Check please! Open Scan Technologies develops software for invoicing.

• Author: Schley, Stewart
• Position: Attitude at altitude

To get to the airy, sunlit second-floor offices of Open Scan Technologies, you first squeeze into a dark, cramped elevator that betrays a faint scent of last night's beer.

Open Scan, which sells software that helps companies process checks and invoices, is located at the intersection of Colfax Avenue and York Street, above the Bank Bar & Grill. The puzzling juxtaposition of a longstanding Denver bar and a new-age, high-flying software company seems perfectly suited to the temperament of founder and owner Nadine Lange, a brassy entrepreneur whose "ready-fire-aim" business sensibility has helped her outwit bigger, badder rivals--and emerge as the leader in a fast-growing category.

In 2007, the wisecracking Lange will have her best year ever since starting Open Scan on a hunch in 1998. Revenues could nearly double, to around $10 million, and even after completing a dazzling redo of her funky Colfax Avenue workspace, Lange already is hunting for bigger digs to accommodate the young software developers and support staff she calls her "characters."

It's a stark departure from the way Lange's world looked barely more than two years ago, when she sold her house to make payroll. "I woke up at the age of 55 and had nothing," she says.

It wasn't because Lange's business was reeling. Lange's close call happened because she'd been investing the company's own cash to grow. With no bank financing, she nearly ran out of money. But Lange had been in tough circumstances before.

Like in 1998, when Lange showed up at a Chicago conference room to show managers of North Carolina's child-support payment program how the software she and a partner had conceived could dramatically speed the processing time associated with the payments that flooded the state's offices every week. Lange had set up a demonstration designed to sell a roomful of skeptics on a brand-new way to handle the core function of their operations--even though in truth, the thing was rigged: She hadn't written a single line of code.

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"It was probably the most stressful moment of my life," Lange says. But she got the contract--over objections from the bigger incumbent, Texas-based Electronic Data Systems Inc.--and now has similar deals to support childcare payment processing for 15 other states.

That sort of handle-the-pressure attitude is a Nadine Lange signature, says John Polk, a vice president with Affiliated Computer Systems Inc., a technology outsourcing company that uses...