Fanning the flames of a brushfire business: the chief executives of this year's Association for Corporate Growth-Denver's Outstanding Corporate Growth Award winners have a lot in common, considering that one runs a systems integration consulting company and one runs a restaurant chain.

• Author: Lewis, David

The two have never met, yet Mac Slingerlend, president and CEO of CIBER Inc., and Kevin Reddy, president and CEO of Noodles & Co., share many of the same traits: fierce pride in their companies and employees; a strong business model; emphasis on corporate culture; and working like crazy but having fun, too.

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Each CEO is a passionate advocate, a powerful communicator, a tireless evangelist. Both seem to be unusually relaxed individuals. Each runs a business that has grown like brushfire.

CIBER, winner of the 2008 Outstanding Corporate Growth Award, built its revenue from $608.3 million in fiscal 2002 to $995.8 million in fiscal 2006. That near-billion clearly tantalized Slingerlend, who on Dec. 6, 2007, announced that to his best reckoning CIBER that day had tallied its billionth dollar.

Noodles & Co., winner of the 2008 Emerging Growth Award, started with one Denver restaurant and today comprises about 180 eateries, 140 company-owned and 40 franchised restaurants. The company is growing at a rate "north of 30 percent," Reddy says. Meantime, Noodles beats industry norms with same-store sales growth in the mid- to high-single digits. This was accomplished without price increases, says Reddy, while "in 2006 we ran high single-digit same-store sales in that year we did it with a price decrease." Unlike CIBER, Noodles is a private business.

ACG awards committee chairman Paul Edwards is a principal of the Denver-based CPA firm of Ehrhardt Keefe Steiner & Hottman PC. He gets excited talking about his own firm and the awards committee's work, and he looks for that passion in the CEOs of the companies the committee reviews each year.

In the beginning, Edwards says, comes the number-crunching. In the end there's "really a gut feeling from our standpoint, and if you look at somebody like a CIBER--they have been around for a long time and have had consistent growth almost through their whole history. You get a pretty good feeling on that."

Toward the end of the process, a dozen or so final candidates are winnowed from, in effect, the universe of Colorado businesses. The committee uses public sources of information such as Securities and Exchange Commission filings and back issues of ColoradoBiz; and it solicits financial data such as profit and revenue numbers from privately held companies.

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"Then you meet Mac (Slingerlend), and you say, 'Yeah.' You get a pretty good feeling from that meeting so, yeah, that...