CONNECT Founders’ Tie Paid Off
Chamber Honors Small Business
By Robert Schwab, Denver Post Business Writer
About a year after Maureen Clarry and Kelly Gilmore started their information technology staffing company in 1992, both were very pregnant. When they made sales calls together, clients would look at them and say, “Oh, bookends!”
With clients didn’t know then was how important those sales calls were to each of the two women’s families.
Each made the primary income in their families at the time they quit their jobs to start CONNECT:The Knowledge Network Inc., their Littleton firm.
It was eight moths later when, within two weeks of each other, each learned she was pregnant.
On Friday, Clarry and Gilmore stood together again to accept their designation by the South Metro Denver chamber of Commerce as small business of the year.
Their company, which now generates $7 million in annual revenues, was one of 20 firms nominated for the award.
“We did set out to make an award-winning company,” Gilmore told chamber members at a lunch at the Hilton Denver Tech South. “But we never thought we’d win an award.”
CONNECT took its cue from those early days when both women were pregnant and yet persisted in their dream to create a business that supplemented rather than destroyed their family lives, both said in an interview.
As space for their company of now 17 employees diminished, first in the Gilmores’ bedroom where CONNECT started, then in the Clarrys’ basement where it moved, the pair kept in mind that they quit jobs as IT professionals with GE because they wanted to create a company where they controlled the time they could spend with their children.
So when they bought and restored the old St. Mary’s convent at 5602 S. Nevada St., Littleton, they converted a stand-alone b building on the lot into an on-site day-care center for their own and their employees’ children.
That “family-friendly” management helped win the award for the pair.
The South Metro chamber, which has made a tradition of serenading their business-of-the-year winners, sang this lyric to the women, to the tune of Ricky Martin’s “livin la Vida Loca”:
“They had a complication right from the start, babies in quick succession, but clients had a heart.”
But both Gilmore and Clarry made it clear in their interview that the “soft” parts of their story the convent renovation, the day care, their pregnancies & were not the elements that made a success of their firm, which has many competitors in Denver’s high-tech-crazed market.
Gilmore said the pair have crafted teams of high-tech programmers, database administrators and others to the specific needs of their customers.
Lately, they have also acted as headhunters for large-company executive searches, placing people with Rhythms NetConnections and with Level 3 Communications Inc.
Three other finalists were named in the South Metro Chamber competition: CoCal Landscape, a minority-owned firm; Microtech-Tel Inc., founded by Sam V. Koumar, an immigrant from India; and Sandhill Scientific Inc., a booming medical technology manufacturer.