CEO of the year: Mike Gilliland applies hard-earned lessons to Sunflower Farmers Markets.

• Author: Taylor, Mike
• Position: Chief executive officer

Mike Gilliland walks--limps, actually--through the produce section of the newly opened Sunflower Farmers Market in Lafayette at 8:30 in the morning, shaking hands and saying hello to a few employees next to neatly stacked peppers and tomatoes. Gilliland seems to know them all, and they know him, probably because they're part of the team that is deployed to get new stores up and running, and there have been a lot of those, an average of eight a year.

Gilliland, the 2010 ColoradoBiz CEO of the Year, launched Sunflower Farmers Markets in 2002 with a no-frills feel and the slogan "Serious Food ... Silly Prices." Since then the Boulder-based grocery chain has grown to 32 stores in six Southwest markets, including 12 in Colorado, with plans to enter California, near Sacramento, in early in 2011.

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Up until 18 months ago, Sunflower's same-store sales were in double digits. That's slowed to low single digits amid the recession, some cannibalization with Sunflower stores vying with each other, outside competitors such as Sprouts moving in, and traditional supermarkets dropping prices on produce to compete.

Still, largely on the strength of new-store growth, Sunflower's sales increased about 50 percent from 2008 to 2009 and are up 35 percent this year over 2009. Sunflower President and Chief Operating Officer Chris Sherell expects sales to increase another 20 percent to 25 percent in 2011.

On this early Monday in November at the Lafayette store, about half an hour passes before Gilliland explains that his slight limp is the result of a hike into the Grand Canyon with a buddy a few days earlier. "Three hours down and five hours up," he says.

That Grand Canyon descent and re-emergence doesn't exactly mirror Gilliland's 25-year career in the natural-foods business, but it'll do as an analogy. Gilliland and then-wife Libby Cook got into the natural-foods retail business in the mid-'80s somewhat accidentally, buying a convenience store on University Hill in Boulder they found while browsing the "Opportunities" section of the newspaper.

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"I was just looking for something I could run," he says. "We found a little convenience store, and it started from there. I didn't have any predisposition toward the food business or the grocery business before that."

The Gillilands and their business partner bought a few more Boulder stores, with varying degrees of success. In 1987 they acquired Crystal Market, which specialized...