Business leaders mildly optimistic about 2004.

• Author: Schwab, Robert
• Position: Roundtable on the Economy - Panel Discussion

Colorado is on the mend. It has suffered through the collapse of the state's telecommunications and technology industries, the loss of 60,000 jobs over two years, and the worst advertising recession in the history of advertising.

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Add to that United Airlines' bank-ruptcy filing, Qwest's restatements of its financials, state-government and widespread municipal budget cuts, and several mergers and departures of corporate headquarters.

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Colorado has endured and puzzled over all those economic blows during the past year, and the strife and confusion of having to deal with those forces may have left business leaders and company owners wondering whether the bloom of the 1990s business expansion could ever resume.

In the face of such adversity and in order to gauge the forecast of what business leaders expect for the Colorado marketplace in 2004, ColoradoBiz conducted a roundtable with business leaders who participated in the magazine's annual industry tour of San Francisco-area technology companies.

The CEOs or other top officers of businesses that are picked Top Companies in our annual Colorado Business Awards competition (August issue) are invited on the tour, which is hosted by Dan Wiesner, CEO of Wiesner Publishing, the parent of ColoradoBiz, and Mariner Kemper, chairman and CEO of UMB Bank Colorado, and a sponsor of the competition.

Both participated in the discussion along with Amy Fuller, CFO of East West Partners, the real estate developer; Mary Beth Lewis, CFO of fast-food restaurant Noodles & Co.; Dave Griset, business manager of Rocky Mountain Steel Mills in Pueblo; Kevin Kanouff, president and general counsel of The Murrayhill Co., a financial services firm that assesses risk in packaged mortgage loans; Sandford W. Rothe, managing partner of the Denver office of Deloitte, also a sponsor of the competition and the accounting firm that analyzes the financials of the firms that enter it; Mark Beese, director of marketing for the law firm Holland & Hart, a contest sponsor as well; Richard Kylberg Jr., president of CCA Inc., a Denver owner of radio stations around the country; and Robert Golightly, chancellor of the Denver campus of Colorado Technical University.

The panelists' affiliations cover a broad spectrum of Colorado's business community. Each panelist's take on the state's economy and its prospects for 2004 can be gleaned from this edited and somewhat reconstructed transcript of the discussion. It starts with a request of each panelist to assess what impact the two-year slowdown has had on his or her business.

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Mariner Kemper, UMB Bank Colorado: As a whole, banking has done very well through this period because of interest rates. Most of the large banks have become finance companies and have gotten into the mortgage business. Wells Fargo went from being a full-service bank to having a portfolio of about 80 percent mortgages. ... My bank, we've done pretty well because we're sort of an A-credit lender.

Because of the recession, corporations have focused on cutting costs and becoming more efficient. So, as we come out of it, there's going to be a really strong movement in corporate profits, and a readiness for change and growth. From a workforce perspective, I hated the go-go years that we were having because I couldn't hire anybody. Now, I'm able to hire. I have people coming in throwing resumes on my desk all day long, every day, so there's a qualified, prepared workforce.

Dave Griset, Rocky Mountain Steel: I don't think (the recession) has had an effect on us. Most of our sales (of molded rails for railroads) go outside the state, 90 percent of our sales. We have for the past several years been selling at capacity. We have a very finite capacity, and we've been at that limit for a good part of the past few years. We are forecasting our manufacturing to stay at capacity. Our biggest problem is the cost of our raw materials. Last year, we had a tremendous year, because we had some reasonable raw materials' costs and energy costs, but this year it's completely opposite, it's just killing us.

We melt a million tons of (scrap) steel every year, anything generated out of Denver. We melted Mile High Stadium. We actually melted that, and turned it into the T-REX rails.

Amy Fuller, East West Partners, which has built resort properties in the mountains, and apartment, townhouse and condominium properties in Downtown Denver: I'd say (the recession) certainly has had its effects, mostly in the Denver area. Our customer base is so completely different in the resorts. What we're doing in the Vail Valley, certainly there's less volume up there, but there's still very consistent demand. That's a segment of customers that really hasn't seen enough erosion of their income to change the fact that they still want a vacation home.

But for real people, people looking for their primary home, people are being a lot more selective. You can't just put out a quality product and expect people to gobble it up. They're doing a lot more comparison shopping, and you really have to explain all the benefits of your product--a lot more than you've had to for quite a few years.

We have three (real estate)...