I want [insert your company here] to be among the U.S.' top 500 companies within five years.

How would you define the top companies in the U.S.? Every year Fortune publishes its highly regarded Fortune 500, a list of the top 500 companies in the U.S. by revenue. For investors, though, is that really how you would define the top companies? While the revenue a business brings in is important, it should never be the gauge for the success of a business or management team. As an investor, I believe the most important measure for investors is the return a company earns on the cash it invests. Read on for a better method of defining the top companies in the U.S., a look at the top 10, and a surprising quality that six of the top 10 share.

The top 500 companies in the U.S.
To be fair to Fortune, the Fortune 500 is not meant to define the leading companies in the world, only to "serve as a snapshot of the state of American Business." As Fortune's Allan Sloan stated last year, "The 500 is based on U.S. based companies' publicly reported revenues, not on any quality-based metrics: You get high-grade companies like Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway (No. 7) nestled near utter dogs like Fannie Me (No. 5.)."

To construct a quality-based list of the top 500 companies in the U.S. I focused on what's really important for investors to pay attention to:

  1. The amount of cash a company generates: free cash flow.
  2. How much capital it took to earn that cash: pre-tax return on invested capital.

Free cash flow
To select the top 500 publicly traded companies in the U.S., I started with the 500 companies with the largest free cash flows as of the end of 2011. Free cash flow is what a company has left over at the end of the year after paying for all the salaries, bills, interest on debt, and taxes, and after making capital expenditures to expand the business. It is the gold standard by which to measure the profitability of a company's operations.

The list was then rank ordered by the companies' five-year average pre-tax return on invested capital. As business guru Jim Collins recently opined, "In sports, your team has to win championships, or it really can't be called a great team. In business, the measure is financial -- return on invested capital. I think that, to be considered great, a company must have sustained returns on invested capital substantially in excess of other companies in its industry."

This one-size-fits-all calculation cuts out many of the legal accounting tricks (such as excessive debt) that managers use to boost earnings numbers, and provides you with an apples-to-apples way to evaluate businesses, even across industries.

By ranking the companies by pre-tax ROIC, companies that earn their investors notable returns are highlighted, not just companies that increase their capital base. The few companies with greater than +500% or -500% ROICs were reduced to 500% to limit the effects of abnormally low invested capital. 

The resulting list is a qualitative look at the top 500 publicly traded companies in the U.S. While nowhere near perfect, it is intended to be representative of the 500 best performing publicly traded businesses today. In the top 10, there are some surprises but also some of the names you might expect such as Apple and Mastercard. For the full 2012 Value Investor 500, click here.

2012 Value Investor 500 Top 10

1

Terra Nitrogen (NYSE: TNH)

Sells fertilizers ammonia and urea ammonium nitrate. The commodities have taken off in demand and price over the past few years, while one of Terra's biggest costs -- natural gas -- has cratered in price. The company has been reaping the rewards.

2

Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL)

Surprised Apple's not No. 1? The largest company in the U.S. by market cap has been dominating the consumer electronics markets the past few years with iPhones, iPods, iPads, MacBooks, and more.

3

Altera (Nasdaq: ALTR)

Leader in the programmable logic chip device industry. The company eschews the top-of-the-line chips and focuses on niche markets, which have less competition and higher margins.

4

Mastercard (NYSE: MA)

The second largest payment processor in the U.S. behind Visa.

5

Apollo Group (Nasdaq: APOL)

For-profit education company that runs the University of Phoenix.

6

Accenture

Management consulting, technology services, and outsourcing services firm. With minimal real assets besides its people, Accenture is a cash flow machine.

7

TD AMERITRADE 

One of the top online discount brokers. The company has been buying back shares over the past few years, and it began paying a dividend last year.

8

Moody's 

The largest providers of debt-rating services and analysis, with nearly 40% market share in the U.S.

9

ITT Educational

Education company that runs ITT Technical Institutes around the U.S.

10

Linear Technology 

Provides integrated circuits that enable gadgets in cars, computers, iPhones, and even the Mars rover.

For the full 2012 Value Investor 500, click here.

The surprising quality that six of the top 10 share
I mentioned earlier that six of these 10 companies all have a surprising quality. It's that they are recommendations of Motley Fool investing services: Apple, Accenture, TD AMERITRADE, Linear Technology, Moody's, and Mastercard round out the list.

My recommendation to you is to check out the full 2012 Value Investor 500 and let me know what you think in the comments section below. If you are looking for more, we recently singled out three Value Investor 500 stocks in a free report called "3 American Companies Set to Dominate the World." These three companies all have strong brands, generate large amounts of free cash flow, and have high ROIC.