Contractors lead minority top 50 resurgence.

• Author: Schwab, Robert
• Position: List

ANNA GARCIA, OWNER AND PRESIDENT OF ANKO Metal Services Inc., testifies to the success of minority-business development programs with a few simple numbers: "Between 2001, when we got our first contract," Garcia said of ANKO's work on T-Rex, the billion-dollar highway project on Interstate 25 through South Denver, "and March, '06, which was our eighth change order, it brings our bottom-line contribution to T-Rex to $18 million."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Garcia and her company are not only testimony to the success of minority-business development programs in general, but to the growth of minority businesses since the 2001 recession devastated their ranks in Colorado.

The ColoradoBiz annual list of Top Minority-owned Businesses this year again contains 50 entries, with 2005 revenues ranging from $2.1 billion for Burt Automotive Network, the list's perennial No. 1 ranked company to Spectrum Services Inc., a Denver engineering and construction firm, that ranked No. 50 with $1.2 million in 2005 revenue. Last year's 50th ranked firm posted just $689,000 in annual revenues.

Still, although ColoradoBiz Managing Editor Mike Taylor contacted more than 1,000 companies in order to build this year's list to a Top 100, as it has been in the past, ColoradoBiz was able to round up only 65 nomination forms, so the list remained at the Top 50 for the fourth year in a row.

Still, the firms that continued to make the list showed improved growth, including Garcia's, which ranked No. 26 in 2006, with $3.9 million in revenue last year, an 11 percent gain from the year before. The three fastest growing companies on the list, which will be honored at the ColoradoBiz annual Minority Business Breakfast, July 26, were:

* Sun Construction Inc., Colorado Springs, a pipeline and site utilities contractor, which posted 165 percent growth in revenues, ranked at No. 11.

* Torix General Contractors, also of Colorado Springs, which posted 155 percent revenue growth over a year, and was ranked No. 3 on the list; and,

* SourceOne Staffing Inc., Wheat Ridge, a temporary staffing service firm that posted 137 percent revenue growth in 2005, ranked No. 43.

Like Garcia's metal fabrication-and-distribution company, as well as Sun Construction and Torix, contractors in the construction industry fared well on the 2006 list. A dozen of the 50 companies were involved in the industry and only one of them was among eight firms that posted a decline in revenues from 2004 to 2005. The others posted gains ranging from ANKO Metals' 11 percent to the 100-plus percent gains posted by the two top fastest growers. The eight firms that showed declining revenues in this year's ranking compared with 10 firms that showed declines in 2005. Overall, revenues of the 50 firms in 2005 grew 12 percent to $2.81 billion total compared with $2.51 billion the previous year.

Garcia's company grew from a first T-Rex contract for providing decorative metal railings and other items for the eight rebuilt bridges in "The Narrows," from Steele to Logan streets along 1-25, to the metal contractor for building the 14 light-rail station pedestrian bridges and bridge towers on each side of the highway that were part of the project, too. She said the general contractor on the six-year project, Southeast Corridor Constructors, just kept trusting ANKO with larger and larger segments of work as her company performed well from the...