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Thanks to Denver's combo of a great climate, plenty of talent and its tech focus, business process management company K2 chose the Mile High City to house its marketing dream team.
From its first office 14 years ago with 10 employees in Johannesburg, South Africa, K2 has grown to more than 250 employees in five offices all over the globe, with Denver serving as the headquarters for the corporate marketing team.
Leading the team is SVP of Marketing Josh Swihart. Swihart worked with K2 from 2006 to 2008, leaving for three years to serve as CEO of Colorado software development company Aspenware, which was in desperate need of an overhaul. While at Aspenware, Swihart set a new strategy, gathered high end clients like Vail Resorts and built the team to create a premier boutique custom software company. In 2011 Aspenware was voted one of the “Colorado Companies to Watch” as well as was included in the Inc. 5000 Fastest Growing Companies list.
In 2012, Swihart returned to K2 to build up the brand. K2's business applications, like their flagship product K2 blackpearl, which let companies build process-driven applications including forms, workflow, data and reports across the enterprise.
Swihart and his Denver team have helped steer K2 to a nearly 50 percent increase in market share, 80 percent increase in software bookings and about 60 percent boost in revenue. Some of his core marketing team in Denver includes staff that relocated here from South Africa.
“It’s definitely a mash-up of talent from here in Colorado and from South Africa,” said Swihart.
Even though K2’s network serves more than a million users in over 80 countries, K2’s overall marketing strategy is focused on customers in each of its local markets.
“Part of our vision is to make tech easier and more accessible to people. Our goal is to make software and maintenance, as easy as possible for customers," said Swihart. "When a company is going from steps one to two - often they need that level of relationship for hyper success. The future of K2 lies in keeping our brand identity, and communicating it back out as we continue to grow.”
One of the current challenges for such a large global company is selling to a wide range of verticals, from sales forces to CFOs. Swihart said one of his challenges is to use their data to do "better fortune telling" and predict key areas of growth.
“We love working directly with entrepreneurial clients who don’t just work on the clock," Swihart said. "It is exciting when someone begins to dig deep into all the ways you can fully utilize our products. When switching to K2 products, they complete work - that often takes a year to get done - in a matter of weeks. We enable those people to succeed."
