Current Issue
June 2009 Issue
Cover Story
50 Colorado companies: Fueling the economic fire
However many billions the federal government pumps into the economy, one truth rings clear: It will be business that will lift the country out of the doldrums and thrust it forward into the 21st century.
Here are 50 companies you can expect to help lead the way. These Colorado Companies to Watch are second-stage entrepreneurial enterprises that are investing in people, technology, infrastructure and their communities as they build their businesses.
And what a diverse collection of products and services they produce: craft beer, medicine, information technology,...
Articles
The economist: The law of unintended consequences
By Tucker Hart AdamsBack when I took college physics, I learned Newton’s Third Law of Motion: Every action has an equal and opposite reaction. I’m not sure that holds in economics. In fact, a better statement may be: Many actions have a totally unexpected and unequal reaction. Let’s call this the Law of Unintended Consequences.
One of the most fascinating examples of the Law of Unintended Consequences is what occurred after the reform of bankruptcy laws in 2005. Between 1980 and 2004, a period when the population of the United States increased by 29 percent, personal bankruptcy filings...
READERS respond: July 2009
NO QUOTA IN ADA AND AMENDMENTS
In response to Theodore A. Olsen’s guest column regarding the ADA Amendments Act (“Redefining Disability,” April), we at the DBTAC Rocky Mountain ADA Center offer the following points as pulled directly from the language of the Americans With Disabilities Act and the ADA Amendments Act:
* The ADA and the Amendments Act seek to ensure access to equal employment opportunities based on merit. They do not guarantee equal results, establish quotas or require preferences favoring individuals with disabilities over those without disabilities.
...Colorado Cool Stuff: DERAILED INK T-SHIRTS
By Eric PetersonLast fall, Rob Bell and John McCaskill saw their careers get, well, derailed. They also saw it as a great opportunity to start a business. “We were both unemployed and wanted to do something different that was creative,” Bell says.
The resulting business, the aptly named DeRailed Ink, began with one humorous sports T-shirt—“What Would JC Do?”— with an artistic, fair-use image of a certain former Broncos quarterback. Bell and McCaskill got a permit and sold them in front of Mile High on game days. Next up was another Bronco design, “Eddie Royale with Cheese,” followed...
State of the state: Boulder’s Intrepid Travel named No. 1 place to work in U.S. by Outside magazine
By Dan RayEven for a company designed to lead people “off the beaten track,” Intrepid Travel’s employment policies are a bit hard to come by in the work-a-day world.
Four weeks of annual paid vacation, free public transportation passes, paid days off for volunteering, monthly potluck lunches, weekly at-work happy hours and even a “bring your pet to work” day are among the reasons that Intrepid Travel’s Boulder office has been honored by Outside magazine as the best place to work in America.
Outside compiled its second annual “Best Places to Work” list after a yearlong research...
Executive edge: John Lester
By Lynn BronikowskiJohn Lester’s career and life started on the same day – July 10, 1986.
That was the day he landed his first job – at the prestigious Boettcher & Co. – freshly armed with an MBA from the Daniels School of Business at the University of Denver.
It also was the day the Greeley native who had been plagued with kidney disease since his undergraduate days at DU got a phone call from University Hospital. They had found a kidney match, bringing to a close exhaustive dialysis treatments.
Photo by Todd Nakashima
“That kidney lasted 17 years, and I’ve been through several bear...
On management: So you want to start a business?
By Pat WiesnerIn the early ’80s, things got tough for the Wiesner family. I was working for a medium-sized publishing company. A pretty good company. I was its president, doing well, but I wasn’t happy.
I don’t remember exactly why, but looking back it was probably because underneath it all I didn’t like the way I was being president. I was looking for trouble, and I got in an argument with the chairman about money. Specifically my pay (which really wasn’t that bad looking back on it now). It escalated into a stand-up shouting match in which he fired me and I quit at almost the...
Small biz tech-startup: Advanced Regenerative Therapies
By Eric PetersonINITIAL LIGHT BULB:
The genesis of Advanced Regenerative Therapies came when Colorado State University experts cross-pollinated their expertise in tissue regeneration and equine orthopedics. Dr. John Kisiday, who specializes in the former, came to CSU in 2005 and connected with Dr. Dave Frisbie, a specialist in the latter at CSU’s Equine Orthopaedic Research Center. Frisbie and Kisiday work at the center, a clinical and basic science group founded by Dr. Wayne McIlwraith, the director of orthopaedic research at CSU.
T.K. Pope, Dr. John Kisiday, Dr. Dave Frisbie and...
State of the state: Brewing
By Jay DedrickWhen we talk American craft beer, you’re likely thinking in terms of Americans enjoying American-brewed beers from small (less than 2 million barrels of beer brewed annually), independent brewers.
How about those same beers being enjoyed by suds lovers on the other side of the globe? Sure, you take for granted seeing European beers here in the States, but imagine finding a Left Hand Milk Stout in a watering hole in Stockholm.
Left Hand president and co-founder Eric Wallace imagined just that, then went out and made it happen. He developed his passion for quality beer...
Telluride Bluegrass Festival returns June 18 to 21
By Mike CoteOver its 35-year history, the Telluride Bluegrass Festival has stretched the boundaries of bluegrass by booking bands you might not associate with banjos, mandolins and fiddles. But when rock acts make the trek to the mountain town they catch the bluegrass bug.
This year, Elvis Costello will be employing an all-star bluegrass band when he and the Sugarcanes perform at the 36th annual four-day festival. The new supergroup Works Progress Administration features members of Nickel Creek, Toad the Wet Sprocket, the Heartbreakers and the Imposters. Inspired collaborations...
Colorado’s public companies reflect, defy recession’s ill effects
Publicly traded companies based in Colorado showed the effects of the recession in 2008, with moves out of state, mergers and bankruptcies combining to push 15 companies off this year’s Top 100 Public Companies ranking.
The most visible absence this year is Frontier Airlines, which filed for bankruptcy protection in April 2008. Originally scheduled to submit a reorganization plan on June 4, the airline in May asked the U.S. Bankruptcy Court for a deadline extension to Oct. 9, The Denver Post reported.
Overall, nearly half – 48 – of the companies in the ranking...
Cote’s Colorado: Colorado clean tech goes to Washington
By Mike CoteForget that schism between Wall Street and Main Street. If you want money these days, you’ll find your bankers at the nation’s capital, especially if you’re a clean-tech company from the state whose governor swears he coined the phrase “New Energy Economy.”
The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act includes $61.3 billion for clean energy initiatives, including renewable energy, energy efficiency, updating the electrical grid and energy research projects plus billions more in tax incentives. You can bet the state where President Barack Obama flew in to sign the...
Small biz: Redemption for Wile E. Coyote
By Mike TaylorEarly last month a co-worker and I watched with fascination from my third-floor office window as a coyote ambled across our business park in the middle of the Denver Tech Center. Stopping at the edge of Greenwood Plaza Boulevard, the coyote waited for a lull in traffic, then loped across the four-lane road.
Fishing in my desk drawer for my camcorder, I bolted down three flights of stairs, dashed outside and across the street. From about 75 feet away, I zoomed in as the coyote chewed some food under a picnic table. Maybe this was the animal’s usual early afternoon...
Sustainability spotlight: Goodwill Industries of Denver
By Kyle RingoMost people recognize Goodwill Industries of Denver by the nonprofit’s 18 retail stores selling secondhand goods, but that arm of the organization only serves the greater mission of helping members of the community reach their full potential.
Toward that end, Goodwill has started an Energy Workforce Program at East and Montbello high schools. The program is aimed at preparing students for an expected influx of jobs in the state with renewable energy companies drawn here by tax incentives offered in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act from the Obama...
Rundles wrap-up: Be wary of cheap
By Jeff RundlesWhen I was in college at the University of Denver in the 1970s, my friends and I liked to enjoy a few beers. Then a few more. And a few more after that. But, being the college students we were, and on budgets and all, we had a “quantity versus quality” point of view.
At the time, a case of Coors could be had for $4.99, including tax, which sounds like a good price, but in reality was the equivalent of the $20-plus a case Rocky Mountain Spring Water goes for now. So to supplement our quantity, and to stretch our meager resources, we got a case of good Coors for round...
Colorado Cool Stuff: Optic Nerve Eyeque
By Eric PetersonThe company behind the $50 pair of technical sunglasses, Optic Nerve was founded in the early 1980s. In the late 2000s, its catalog keeps on growing. After debuting a line of ski goggles in January, the company is expanding its biking eyewear this summer with the cutting-edge Eyeque and several other styles. Optic Nerve is sponsoring the all-day, all-night 24 Hours of ERock (www.elephantrockride.com), a June 5-6 distance race around Elephant Rock in Palmer Lake.
“The Eyeque is ideal for 24 Hours of ERock,” says company spokesperson Gregory Niver, because riders won’t...
Sports biz: Draw play
By Stewart SchleyWhen the Denver Broncos played for the first time in 1960, players took the field in uniforms that were (with apologies to Pat Bowlen) predominantly mustard. The Broncos, one of eight ragamuffin teams in the newly formed American Football League, suited up in mud-colored pants topped with pale yellow jerseys and brown helmets.
General manager Dean Griffing, a notorious cheapskate, bought them on the cheap from a defunct Arizona team, according to Broncos lore. The team would have looked perfectly ordinary, a nondescript collegiate team from the Midwest, if it wasn’t...
Colorado Cool Stuff: Bouré bicycle clothing
By Eric PetersonDrew Bourey started Bouré in Tucson in 1988 after a two-week crash course from a friend. Bourey, who was racing bikes at the time, moved his fledgling manufacturer to Durango a year later and partnered with Ned Overend to make jerseys, shorts, tights and other clothing, slowly and steadily growing the business.
In the 1990s, however, “The screws got tightened on domestic manufacturing,” Bourey says. “We never really had the desire or the size to go offshore. Luckily for us, the Internet popped up around this time.” Bourey successfully steered the company into direct...
VC is out there – if you’ve got the right stuff
By Mary ButlerThe good news is venture capitalists are still funding Colorado startups. The bad news is VCs are taking far fewer risks.
Entrepreneurs need to create business plans that require less money; they need to do more bootstrapping; and most of all, they need to have real customers and real profits.
These were among the messages of four venture capitalists, who spoke at the 21st Annual Colorado Capital Conference on May 12 as part of a panel titled, “The State of Colorado Venture Capital – Active Investors in Today’s Market.” The Capital Conference is for investors,...
The economist: It’s a puzzlement
By Tucker Hart Adams“It’s a puzzlement,” sang Yul Brenner in “The King and I,” as he tried to understand the differences between East and West. Alan Greenspan chose a different word in testimony before the House Finance Committee more than four years ago. He talked about the “conundrum” of the unanticipated behavior of world bond markets.
Long-term rates were falling, even though the Federal Reserve was increasing short-term rates, flattening and eventually inverting the yield curve (the spread between short and long rates on securities with a similar degree of risk).
Whether we call...
Too much beetle wood ain’t enough
By Allen BestIn Vail, the specter of dead and dying lodgepole pine trees presents both adversity and opportunity. Mountain bark beetles, always present in forests but in epidemic proportions since 1996, have turned adjacent slopes the color of cheaply dyed hair, the needles of dying trees a dull red verging on orange.
Worried about public reaction, town officials several years ago even considered using Photoshop to remove the dying trees from marketing materials.
But even before the full trauma of forest change was evident, a small delegation had returned from the Alps convinced...
Guest column: The end of advertising as we know it
By Pasquale “Pocky” MarranzinoAs Mick Jagger sings in the Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil,” please allow me to introduce myself …
My name is Pasquale “Pocky” Marranzino Jr. I am co-president of Karsh & Hagan, a 32-year-old advertising agency headquartered a long home run north of Coors Field. I have been practicing my craft for 36 years, and I have worked on a number of household names locally, regionally and nationally.
I am flattered to be invited to write a marketing column for this publication. My goal is to give you a glimpse of what’s going on in the area of commercial persuasion;...
State of the state: Restaurants
By Mike TaylorDespite a 22.7 percent revenue increase in a year that clobbered other restaurant chains, Chipotle Mexican Grill announced on April 1 a trial run of a new menu in its Denver-area restaurants featuring smaller portions and cheaper prices.
An April Fool’s joke? No, but fans of Chipotle’s giant burritos can be excused for wondering if the Denver-based chain is messing with a good thing after a year in which it opened 136 new restaurants to bring its total to more than 830 stores and generated $78 million in profits. Through April 15, Chipotle’s stock price was up 17.9...
State of the state: Economy
By Mike CoteA few things are certain in life: death, taxes and financial bubbles, be they tech stocks or subprime mortgages.
A panel that convened in Denver in April as part of the annual convention of the Society of American Business Writers and Editors pondered how to look for the next financial bubble and whom to blame for the one that fueled the biggest financial meltdown since World War II.
Up until the 1990s, housing prices roughly kept pace with inflation for a hundred years. So it shouldn’t have been difficult to determine that something was amiss when they radically...
Who owns Colorado: Telluride
By David LewisIn this state, Telluride vies only with Aspen and maybe Vail when it comes to glamour and glitz: Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes, Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf and now Jerry Seinfeld. Oprah.
Need more be said?
Telluride was and is more or less a remote little mountain town in a box canyon with Bridal Veil Falls at one end, noted as seat of San Miguel County, which is still a jurisdiction without a stop light, and for its wild silver mining days and its downtown Telluride Historic District.
To condense Telluride history a bit, there was mining, then came skiing, then came the...
