DALLAS and NEW YORK -

Headlining a list that included such well-known companies such as Apple and Starbucks, Copart topped The Exceptional 100 list released by Deloitte this week, a ranking measured by Deloitte’s new proprietary method that examines a company’s overall economic performance including profitability, growth and shareholder value.

A list of 100 U.S.-based, publicly traded companies were identified as top performers, and Copart beat out other firms such as McDonald’s, Ralph Lauren and Coca-Cola.

“Copart is excited and honored to be at the top of The Exceptional 100 list,” Copart chief executive officer Jay Adair said. “It was our founder Willis Johnson’s vision that set the frame work for the company we have become, as well as our 4,000 employees worldwide who continue to innovate and lead our business each day.”

Deloitte explained that The Exceptional 100 is based on three features of financial performance analysts contend are often overlooked:

— Financial performance is multi-dimensional: The approach embraces the idea that profitability, growth and value all matter, and so it evaluates company performance across all three dimensions simultaneously.

— Relative performance matters: Deloitte compares any company against the full population of publicly-traded companies, adjusting for industry and size. According to Deloitte, this is potentially a much more robust approach to performance benchmarking than many companies tend to use.

— Chance must be separated from skill: A single year’s results rarely reveals much about a company’s sustained performance, but what is the right time period over which to measure performance? The Exceptional 100 uses advanced statistical analyses and modeling techniques to determine how well a company needs to perform, and for how long, to be quantifiably “better than lucky.”

Copart topped The Exceptional 100 list with sterling performance on all seven measures and an average exceptional streak of 16 years. Its probability of being exceptional on value is 100 percent and its average probability across all measures is over 96 percent.

“When I look back at starting the company more than 30 years ago, failure was never an option,” said Willis Johnson, Copart’s founder and chairman of the board of directors.

“What I was doing wasn’t work. It was a labor of love. I surrounded myself with other people that felt the same way,” Johnson continued. “The vision was always to make this company more than what it was when we started out. To see that come to light and be recognized for our performance and growth over the years is truly humbling.”

Two other companies with direct connections to the used-vehicle industry made The Exceptional 100 list as well.

Credit Acceptance Corp. — one of the top 10 market share holders in used-vehicle financing — came in No. 86.

America’s Car-Mart — a network of more than 130 buy-here, pay-here dealerships throughout the Southeast — landed at No. 95.

“Current methods of evaluating corporate financial performance can be unnecessarily incomplete and disconnected," said Michael Raynor, director at Deloitte Services, and one of the lead researchers on the project. “There are essentially three ways in which a company can deliver exceptional outcomes: through profitability, through growth and through shareholder value.

“Although it is useful to know where a company stands in each of these measures individually, we believe truly exceptional companies have beaten the odds over a period of time, and have consistently outperformed on multiple measures simultaneously,” Raynor continued.

“Understanding each of these elements is critical to setting and achieving appropriate performance improvement targets,” Raynor went on to say. “Because there is no one measure of financial performance that captures everything that matters, managing financial performance means understanding how well a company is performing on multiple dimensions in order to determine which elements need improving.”

According to the companion research report, “Charting Superior Business Performance,” co-authored by Raynor and Mumtaz Ahmed, chief strategy officer at Deloitte, understanding relative performance is both critical to successfully improving performance and widely misunderstood.

“Our research found that up to 80 percent of managers either over or underestimate their company's relative performance or percentile rank,” Ahmed said. “This misunderstanding can lead to misplaced efforts, such as an unnecessary focus on aggressive cost-cutting, as opposed to increasing margins through strategic differentiation to improve long-term profitability.

“Our hope is that The Exceptional 100 study will help managers better understand this critically important dimension of their performance and will help them better focus their performance improvement efforts,” he added.

Raynor reiterated a single-year’s results are rarely significant to observers of corporate performance and there is little agreement on the time period over which stand-out performance reveals itself.

“It’s common to pick three, five, 10 and even 20 years,” Raynor said. “But these choices are needlessly arbitrary. Our statistical method uses modeling techniques that allow us to infer more meaningful time periods that are specific to each performance measure.

“As a result, we can identify those companies that are quantifiably likely to be ‘more than just lucky,’” he concluded.