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Readers of Arkansas Business were probably surprised by the new company atop our list of women-owned businesses on Sept. 15.
Ozark Safety Cabins of Flippin told us it had 220 employees, with 10 working in Arkansas.
That’s quite the staff for a company making its first appearance on our list of women-owned companies who have registered as such with the Arkansas Economic Development Commission.
However, doubts about the company’s size started to pop up almost immediately after that issue was published.
As we told you in last week’s iteration of Whispers, we felt uncomfortable enough with the veracity of Ozark Safety Cabins’ claims that we decided to take it off the list, at least until the company could answer a few questions. To date, we haven’t received those answers, and I’d say more questions have been raised, including about whether the company is entangled in a fraud case in Texas.
We plan to continue watching that case and this company, which says its mission “revolves around providing sustainable, secure, and affordable housing solutions, with a particular emphasis on the homeless and refugee crises.” But I did want to use this episode as an opportunity to tell you a bit more about how we come up with the lists you see each week.
There are a few different types. The women-owned business list is a bit of an unusual one. Every year we know and are told about woman-owned companies that aren’t included on the list but are larger than some companies that were included. That is because we only include companies that have registered with the state as women-owned business enterprises or certified women-owned business enterprises. (We have no interest in defining what is and what isn’t a women-owned business.) The certification gives those companies some advantage when bidding for government work and provides a directory for those who would prefer to hire a company with female ownership.
Once we have the AEDC roster, we then survey the members so we can rank them by number of employees. We have a handful of lists that come together in this way.
The second category of lists involves simple requests for government data, cleaning it up and sorting it, like last week’s ranking of banks by deposits.
The final group of lists is entirely first-party data that we collect, like the Sept. 22 list of commercial property management firms. We survey all of the companies that we think might qualify, vet their responses and rank them accordingly.
On our first-party lists, we get complaints, albeit rarely, that some of the businesses included are inflating their revenue figures or employee counts. Other times, we catch it before publication.
I wish that had been the case with Ozark Safety Cabins, and I’m glad some eagle-eyed readers pointed out the… complicated situation surrounding the company. We actually held the company off the list in 2024 because we were skeptical, but we elected to include them this year as they remained on the state’s list and seemed to be legitimately growing.
We published 57 companies in the print version of the list Ozark Safety Cabins appeared on, and other lists we publish have hundreds of companies on them.
So you can imagine how impractical it is to verify every claim from every business placed on every list, though we do our best.
What we can do, however, is be quick, upfront and transparent when an issue does arise. That is what we endeavor to do on the infrequent occasions when problems arise with any of the content we publish for that matter.
This is an important lesson in media literacy. The news outlets who are forthright and quick to correct mistakes are those that deserve your trust. You ought to question the outlets that quietly update flawed articles online without noting their mistakes.
Whenever we publish erroneous information — and I’m actually still not sure whether Ozark Safety Cabins’ inclusion on the list was erroneous — I assure you that it makes us sick to our stomachs. I’ve lost as much sleep over the anxiety around getting something wrong as anything else in my life. And I don’t think I’ve ever been as miserable as I was after having to write a correction when I was a reporter.
But as long as journalists are human — I won’t make an AI joke here — there will be miscues.
More than anything, we respect you, the reader, enough to let you know when we screwed something up.
I’m surprised we don’t have more problems with our lists like this recent one, given how much data we publish each week. It’s a credit to our researcher, Gwen Moritz, and it’s a credit to Arkansas’ business community, which has chosen to be honest and transparent with only a few glaring exceptions.
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