NIMBL, like Jack, jumps to $6 million in three years

"Be like Jack," NIMBL exhorts visitors to its website, www.benimbl.com. Its logo incorporates a man in a business suit jumping over the company name as if it were a candlestick, a necktie flying away as if the action were real.

The image is appropriate. Yosh Eisbart and Michael Pytel have built their SAP software boutique to an expected $6 million in revenues this year -- only its third in business -- by "being agile and being flexible and trying to break ... the previous paradigm of one size fits all," Eisbart said in an interview, where he spoke without a tie and without a suit for that matter.

NIMBL is one of the companies that populates 2,500 square feet in Taxi, the mixed-use commerical development west of the South Platte River near the RiNo art district that I wrote about in April.

Eisbart wanted me to come out and see what the company was doing because its early success brought it to the casual atmosphere of Taxi but also branded it as a local software-implementation company with a national customer base that specializes in SAP: "the largest business software package on the planet," Eisbart says.

That's right. SAP AG, based in Germany, rival to Oracle, IBM, Accenture and smaller computer giants, with $17 billion-plus of revenue, 53,000 employees around the globe, and an icon of  German international business interests. Which explains the well-suited figure in the NIMBL logo.

Michael Pytel and Yosh Eisbart

But if uptight is what you might expect from an SAP specialist, Eisbart doesn't bring that to NIMBL. Instead, he brings expertise. His is a "new-economy business," which is what Kyle Zeppelin called his Taxi tenants last spring, and Eisbart explains with conversational ease how that can save his clients money. Big money.

Big companies familiar with the software-implementation routine know the pattern for these transactions is to sign one of the big-company service providers to a sometimes millions-of-dollars contract, and have an army of consultants (or employees) of the provider descend upon your headquarters and work for months installing and "implementing" the new software.

Gambro USA, a medical-device manufacturer headquartered in Lakewood, signed up for an SAP installation whose end-users would be 400 North American employees spread across the continent from Daytona in Florida to Tijuana, Mexico and 12 other plants. The large provider had already spent nine months on the project but Gambro "didn't feel like they were getting the traction or meeting the goals  of their implementation," so, because of an earlier relationship with NIMBL, "they brought us in tactically," said Eisbart. Within a year, 10 consultants from NIMBL had reduced the 40 original implementation consultants significantly.

Eisbart and NIMBL leveraged that success by making presentations about it at several SAP-customer conventions as the company has grown: from $2 million in revenue in 2009, to $4 million in 2010 and an expected $6 million for 2011. Customers now include Exxon Mobil, Pepsi and Nestle, and in Colorado: Newmont Mining, ULA (United Launch Alliance), and Gambro.

With that list of clients, you would not expect a busy Eisbart to be leading his company's pro-bono work for a non-profit, the Center for Immigrants and Immigration Services, as it helps asylum seekers, torture survivors and war victims, and victims of human trafficking, mostly from Africa, stay in the United States and gain the computer skills needed to hold down jobs here.

"These guys are doing God's work," Eisbart said of the group which he discovered when it applied for a grant from the Rose Community Foundation.

Eisbart sat on the evalutation committee for the grant; after it was awarded, he went further to offer CIIS pro-bono help with setting up a data base for the group's clients, and recruited more pro-bono work from Evolution Marketing Group, which is housed within NIMBL's office space at Taxi. EMG remade the immigration organization's website and is teaching CIIS volunteers how to manage it. NIMBL is providing basic computer classes to CIIS clients.

Frederick Jayweh, the volunteer executive director of CIIS, said the free work Eisbart's companies have contributed to CIIS probably would be valued at $15,000 to $20,000; but more importantly it puts the group in a position to apply for a federal grant next year that might provide some of its volunteers with a bit of salary for the work they do.

A "new-economy business." Helping to get God's work done with computer software.

Mecca for creative small businesses

Over the river and through a bit of urban jungle, longtime developer Mickey Zeppelin and his partner/developer/son Kyle are building a mecca for 21st century "creative entrepreneurs."

And I don't mean artists.

The Zeppelins' three buildings, two that make up Taxi and a recent truck-terminal renovation they call Freight, are rife with cutting-edge art and even an artist's studio or two.

But the commercial development is more about business, and particularly collaborative, Internet-based small businesses -- search-engine optimization, Internet advertising, digital graphics and design -- than it is about the artsy, loft-like design that has become common to modern or renovated business districts.

Besides that, Taxi and Freight are located on the west side of the South Platte River, in the still more industrial area of what many people are now calling RiNo, the River North Art District. When Taxi opened nearly 10 years ago, Mickey Zeppelin's ties to the arts community usually rendered publicity about his business enterprise to a secondary status behind the dozens of arts-oriented businesses and residences that were spreading out on the east bank of the river.

But the Great Recession, which drove many middle managers and executives into starting their own businesses, and the explosive growth of some of those new, Internet-savvy firms, "played  into our hands in a lot of ways and is what got Freight leased" over the past year even before build out, said Kyle.

Kyle and Mickey Zeppelin

Kyle Zeppelin prefers to call those commercial tenants "new-economy businesses," and notes that their owners and employees fit perfectly into the open-air campus that Taxi and Freight have become.

He and Mickey bought the Freight building, the truck terminal still equipped with freight-bay garage doors that new tenants can open on mild and summer days, after building and filling the second Taxi building which includes residential units above a ground floor of commercial spaces.

The three buildings are 95 percent leased by about 60 businesses that employ about 300 people, Mickey said. Several original commercial tenants are still there, and some have grown from small spaces to larger ones, with one threatening now to take over the large leasing office Taxi had kept for itself.

The original Taxi building, 3455 Ringsby Court, was converted from the old headquarters of Yellow Cab and retains some of the concrete curbs and paving that were part of the original site. The Fuel Cafe, independently operated by a tenant, offers close-at-hand food and bar service; there's a Pilates studio and fitness center, free parking and a new childhood-education center in the Freight building.

"The Internet is not getting any smaller," Kyle said to explain Taxi and Freight's attraction to the new businesses leasing its space. "You look around at the inventory of real estate and it was primarily this pretty typical format of Class A and Class B office buildings that were very impersonal and in some cases very fancy and not very representative of the way this new generation of companies was working," he said.

It's "more collaborative, more open floor plans, more shared spaces, more opportunities for collaboration at a high level of specialization," he added, and both he and his father believe Taxi was ahead of the trend 10 years ago when it built just those kinds of innovations into its business "campus."

"You can't put them in a downtown office building next to a mortgage broker or an insurance company," Kyle said of his "new-economy" tenants.

"These guys want to come to work in their shorts; they don't necessarily have to answer to anyone. They're good at what they do and they want to keep their employees happy because their employees are in demand. And if they want to bring their dog to work, they'll bring their dog to work. If they want to play video games over lunch in their conference room, then that's what they're doing."

Mickey, at age 74, is quick to measure a potential tenant's interest in the culture of Taxi. "It's interesting," he said. "We generally will know within 10 minutes: They get it or they don't get it. It's the kind of place that has incredible energy around it, and people say, 'I love it,' or you just take one look at their face and say, 'This really isn't a fit."

The Zeppelin's next building -- new construction planned at about 95,000 square feet and a cost of about $20 million -- will be targeted to bigger companies, large tech firms that might be interested in 8,000 to 10,000 square feet to house up to a couple hundred employees.

"That's really the kind of Silicon Valley model," said Kyle. "Plug in the Apple or the Twitter or the Google and surround it with all these smaller groups and it creates an opportunity. The smaller groups create an opportunity for the bigger groups to tap into some of this innovation that needs that kind of small scale, and then the bigger groups present an opportunity for the small groups because they're out there functioning at a really big scale."

Sounds like the perfect formula for continuing to draw innovative small businesses to a 21st century business park -- with a little residential thrown in the mix.

Mickey Zeppelin said he and his partners have thrown about $50 million into the development so far, and their return on the investment is just now beginning to manifest itself. Rents range from $17 to $20 per square foot, which Kyle said is about 20 percent less than new construction in nearby downtown, and Taxi is actually able to help small firms finance custom tenant buildouts, adding another level of draw for smaller tenants.

And the urban atmosphere -- "We got a bus maintenance facility on one side, a concrete plant on the other," said Kyle -- remains in fashion among new businesses that are not only playing at the edges of their industries but that also appreciate locating in a place that's "got an edge to it."

That makes Taxi and Freight a little like the landlords who have developed the complex. "It's a little off center," said Kyle. "If you don't see the vision ...."