Rebound lands BCInteriors high on Mercury 100 list

FORT COLLINS – Scott Cooper’s tenure as sales manager with BCInteriors Inc. could not have begun at a worse time.

The worldwide downturn in the technology sector, combined with the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, decimated the U.S. economy’s office employment sector, the market upon which BCInteriors depends for its sales, design and space-planning services.

“I came in right at the end of the dot-bomb,” Cooper said, referring to partial collapse of the Internet-based economy. “There were some pretty lean years … some very lean years.”

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The company that was launched in Boulder in 1978 and now is in Fort Collins survived, and in the past three years has begun to prosper again. In fact, since 2004 BC has tripled sales, landing in the No. 3 spot on the Northern Colorado Business Report’s Mercury 100 list of fastest-growing private companies.

Cooper and BC have been on a roll during the past two years, with major contracts with large employers up and down the northern Front Range.

When Colorado State University received a $20 million gift from philanthropist Pat Stryker to pay for the job of rebuilding Hughes Stadium, the football venue tucked against the foothills west of the city, BC was there for a piece of the pie.

The contract to furnish the luxury skyboxes, dining areas and common spaces in the multistory remake of Hughes’ west side represented a big part of BC’s 2005 growth.

Working with Fort Collins design firm Aller-Lingle Architects PC, BCInteriors gave Hughes a finishing touch with furnishings that fit the setting.

“That was a great project for us,” Cooper said. “We were involved from the very beginning with Aller-Lingle. … I think the university did a really good job with the money they had available.”

The following year brought more projects: Cooper, working from his Fort Collins headquarters in conjunction with BCInteriors owner Chris Mabbit, landed a contract for furniture and space design services for the Boulder headquarters of Noodles & Co., the fast-growing, Asian-style restaurant chain. Also last year, BC contracted with the Urology Center of Colorado, one of metro Denver’s largest medical practices, to furnish its new building just north of Invesco Field.

“That was a huge project,” Cooper said. “We did three floors of furniture.”

The success that BCInteriors is finding in the Front Range market is in keeping with statistics that the trade group representing office furniture manufacturers compiles.

The years 2001 and 2002, when the recession was bottoming out, saw back-to-back declines of 17 percent and 16.4 percent in the amount spent on office furniture. The U.S. office-furniture market slipped to near the $10 billion level in 2003, after peaking at near $15 billion in 2000.

By 2006, the year BCInteriors posted its loftiest revenue figure in ages with $1.5 million in sales, the national market was also turning upward with nearly $13 billion spent.

“Things have made a major turn for us in the past couple of years,” Cooper said. “We consider ourselves really fortunate to still be around.”