David Gonzales' dream.

• Author: Rawlings, Irene
• Position: Includes related article on the center's former tenant R.A.M. Sports Inc. - Executive director of the Denver Enterprise Center - Cover Story

The executive director of the Denver Enterprise Center keeps dreaming big. Dreaming and doing.

The first thing David Gonzales does when he comes to work is take off his jacket and roll up his sleeves. That's because he never knows whether he'll be talking business strategies with tenants or Sweeping sawdust off his business incubator's loading dock.

That helps explain why his Denver Enterprise Center tenants call him "David" to his face but "Dr. Gonzales" when they speak of him to other people.

"I can't say enough good things about how this open environment nurtures small business," said center tenant Donna Altieri, of Altieri International Bags. "But the most important thing is, Dr. Gonzales is here to advise and assist."

Plotting business strategies and wielding a broom go hand-in-hand for managers of small business incubators like the Denver Enterprise Center. It's just that Gonzales is so good at both - the dreaming and the doing. Good enough to win last year's National Business Incubation Association's Incubator of the Year award - continuing an amazing streak in which Colorado has won four annual business incubator awards, more than any other state.

Small-business incubators nurture fledgling businesses until they can toddle off on their own. Kind and cruel, an incubator provides tenants a temporary nest, offering low overhead, administrative aid, advice and a collegial atmosphere. Then, in a few years, they're supposed to fly the coop. An incubator measures success by the businesses that leave it, and the center has graduated 72 entrepreneurs who collectively have created more than 1,000 jobs.

By nature, business incubator managers have to be half-visionary, half-practical, part Gandhi, part Bill Gates.

That suits Executive Director Gonzales.

"Any time you take on a big challenge, you almost have to be a visionary," he said. "You have to have a metaphor, a picture that shows you it's moving along just like you hoped. You need to be driven, you got to eat, breathe and sleep it, you got to do everything you can to make it true."

Gonzales - that's "Dr. Gonzales" to the rest of us - is an intense exclamation point of a man with burning eyes, a mile-a-minute mind and a searchlight smile. When he turns his attention to a vision, a problem, a project, obstacles crumble.

At the Denver Enterprise Center that's meant envisioning and executing a series of groundbreaking projects, including the Denver Enterprise Kitchen Center, the pioneering...