year. But this issue also chronicles the other side of the coin: that the fire of economic adversity purifies and strengthens, separating the wheat from the chaff. The strong and smart not only survive--they flourish, pointing the way to new paradigms of business performance and prosperity in an evolved economic environment.

Take PRWT Services Inc., our 2009 Industrial/Service Company of the Year. PRWT demonstrates a willingness to not only adapt, but to reinvent itself in response to rapidly changing market challenges and opportunities. PRWT was launched in Philadelphia as a provider of back-office and administrative support and services. When it saw market share in that space shrinking, it didn't fight a losing battle with diminishing returns; instead, it turned its sights on an entirely new industry: pharmaceutical manufacturing. Led by President and CEO Harold T. Epps, PRWT delivered revenues of $167 million in 2008--and is now positioning itself to become the next of only a handful of black-owned companies to ever go public.