Familiar face back in office space.

• Author: Taylor, Mike
• Position: Citron WorkSpaces

Citron WorkSpaces in Louisville is just a 2-year-old company, but owner Kathey Pear is no newcomer.

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Pear left a similar business a decade ago, and the fact that she is back in the office-furniture and design business moves her to wonder, "What are the odds of being able to get back what you had and lost? ... It feels great."

She built Pear Commercial Interiors into one of the top woman-owned companies on the Front Range, with revenues of about $25 million at its peak. The business is still there on Arapahoe and 15th Street in Denver and still sports the pear-shaped logo that she designed, but Pear herself has been gone from there for years.

In 1995, at the age of 43 and just months after giving birth to her daughter, Pear learned she had breast cancer. She sold the company, stayed on for three years under the new ownership while she recovered, and then began a series of ventures with mixed results.

One was TechButler, geared to provide live remote computer support for small businesses and home users. It lasted a couple years until the tech bust.

For a while she sold sound-masking systems, or "white noise," for commercial applications.

"Then I got into the mortgage business for about a year and a half, and that's what convinced me that office furniture was a really high-class profession," Pear says. She laughs when she says it, and it is funny, but it's also clear she means it.

"I missed having real relationships with people," she says.

It's evident that Pear and her staff of 15 know how to cultivate relationships. With revenues of $4.9 million in 2006, Citron Workspaces ranks No. 45 among the ColoradoBiz top 100 woman-owned companies. More notable, Citron posted the most dramatic year-over-year growth among all companies in the ranking, with sales climbing 308 percent from 2005.

Whereas Pear's old business was high-volume with low margins, Citron aims for full service: space-planning, furniture selection and even taking the old furniture off clients' hands and redistributing it to recyclers.

Clients have included Niwot-based Crocs, Boulder clothing manufacturer Fresh Produce Sportswear, and Valleylab, a Boulder-based medical-products developer.

"We're trying to do more intense work with our clients," Pear says. "It's similar to what you're seeing in the (commercial real estate) broker market--kind of the tenant-rep model. We're out to find some good quality customers who appreciate somebody devoting a lot of time and...