When a company has a shoeless office policy, it makes sense to offer employees comfy footwear options sporting the company logo. For folks who work for Gusto, the San Francisco-based provider of web-based payroll and benefits services, that means Gusto socks and Gusto slippers.
In Denver, the number of feet with access to that branded footwear has multiplied in the last month and a half, a trend that is only expected to accelerate through the rest of 2020.
Coming off a $200 million funding round last summer, Gusto moved into 65,000 square feet of new office space in the building at 1515 Arapahoe St. earlier this month. The number of so-called “Gusties” in the Mile High City has shot up more than 13% since mid-December to 885 people, company representatives say.
The new space is just across the 16th Street Mall from Gusto’s existing Denver digs, inside the retail wing of the Tabor Center complex, real estate previously occupied in part by Denver’s ESPN Zone.
“We are committed to downtown Denver for the long term,” Gusto’s head of environment Charles Sim said. “That’s our home.”
By the end of September, Gusto expects to take on other 64,000 square feet in the Arapahoe Street building, identifiable by the Ashford.edu sign on the side. In 2021, the company aims to add another 70,000 square feet there. With all that room to grow, today’s headcount of around 900 Gusties is expected to balloon to around 1,500 by the end of 2020, Sim said.
Founded in San Francisco in 2011, Gusto first arrived in Denver in 2015 with just seven employees, said Jess Felluss, a member of the Gusto’s real estate staff that was part of that “landing team.”
It’s one of 22 Bay Area tech or life science companies to set up outposts in Denver between 2010-19, according to research by Cushman & Wakefield. By the end of 2017, the company’s Denver presence had grown to 250 employees.
That overlaps with an explosion in tech jobs in Denver. The metro market added 8,544 high-tech positions in 2017 and 2018, according to an October report from CBRE, a growth rate of 13.8%. In 2019, all Gusto did was add another 300 employees in Denver. That 2019 growth is equivalent to the size of the company’s entire San Francisco headquarters office as of December, according to Sim. Gusto also launched an office in New York City last year.
As with many of its fellow Bay Area firms, Gusto execs tout Denver’s tech talent pool as one of the things that made it a desirable place to be. But COO Lexi Reese focused on another group of people when laying out why the company has is so keen on the city.
“We really felt it was a good fit because there is a tremendous small-business community there,” Reese said last month. “Gusto is a technology platform, for sure, but our customers hire Gusto to do the very important work of growing and taking care of their teams. To be in Denver where a lot of that growth is happening felt exactly right for the company that we are trying to build.”
Gusto provides payroll and other services to 100,000 small businesses, Reese said. Of those, 5,000 businesses are in Colorado and more than 1,300 are in Denver, according to the company.
The Denver office has employees focusing on all aspects of Gusto’s business, but it’s heavy on sales and customer service workers. It’s “fueled by the businesses’ needs,” Reese said. In addition to payroll and benefits services, the company offers human resources expertise and has organized meetups for customers in Denver covering topics such as data security, Reese said.
With meeting rooms in the expanded office named after small-business varieties like “corner store” and “day spa,” Gusto emphasizes that its success is predicated on the success of other businesses. It’s a feel-good message that’s easy to for workers to buy into.
“My dad had a moving company in Telluride, that’s why I have a passion for what we do,” Whitney Bondy, part of Gusto’s health insurance qualification team, said.
For Koan Goedman, signing up for Gusto’s payroll and benefits took pressure off of him and allowed him to provide his employees with benefits sooner than if he had to set them up on his own. The owner and co-founder of Denver coffee company Huckleberry Roasters said he and his former business partner were originally keeping track of payroll on Excel spreadsheets. Gusto’s platform was not only much more efficient but made adding health, dental, vision and paid time off benefits push-button simple.
“Our core mission for Huckleberry was we wanted to treat people well and offer benefits in an industry where it’s not really the norm,” said Goedman, who now runs a commercial roastery and two coffee shops. “With Gusto being able te navigate those private insurance waters for this growing group of employees was really advantageous and very easy for us.”
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Another San Francisco tech company is expanding in Denver. This one is banking on small businesses’s success - The Denver Post
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