In the Weeds: The Story of SharpNet Solutions, Celebrating 25 Years

Driving north on U.S. Highway 287 into downtown Fort Collins, anyone can overlook the location of SharpNet Solutions. The century-old building blends right in with the whole charm and setting of Old Town, the city’s historic downtown that inspired the iconic Main Street, U.S.A., in Disneyland.

Chris and his wife, Amie, who has helped him run the company from the beginning, have a great appreciation for Colonial architecture. When the time came to look for office space, they were drawn to the stately columns and historic charm of the Darrah House, a landmark building right off Highway 287 at the southern edge of Old Town. According to the building’s website, the motto of its original owners, the eclectic Darrahs, was “We build the ladder by which we rise.” It’s a slogan that could easily be applied to Chris Sharp and the company that now calls the Darrah House home.

At the time the Sharps bought the Darrah House, SharpNet had only 16 employees, not enough to even fill one floor. To fill the entire house, they rented other office space. But as the company began to expand, the Sharps chose to not renew leases because they needed more space.

“We grew faster than we could acquire the remaining space in Darrah. When COVID hit, we had exponential growth. I felt like I was hiring for a year and a half,” he said, noting that he had to acquire another building in the process. “Once we finally get the whole of Darrah in November, we’ll be five years into it.”

In the beginning, it was long days, long weeks, and even longer nights, because Sharp still had his job at HP while he built his ladder to the future. He and Amie used to joke that his office hours were 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. He continued to work at HP for almost another year, but when he finally received from budding SharpNet 70% of his HP income, that was close enough to quitting his job.

“Plus I had the double paycheck at that time, so I had the cash flow to get me through.”

Once he launched his new marketing venture, he worked at home for seven months before finally moving into an office. At that time, the company had just one employee: Chris.

At the inception of SharpNet, there was no industry called digital marketing. No one knew what to call it when you were trying to get people’s attention online. Eventually, the world seemed to settle on “digital marketing,” but as the internet became a more significant part of society and more businesses went online, many tasks associated with digital marketing became simply part of “marketing.” Today, digital marketing is just the way marketing is done, as businesses of all sizes are using high-return investments like pay-per-click (PPC) advertising and search engine optimization (SEO) to drive growth.

Before all those acronyms, though, there was SharpNet Solutions and its helmsman, Chris, leading the pack when it all began to take off. Looking back from our all-digital present, it might be easy to see exactly where things were headed, but back in the late 90s, it wasn’t. Although Sharp knew he was on to something, he wasn’t entirely clear what that something was.

“It was one of those things where I knew the industry was going to go, and I also knew at that time, when I was 26 just barely 27…I had the stamina to work the full-time engineer job and do this at night. And there wasn’t any risk because I could do the work until it happened, and if it did fail, I would just remain that full-time engineer.

“I used to say to people, ‘You can build an empire at the same time most people just watch TV.’ I wasn’t watching TV, and I wasn’t golfing or doing the fun things because I was building a company on the side. I had no idea where this was going to go.”

The internet had begun to take off, and Sharp had the foresight to know it would continue, although he did not quite know exactly what that would look like. He recognized that businesses were being launched on the internet, and that commerce was beginning to happen there. GoTo.com became the first pay-per-placement search engine. Later the company changed its name to Overture and sold itself to Yahoo!, which was one of the first companies to develop and offer pay-per-click advertising.

“When I saw PPC go, I knew that meant there had to be advertisers, and if there were advertisers, people were paying to get themselves on the internet, and that meant there was money here.” Sharp said. “So I thought, Let’s create a marketing company.”

Originally, Sharp had the idea to create a website that “advertised things”—a platform on which he could sell ad space to local businesses. But an idea nagged at him.

“I didn’t want to go door to door and just sell advertising space for a website.”

Sharp wanted something much bigger, which meant he had to teach himself how to do search engine optimization. And while learning SEO, he had an epiphany.

“I realized that’s the service—SEO, not selling ad space,” he said. Because of the ads he saw on GoTo and Yahoo!, Sharp also got the idea to add PPC to his list of marketing services, along with building and hosting websites.

How long did this epiphany take to flourish?

“All of 10 minutes,” Sharp laughs. “That whole new vision of what SharpNet’s going to be, I had that vision all in one sudden moment.” That realization quickly transformed SharpNet Solutions into a marketing agency that uses a deep understanding of search engines to grow businesses rather than just selling ads on a single website.

The company’s locations in Fort Collins have ranged from Chris’s house in the early days to a mall-type office on Oak Street for four years. The fledgling company then moved back and forth between those two locales before the Sharps acquired the Darrah House.

“For me, one of the biggest changes is how the company has matured, from just me to a handful of people, and now to 50 people…” Sharp says. He pauses to reflect. “And what it takes to manage them. It’s really become a lot more about structure, planning, and leadership. That’s what I have to focus on now. Before, I was the boss and there wasn’t much structure to it. There’s now lots of structure and cohesiveness, and trying to accommodate the personalities of 50 different people, not just five or 10 people.”

He leans back in his chair, fingertips pressed together. “Delegation was the hardest thing. It wasn’t even learning how to do it; it was more just accepting it and letting things go. Even today, only recently did I give up doing reports, and then felt tremendous relief when I found out it was working. It was amazing. And now I’m bewildered that I didn’t do this five years ago.”

But as Sharp has learned to let go, he knows he still wants to be “in the weeds,” involved in the production side of things, because he doesn’t want to lose touch with the company’s everyday operations.

“If I don’t stay in the weeds, I don’t feel like I can effectively keep the culture going here, or understand workloads and have reasonable expectations. It’s easy to say on paper we’re falling behind and I need everyone to work with 15% more productivity. But what does that even mean?” he mused. “Does that mean everyone’s working 30 minutes longer, or working on Saturdays and Sundays? Keeping a foot on the production side of things, inside the weeds, I know what that means and I know its impact on lives, what has to be given up to do that. So, I think the culture that we’re trying to hit [is] having this be a place where overtime is extremely rare, where you go home and work is done—those things are lost if I pull myself out of the weeds.”

And with growth have come more weed patches to be in. In addition to the historic Darrah House, SharpNet now has another office in Fort Collins, barely a block away from Darrah, as well as a location in Challis, Idaho, that opened in 2019.

“We’ve had a family house in Challis since 1912; it was my great-great-grandmother’s,” Sharp said. “ I love the town, they needed jobs badly because it’s a poor, poor town, and I thought I could always fly up to Challis in the summer and work out of that office.”

Sharp raised his gaze wistfully toward the ceiling. “It hasn’t turned out that way, yet.”