Switchback leverages award-winning software for new sales

Switchback is leveraging some award-winning coding projects for more growth at the Kerrytown-based start-up.

The three-year-old firm focuses on Drupal work. It won the 2011 Technical Innovation Award for OpenCourseWare Excellence from the OpenCourseWare Consortium for the Open.Michigan project with the University of Michigan. That project re-engineered the university's courseware delivery system so that more knowledge can be shared in the academic environment. Switchback's new Drupal-based system has cut publishing time by 400 percent since its launch.

"They came up with the name. We came up with the code," says Steve Colson, co-founder of Switchback.

Colson founded Switchback with Mike Monan while the two were working on their own independent projects. The friends amicably parted ways earlier this year so Monan could pursue other projects. Today, Switchback employs six people and is in the process of bringing on interns. It is leveraging its award-winning software to grow its sales, which will allow it to add a few new positions over the next year.

"We want to grow Switchback," Colson says. "We want to add a lot of programming and design jobs. In order to do that we need to grow sales."

Source: Steve Colson, co-founder of Switchback
Writer: Jon Zemke

Read more about Metro Detroit's growing entrepreneurial ecosystem at SEMichiganStartup.com.
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  • Switchback
    Ann Arbor, MI Website
    Based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Switchback provides smaller- to medium-sized organizations with the ability to update and maintain their own websites.