Once upon a time, a wise man said, “You can’t get to where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been.”

Or something along that line, like the one about those who ignore history being doomed to repeat it. So it is for us at The Business Ledger in 2008, our 15th anniversary year.

Fifteen years...where has it gone? It doesn’t seem that long ago when publisher Jim Elsener and I were frantically trying to write and gather enough articles and photos to fill 24 pages of that first issue of the DuPage Business Ledger in 1993.

This issue is No. 290, if my count is correct. That’s a lot of words and lot of stories. As editor, I even can remember a whole lot of them.

So, knowing where we’ve been and what we’ve done is important to us, because we learn from our mistakes and, we hope, make every issue of The Business Ledger better than the one that came before it.

From its inception, this newspaper has had a simple mission: to tell the stories of successful businesses so as to inform other owners what others are doing, with an eye toward emulating their success. Another critical part of that mission has also been to recognize and honor those business owners and executives and those companies, institutions, agencies and organizations that have done well in business, in working with business or in entrepreneurial ventures.

In fact, entrepreneurship really speaks to the heart of not only what The Business Ledger is but also to the kind of business community it serves. In short, we are an entrepreneurial venture that for 15 years now has been covering entrepreneurs of various types and sizes.

“Entrepreneurs are the toughest and most resilient business people in our economy,” says Business Ledger founder Elsener, who from personal experience truly knows of what he speaks. “They are risk-takers. They are idea-generators. They create jobs. Their spirit is essential to the growth of our business community.”

We are proud that many whom we have recognized through our awards programs were or have become top names and companies in the Chicago area business community. We have now honored almost 250 women business owners and leaders as “Influential Women in Business” over the 11-year history of that awards program; almost 300 companies and organizations as recipients of Annual Awards for Business Excellence; nearly 175 men and women with Entrepreneurial Excellence awards; and more than 50 companies as “Best Places to Work in Illinois.”

To do them honor does us honor.

In this section, as a companion feature to reflections on our 15th anniversary by some former and current staff members, we also honor suburban companies and organizations that are celebrating 50 years or more in business in 2008.

And Sherri Dauskurdas has ably profiled four of the “oldest of the oldest” among those companies. We think you’ll find those interesting, informative and indicative of the fact that every business represents hard work built upon an entrepreneurial idea, whether it be a moving company that started in the 1800s or of a dot-com beginning in 2008.

But just as we honor and learn and build on past successes and past mistakes, so also do we look to the future and the challenges that lie ahead for us in this great adventure known as publishing.

We have changed and our industry has changed and continues to change every day. We still have the same incredibly diverse marketplace to cover that we did with our first edition in April 1993 or when we began biweekly publication in August 1999. But the suburban region is growing in population and diversity of cultures and interests and now, in contrast to 1993, more people are commuting to work from suburb to suburb or from the city to the suburbs than there are going into Chicago.

A sea change, to be sure, and it’s affected coverage by the dailies and the community newspapers throughout the area, but the greatest single change in the 15 years this newspaper has been publishing is the growth of and utilization of the Internet and all its related functions, from Googling to e-mail to My Place and things yet unfamiliar to some of us.

Newspapers, at first slow to react to the threat to traditional publishing posed by the Internet, now have embraced the technology and dot-com editions of major newspapers have become de rigueur; indeed, some of the largest papers have virtually separate staffs, one for the ink on paper product, another for the Internet version.

It’s a challenge we face, too. Our core product is The Business Ledger, along with our special publications like Book of Lists, Market Facts, The Small Business Resource Guide, the Guide to Business Philanthropy, and others.

But we too are making that change—necessitated by the new reading habits of a younger class of business owners—to being not a publisher but an information provider.

It’s a slippery slope, maintaining that balance between two competing forms of media while hoping to touch readers of each, but change is a constant in business and we feel confident that we can provide our readers the suburban business news they want in whatever format they want it.

For example, we’re looking into providing information value for readers of our twice-weekly e-mail newsletter, “The Business Edge,” with industry-specific features on the horizon. Our Web site already has been improved and will continue to be tweaked to be more reader-friendly and service-oriented.

“We have brought people together in so many ways and I’m confident that the suburban business community is a better place because of us,” says Elsener.

And we will, as always, seek input from our friends, our readers and our advertisers, many of whom have traveled this path with us for 15 years.