Vocal point.

• Author: Schley, Stewart
• Position: SPORTS biz

Sit down, says Steve Patterson, who played tight end 20 years ago for his high school in Cortez, Colo. Sit down and let's talk.

Mid-morning sunshine streams through a tinted window at Patterson's Highlands Ranch office as he settles into a comfortable chair. A copy of Sun Tzu's sixth-century manifesto, "The Art of War," sits on a bookcase nearby. For an hour, Patterson talks about his work and his philosophy of work: how he'd prefer that an employee rip up the ski slopes on a Sunday afternoon and drive home Monday, rather than grind through the traffic Sunday evening on 1-70. How there's no dress code at his company and no ordained vacation: Better to hire great people and trust them to figure out their own work schedules--and what to wear. How he insists his software developers work on something other than their day jobs on Fridays, so long as they tell their colleagues about what they discovered.

As Patterson talks, his voice fluctuates in volume and pitch. Chatting about the Rockies' Ubaldo Jimenez, his tone is bright but measured. Talking about the importance of achieving purpose in work and life, Patterson's words take on a sort of urgency, quickening as if they were spoken in italics.

To Patterson, there's something essential about the human voice that no e-mail, text message or 140-character Tweet can replicate. Cadence, emotion and the revealing interlude of a brief silence are too often absent in an age of hastily typed communication, he thinks. What we really crave are qualities of conversation: the opportunity to hear another person's voice, to decode its rhythms and its timbre, to reply with our own thoughts.

Patterson and his partners have bootstrapped their company, Broadnet Teleservices, on just that: the fundamental appeal of human conversation. With at least $15 million in revenue anticipated for 2010, the 30-employee business is one of the fastest-growing in Colorado. Patterson is its president and CEO, and sports are a big driver of its growth.

Combining auto-calling and Web-based technologies, Broadnet creates "Town Hall" meetings over the telephone, uniting thousands of participants in live conversations led by notable figures in politics, sports and business. An example: In March, Broadnet arranged a live call between more than 10,000 season ticket holders of the NFL's Jacksonville Jaguars and the team's general manager. The subject was whether the Jaguars should spend a first-round draft pick on former University...