When Rob Piwowarczyk set out to start his own business in 1995, he didn't seek a venture capitalist or even take out a loan. He sold his Jeep Cherokee for $10,000 and launched Enterprise Systems in his basement.
Piwowarczyk says he never worried about making it. He was too busy working. In the company's first full year, Enterprise Systems generated $500,000 in revenues - not bad for a one-man operation.
Today the Golden-based company has 10 employees and nearly 100 clients, mostly small and medium-sized businesses. Last year's revenues were $2 million.
Piwowarczyk describes Enterprise Systems as a network integrator, specializing in local area networks, wide area networks, security, remote access, wireless networks, and thin client solutions. The company is far removed from its early days.
"I was just a one-man show, basically, just working out of my house," Piwowarczyk says. "Things started picking up so quickly I had to move out of the house and hire my first employee and get an office. The rest is history."
Before starting his own company, Piwowarczyk worked for a couple of different network integrators in the Denver area as a technician and service manager. He liked the work, but after a few years he decided he'd had enough of working for others and had learned enough to run his own business.
"I just basically felt it was time to do something else - to take control of my future and provide some services I felt I could provide to customers," he says.
Piwowarczyk calls Enterprise Systems a conservative company that gets its business not from blustery sales pitches but strictly on referrals. "Once we get an account we want to be their single-source providers," Piwowarczyk says. "We see ourselves as project managers. There are some things we just don't do, but we have contacts who can bring resources to the table to take care of our clients."
The life Piwowarczyk has built for himself is just what his family hoped for when they left Poland in 1977 when he was 12 years old. Piwowarczyk went on to graduate from Denver's Kennedy High School and then earned an associates degree in electronics at Denver Institute of Technology.
"Out of that I got my first job as a computer technician, just repairing and servicing computer equipment in the late '80s," Piwowarczyk says. "That's how I got started. I got a lot of hands-on experience working on different systems, different networks."
Piwowarczyk credits his father, Chester, a Lakewood tailor, for giving him a nudge to make a go of it on his own. "My dad has always been a businessman so he's always encouraged me, pushed me," Piwowarczyk says. "He'd say, 'You've got to just go on your own and do something ... you can do it.' His encouragement was one of the big catalysts in my starting the company.
"I'd always worked for somebody, a 40-hour-a-week job with a paycheck coming, so this was a pretty big jump for me," Piwowarczyk says. "My wife was a stay-at-home mom at the time, and we had a small child and a mortgage. You make the big jump and it's uncertain. But within a week I had so much work where there was no time to worry about having enough money to survive. My attitude was just to take care of the clients."
