Minority standouts see local upturn: second careers, stay-at-home moms and home-based businesses obviously have something going for them, because that description fits the two top-growing firms in this year's ColoradoBiz ranking of the state's Top 50 minority-owned companies.

• Author: Taylor, Mike
• Position: DatamanUSA

Nidhi Saxena quit her day-job five years ago and launched the IT consulting firm DatamanUSA out of her home so she could spend time with her two young children. Diane Pacheco was a stay-at-home mom with a background in gene-therapy research when she and her recently laid-off husband, Darryl Hoogstrate, started the IT-based recruiting and staffing firm Innovar Group out of their house four years ago.

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Fast forward, and Saxena's DatamanUSA boasted revenues of $1.2 million last year representing an improvement of 443 percent compared to 2003, the most dramatic revenue increase of any firm in this year's minority-owned Top 50.

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Just behind Dataman in terms of growth among the ranked firms was Pacheco's Innovar Group, with an improvement of 316 percent on revenues of $1.6 million last year.

Safe to say, neither company is run out of anyone's house anymore. DatamanUSA, which was profiled as the top grower among women-owned companies in the May issue of ColoradoBiz, now has 23 employees in Denver and Cheyenne, Wyo. Gyan Saxena, Nidhi's husband, became a 40 percent partner two years ago and is the firm's COO.

Innovar group employs 25 at its Greenwood Village office. It's those employees, primarily salespeople and recruiters, who Pacheco credits for her company's emergence.

"We really couldn't have grown as quickly as we have without them," she says, giving specific credit to sales directors Tami Gravina and Bryan Sorrentino. "It's very important that they build a relationship (with clients), get to know what the company culture is, what the company's needs are."

Pacheco is Innovar Group's president, while her husband, Hoogstrate, is the managing partner. They launched the company with savings of about $100,000 after Hoogstrate was laid off from his job as staffing director of a local tech firm in 2001. For the first 1 1/2 years they ran their new business out of their house.

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"That was really, I think, the kick in the pants for Diane and me," Hoogstrate says of his layoff. "We had wanted to start our own firm for years. Even though the market was upside-down, our thinking at that point was that a lot of the competition had closed their doors and/or had moved into other lines of business, and so we saw an opportunity."

Having survived the tech downturn, Innovar is reaping the benefits now that companies are starting to spend again. "We've added clients and we're seeing a lot of budgets open up in the local economy, specifically in IT," Hoogstrate says. "And that's nice, because the budgets had been pretty well squashed recently. We've placed some recruiters onsite at bigger companies in town, and we've seen an uptick in the hiring of human-resources people as well. That's an indication that the budgets are opening up."

While the success of Innovar and DatamanUSA is inspiring, their growth is not more surprising than that of the third-fastest grower among minority-owned companies, Robert Outland's Denver-based firm MOA Architectural Partnership.

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Dramatic upturns most often come from young companies that find their niche and hit their stride after initial struggle. But Outland's firm is 25 years old, yet had its best year ever in 2004, with revenues of $5.8 million that represented an improvement of 128 percent over the previous year. Outland credits a surge in school construction for his company's healthy revenues in 2004.

His architectural firm employs 25 people, including 16 licensed architects. The company's specialty is school design, and last year MOA did a lot of that, landing contracts for designing five schools in the Denver, Aurora and Jefferson County school districts.

"We had some slow years," Outland says. "The economy was down in 2001 and 2002. It picked up faster for us, I think, than for some of the other architectural firms in town due to us getting these school jobs."

Looking at 2005, Outland isn't sure his company can duplicate last year's revenues, but he does think MOA's crown jewel in school design might end up being a facility in Colorado Springs currently under development: a full-campus elementary-through-high school called Discovery Canyon that will eventually serve more than 3,000 students.

MOA's reputation in school design has been years in the making. "We started doing schools after about four years and just developed relationships with school districts," Outland says. "We really got to know and understand how to design schools. Due to the relationships we've built through the years we've just been able to really be successful in that market."

Along with schools, MOA also specializes in designing ice arenas. The company's credits include the design work for the Colorado Avalanche's practice facility, along with ice arenas in New Jersey and other states, and most recently The Edge Arena for the Foothills Recreation District in Littleton.

"There's certain things you need to kind of know,"...