It’s high tech, not food, at Chips & Salsa

GREELEY – Chips & Salsa Inc. sounds like a southwestern specialty-foods store. But rather than tingling the taste buds with spicy concoctions, the partnership stimulates the mind with high-tech multimedia.

By combining their backgrounds in theater and computer programming, Chip and Jennifer Thero have developed a unique service business. The company’s corporate office is in Denver, with production in Greeley. Using the latest technology and a variety of teaching techniques, Chips & Salsa designs and produces custom training packages for individuals and corporations.
“We train front line all the way up to executive level,” Jennifer Thero said. “Right now, it’s mostly corporate training, so it’s everything from customer-service skills to negotiations skills. We’re working on one now on confrontation, as part of a larger series on performance management, which is all about training executives how to manage the people who work for them.”
With her degree in theater and experience in educational development in a corporate environment, Jennifer Thero realizes the need to individualize instruction and feels this gives her company an edge over the competition. Many training programs have been funneled through computer people, who may not understand the need to customize teaching to a particular
audience.
“While there are subject-matter experts, there also needs to be someone who understands training and how people learn,” Thero explained. “Certain learning environments work better for certain people. Some people are visual learners, some are oral learners and others are tactile learners. Multimedia gives all three learners what they need.”
Thero emphasizes the need to include customers in the developmental stage of a project. “Multimedia training is a culture change,” she said, “and we need to know how to present it in a nonthreatening manner.”
By first working with the company on their expectations – that is, what they want to achieve by introducing a training package – Chips & Salsa is able to produce multimedia training adapted to a specific audience.
“We’ll take a company’s existing training course and put it into an interactive multimedia format to make it more effective. We look at what they want it to look like, what they want it to sound like, how it will be delivered,” she added. A final step is setting up a user’s help line, often using the customer’s in-house resources and expertise.
Rather than simply putting a training manual on the computer, Chips & Salsa wants to make the training exciting. The company includes elements of gaming in the program, setting up stakes within the learning environment, scoring on speed and accuracy and giving constant feedback on the learner’s progress.
The uniqueness of their business has presented special problems in product design and development.
“Multimedia training involves a cultural change,” Thero explained. “You have to figure out how to present it in a nonthreatening manner within the confines of the politics and budget of the corporation.”
The company recently completed a mandatory ethics training program for 60,000 employees of Southwestern Bell Telephone. Another project was a 30-minute orientation for new hires of Teletech Inc. in Denver.
When a production is complete, the customer often doesn’t realize the resources required to put it together and make it work. Again aided by her theater background, Thero knows the need to cast the right person in the right role. Just as a theater production needs costume and set designers, light crews, actors and playwrights, the multimedia production needs a diverse cast.
“We need an animator and a graphic artist. We need a programmer, and we need a sound person and a video person. And we need an editor,” Thero said. Much of the input that Chips and Salsa requires for a production comes from subcontracted help. Freelance artists contribute video, audio and interface-design expertise.
As a small company, Chips & Salsa has had to be resourceful in finding the support they need to complete their monumental projects. They work closely with another small company, Laserhead Digital Media Inc. Co-owners Mark Lewis and John Lorenzi provide the graphics and animation for the Chips & Salsa multimedia packages. The products of the two companies don’t compete, and a shared office allows them to collaborate on projects and to limit expenses.
By combining equipment, they were able to minimize startup capital needed. The approximately $100,000. in computer equipment is minimal for the type of work they do; much of this was accumulated over a 10-year period prior to the beginning of Chips & Salsa Inc. or Laserhead Digital Media Inc.
With the multimedia training market secured, Chips & Salsa hopes to take a piece of the entertainment market next. Toward that end, they have been working with Laserhead Digital Media in creating characters for digital comic books. Once the characters are known, it will be easier to work into the multimedia-games market using those familiar characters.
“We’re hoping the digital comic books will allow us to make enough money to go into the regular games. The regular game market is saturated; out of 5,000 titles produced, only 250 get shelf space. Jumping into that market would be almost impossible. This market is much narrower. We’re hoping to create a presence and get these characters known and then develop games based on them.” Lewis said.
With a small team already in Australia, Chips & Salsa plans to open branches in other English-speaking nations before tackling the Asian
market.
“We want to grow and have a core group of people, but not so many that our creative ability becomes mired in management,” Thero said. “We want to be the best content designers there are. For us it’s not about hardware. For us, it’s how
we design and present it. We want to be a company about quality.”
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