Rob Cohen prepared for the annual Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce board retreat the same way he prepares for everything: unafraid to aim big.
About to take over as chairman of the influential business group, he spent time talking one-on-one with board members, trying to build support for an aggressive, regional agenda. Even so, the 50-plus-member board struggled to come to a consensus on just what those issues should be.
“It was a difficult couple of days,” said Cohen. “Even I was worried about where we were going to come out. But in the end, you have to trust the people in the room, and you have to trust the process.”
Described by colleagues, friends and family as a confident and passionate leader who is willing to listen, the 44-year-old powerhouse was able to guide the diverse group to agreement on three issues so large state leaders have struggled with them for decades – education, water storage and the Interstate 70 traffic problem.
“Nothing about Rob surprises me, because Rob doesn’t think anything is impossible,” said Tom Clark, executive vice president of the Metro Denver Economic Development Corporation and the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce. “He’s the beginning of the new generation of leadership for Denver.”
These days, Cohen juggles several such Herculean efforts.
He leads the group that hopes to win a Winter Olympics bid for Colorado and the nation’s 15th-largest private insurance firm. He also is a partner in Iron Gate Capital, a Denver-based private equity group.
“My wife always says that I have five jobs, and I only get paid to do one of them,” Cohen said recently with a laugh.
“I’m a serial entrepreneur, a deal junkie.”
Cohen can expect to stay busy if he wants to make headway on the chamber’s ambitious goals of improving education, water storage and I-70 traffic. All have a thorny past when it comes to finding common ground.
Gov. Bill Owens and others have sought long-term water storage remedies that met defeat, such as 2003’s Referendum A, which would have created a state loan program for water projects.
And I-70 congestion continues to grow as the state ramps up for another ski season. The Interstate 70 Mountain Corridor Coalition, which represents a group of 30-plus mountain communities, said it welcomes the chamber’s help – with a caveat.
“The coalition would be a little sensitive to having a solution to I-70 imposed on us without the corridor participating in the determination of that solution,” said Flo Raitano. “But we’re happy that the Denver Metro Chamber is taking a look at this. We need significant partners, and the Denver business community is a huge key to that.”
Rooted in insurance
While he has plenty of energy to apply to such issues, Cohen’s roots lie elsewhere. It’s the insurance business that’s in his blood.
His grandfather started William C. Cohen Insurance in Wichita in 1937. His father took over that business and merged with two other local firms in 1973 to create IMA.
In Cohen’s middle-class Jewish family, his father, Bill, focused on growing the business, while his mother, Pennie Myers, worked as a psychologist.
Intent on attending a large school far from Wichita, Cohen chose the University of Texas at Austin. He graduated in 1984 with two bachelor’s degrees – one in finance and the other in risk management – then went to work for Chubb Insurance Co. in Dallas. He was transferred to the New York area before being sent to Denver in 1986.
“I just fell in love with the city,” he said. “Denver is a very open community where people from the outside can easily get involved. I wouldn’t say that about a lot of the other places I’ve lived.”
He was lured away by insurance firm Lowndes Lambert with an opportunity to work in London, but after a brief stint overseas, Cohen headed back to Wichita to join the family business.
Cohen quickly realized it was a mistake.
“You can’t take a Kansas boy and send him to Dallas, New York, Denver and London – and then send him back to Kansas,” he said. “I wanted to do my own thing.”
He returned to Denver to open an outpost of IMA, but admits that a nurse at Children’s Hospital was a big factor in his decision. While first living here, Cohen met Molly Jenkins, an orthopedic nurse who hails from a large, Catholic family from Omaha.
They were married in 1990.
By then, Cohen had begun to get involved in the business community.
“My career was moving fast, and I had a lot of things, but I didn’t feel that fulfilled as a person,” he said.
He dove into the metro chamber, which he viewed as a place to meet Denver’s movers and shakers. He joined the retention committee and participated in Leadership Denver, a program designed to train future leaders.
Cohen was identified early as a dedicated volunteer, not just what Clark likes to call “an obituary builder.”
“Rob was one of those guys who walked through the door and said, ‘Give me something to do.’ He was ready to work,” Clark remembers.
As Cohen moved up through the ranks, his business also boomed. He took over as chief executive of IMA in 1999; the company has since doubled in size.
To accommodate that growth, IMA needed more office space. Cohen took a risk – along with local developers Walter Isenberg and Ed Haselden – constructing a 145,000-square-foot office building in the heart of Lower Downtown.
“LoDo was really seen more as a restaurant and entertainment district,” he said. “There wasn’t a lot of new speculative office space being built here.”
IMA now fills three floors of the $30 million building with its 150 Denver employees. Other tenants include law firm Davis Graham & Stubbs and the Sugar Beat Cafe.
The company reorganized in 2000 and became IMA Financial Group, with headquarters in Denver and Wichita. Today, the once small family business is an employee-owned company with 11,000 clients and offices in seven cities.
Bill Cohen, now a senior executive officer at IMA, said he always knew his son would one day lead the company.
“That was the plan,” he said. “Sometimes you have to let people make their mistakes. He made mistakes, he learned and developed. Now he’s darn good at what he does.”
Pitching for the Olympics
And while IMA grew, Cohen began pursuing a new endeavor, the business of sports.
Through the chamber, he worked with a group that helped get the $400 million Invesco Field at Mile High built. It broke ground in 1999.
About that time, the city bungled an opportunity to bid on the Big 12 football championships, in part because the original group that worked to bring sporting events to town had disbanded in the mid-1980s.
Cohen – who counts biking and skiing as hobbies – was determined to restart the group. He spent months convincing more than 20 delegates from local professional sports teams and other organizations to fund the entity.
By 2001, the Metro Denver Sports Commission was back in business. It has since secured events such as the NCAA Men’s Ice Hockey Regional championship, to be held here in March.
“Rob has been the core leader of the group,” said Steve McConahey, chairman of SGM Capital and a member of the sports commission board. “He has a nice blend of clarity of vision and keeping the process moving.”
The nonprofit group is considering bids for more than 60 sporting events, but the “big daddy” of them all – and Cohen’s personal dream – is the 2018 Winter Olympics.
“I can’t tell you why, but I’ve always been passionate about the Olympics,” Cohen said. He has attended four and has covered the back wall of his office – which looks out over the red neon Union Station sign – with collector’s pins from the Games.
Painful reminder
Another item hanging in Cohen’s office is a reminder of a more painful time: a 14-year-old newspaper article about the suicide of his best childhood friend. Cohen still carries guilt about the incident.
The night it happened, his friend called. Cohen was busy feeding his newborn son. He told his friend he’d call back. He didn’t.
“How could I have a friend who was hurting that bad and not know?” he said. “It shook my foundation. I started asking myself if I was being the kind of husband, dad and friend I want to be.”
He keeps the clipping on his wall to remind him about what’s important.
Cohen organizes his large desk each day into color-coded priority zones, but stresses that his first priority is to his family. He and Molly live in Littleton with three sons and a daughter, ages 8 to 14.
“I think I do a pretty decent job of balancing between my work, my community and my family,” he said. “That doesn’t mean it’s perfectly in balance every day. But in aggregate, I feel pretty comfortable with it.”
Staff writer Julie Dunn can be reached at 303-954-1592 or jdunn@denverpost.com.
