Colorado on the mend still: economic roundtable strikes familiar tune.

• Author: Schwab, Robert
• Position: Panel Discussion

COLORADO MUST BE A SLOW HEALER. Last year, the ColoradoBiz economic forecast, a discussion with executives drawn from winners of the magazine's Top Company competition, concluded that "Colorado is on the mend."

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This year, after a spring fling at business growth and then a new summer slowdown, a new set of executives interviewed during an economic roundtable sounded somewhat frustrated by the lack of umphhh behind Colorado's recovery from the 2001 national recession.

Yes, two years after the recession, Colorado businesses were still showing slow job growth; difficulty in signing on new clients and earning new cash from old clients; but generating at least some growth from improved operational effeciencies.

Panelists for the ColoradoBiz annual economic roundtable are drawn from the management teams of winners of the magazine's annual Top Company awards competition, as well as hosts and their guests of a California industry tour that is awarded as a prize in the Top Company competition.

This year's panelists included Jeff Oxley, director of operations for Swingle Tree & Lawn Care; Tom Saurey, owner, president and CEO of Tuff Shed Inc.; John Pritchard, president, Flatirons Solutions Corp.; Bowen Banbury, president and CEO, DocuVault; John C. Greenwood, founder, managing member, Proxy Partnerships and a director and shareholder in Mphasis Integrated; Rick Everist, president, CEO, L.G. Everist Inc.; Dan Wiesner, CEO, Wiesner Publishing, publisher of ColoradoBiz; Mariner Kemper, chairman and CEO, UMB Bank; Sandy Rothe, managing partner, Deloitte; and Mark Beese, director of marketing, Holland & Hart.

Their forecast is contained in this edited transcript of the roundtable:

CoBiz: What kind of year did you have and what kind of year are you looking forward to?

Jeff Oxley, Swingle Tree: We had a tremendous first five months, probably the best five months that we had in the history of the company. Good sales, good profits, phone calls coming in. Spending was to a level that was (in the) '99 to 2000 range, where it didn't matter how much you would charge people. They didn't care, they didn't care how long it would take to get the services done. If you told them six weeks, and you showed up in four weeks, you were the best person out there.

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After May though, we really started to see calls slow down. We increased marketing, probably by 30 percent to keep the phone calls coming in, to get bids, estimates, being creative on how to get additional work out there.

The last five months, May to October, we have gone through layoffs, we've released some people. Calls have been at an all-time low. We've instituted a telemarketing program to try to generate leads, try to generate estimates, we've put together a quality-assurance program where we're calling our customers back after every job, saying, "How'd we do? Did we do things that we said we were going to do? Is there anything else that we can do for you?" We've instituted marketing programs at the crew level; crews are now what we call "butterflying," or door-hanging five houses on each side of a job that they complete to try to get a grass roots effort to try to get the leads to come in. We've gone through a strategic-planning session for us that will hopefully lead us into the next five years. For us to be able to grow, both in profit and sales, we feel that we're going to have to go into other geographic markets, whether it's the northwest quadrant of Denver, Longmont or Fort Collins.

We're looking at some acquisitions up in the Fort...