CEOs of the year: Mark and Annie Danielson Trinidad couple pours faith, resources into historic Southern Colorado town.

• Author: Taylor, Mike

From a home-based startup in 1991, Danielson Designs in Trinidad has become one of the largest private employers in Las Animas County, but in some ways that success has been merely a means to an end for company founders Mark and Annie Danielson.

Over the past 15 years the couple has poured time, money and faith into reviving not only the economy but the culture and historic prominence of downtown Trinidad, the county seat of about 10,000 residents near the New Mexico border prone to the boom and bust cycles of the coal and natural-gas industries.

Along with employing about 75, the Danielsons' home-decor business generates annual sales of about $10 million on items such as custom picture frames, decorative door hooks and inspirational signs - like the one that reads, "Home is where your story begins," the company's top-selling item by a wide margin.

"We've sold literally hundreds of thousands of units of that piece," says Mark, 47. "It's unbelievable. It just doesn't stop."

That message - "Home is where your story begins" - also sums up the journey of Mark and Annie Danielson, this year's ColoradoBiz CEO of the Year winners, who met as college students at Colorado College in Colorado Springs.

"It's my favorite story in the world," Mark says. "I knew all the rest of her family before I knew her. I was back for her brother's wedding, and she approached her dad when we were all standing around trying on tuxes. She said, Hey dad, are you going to take me out to dinner?' He was busy, so he turns to me and he goes, 'All right, Mark, what are you going to charge me to take my daughter out for the evening?' So he paid me to take her out, and the rest is history."

You think Mark Danielson must be joking about actually getting paid to take out his future wife, but maybe he's not, because Annie laughs and says, "You can understand why I don't like to tell the story."

The two married in 1985 and then moved to Southern California, where Mark built a custom-furniture business and Annie worked as a product developer for a greeting-card company and later as a budget manager for Pepperdine University.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

And then, Mark says, "We started having kids and didn't want to raise them in Los Angeles, We said this is where we want to be."

"This" was Trinidad, where Annie had moved in 1973 as a 13-year-old when her father, Ed Richardson, a former pastor at the giant Calvary Temple in Denver, moved the family and bought some acreage to create a retreat center that he runs today along with serving as pastor of a local non-denominational congregation.

Mark and Annie Danielson found in Trinidad the small-town, family-oriented environment they were looking for in 1990, but they also found a depressed town grappling with the decline in coal mining and 40 percent of the people on some kind of government aid.

Annie's father spoke often to his congregation of the need to be part of the solution to Trinidad's economic woes, and Mark credits his father-in-law fully for the couple's decision to launch a business that would create desperately needed jobs.

"That was when we sensed the call to say, 'All right, what's the business solution to this?'" Mark says. "That's what launched us into business."

Danielson Designs began with Annie designing hand-painted picture frames and Mark building them in their small woodshop. They took the first frames to a trade show in Chicago, knowing nothing about how to market their wares, but the items were such a hit that overnight the challenge became how to ramp up production enough to meet demand and create distribution channels, which put Danielson Designs on the path to becoming one of the Trinidad area's largest private employers. Officially, Mark is president and Annie vice president, "just because we needed to...