Meet Skye Perry
I’m Skye Perry — entrepreneur, advisor, and founder of SSP Innovations. Since launching SSP from my basement in 2003, I grew the company into a market-leading GIS and utility software firm through technical depth, disciplined strategy, and a values-first approach to leadership. My work centers on building high-performing teams, executing strategic pivots and M&A, and creating products and services that deliver measurable value to customers.
Select Recognitions: Denver Business Journal 40 Under 40 (2017); 9× University of Florida Gator 100 honoree; 3× Titan 100 and member of the Titan CEO Hall of Fame.
Today I serve on boards and advise high-performing founders & executives through Perry Advisory, bringing hands‑on experience in scaling operations, corporate finance, go‑to‑market strategy, and technology adoption — plus recent product work helping companies succeed with Oracle NetSuite SuiteProjects Pro.
I live in Colorado and help run a small ranching operation – Allis Ranch, remain active in music and community causes, and welcome conversations about advisory, board roles, or collaboration.
My Brands & Work
Who is Skye
Entrepreneur & Founder of SSP Innovations
I grew up just outside of Tampa, FL, am a proud graduate and supporter of the University of Florida and have spent my entire adult life living in the beautiful state of Colorado.
My childhood was spent focusing on school, music performance, and work. I am the oldest of three brothers (oldest of five including my two stepbrothers). We moved to the East Tampa suburb of Brandon/Valrico during the recession of the early 80’s as my father, Mark Perry, went in search of new business opportunities to support our family. He had spent a number of years working with his father and brothers in the family’s structural steel business based in Silver Spring, MD and had originally considered either Texas or Florida when the recession hit. He decided on Florida and moved the family there in 1983. Perry Steel, Inc opened a short time later and dad ran the company for another ~40 years in FL while his brothers continued to run Perry Steel in MD/VA.
There were plenty of lean years as we grew up as the steel industry followed the cyclical nature of the overall construction industry. But I saw my father stick with it and the business grew and really hit its stride around the time I was 11 or 12 years old (around 1990). My dad intentionally kept the business relatively small (and even turned down my pitch many years later to join him to grow it into a regional powerhouse, but that’s a story for another time). Seeing both the ups and downs of being an entrepreneur certainly taught me the value of money and instilled in me a strong work ethic from a young age.
I am the product of the Florida public school system up to and through graduation at UF in 2000 (UF has now been ranked as the #1 public school in the country per the Wall Street Journal). I was introduced to music at a young age via the school system and fell in love with it. With the support of my parents, I began studying alto saxophone at the age of 9 and added violin through my elementary school the following year. This evolved to string bass, bass guitar, guitar, and drums over my middle/high school years and by the time I graduated high school, I was certain I was going to study music in college and either work in the music recording industry or become a band director. My musical studies combined a God-given talent with a bit of work and set the stage for a lifelong journey of music performance. It has also driven my involvement with Education through Music – Colorado where I now serve as a board member helping the non-profit organization bring back music education to schools where it has been removed due to budget cuts.
I started my first business in 1990 at the age of 12. Like many kids, I found work mowing lawns in my neighborhood. I still tease my father because he wasn’t willing to hire me at first because he wasn’t sure I would stick with it. But as I began cutting multiple neighbor’s lawns down the street, he eventually came around and gave me a chance! That lawn business grew over the years and when I turned 16 and got my license, I partnered up with another aspiring lawncare professional, Dan Dufford, bought a trailer to tow our equipment, and expanded the business throughout our town. Dan and I ran that business, aptly named Perry-Dufford Lawncare, until 1997 when we were both becoming more invested in college. When we sold that business (not for much but it was still a sale) to our younger brothers, we were cutting around 35-40 lawns a week, employed around four other teens, and had learned a LOT about marketing and door to door sales. All experience which has guided me throughout my professional career.
I ended up studying business and computer science in college. It was a very strategic decision to NOT study music at the time even though I had been so committed to the idea for most of high school. I figured I could always continue to perform music but that I would give the IT industry a go. This decision was solidified when I chose to attend the University of Florida which had nationally ranked business and engineering schools but not nearly as strong a music program. I turned down music scholarships from the University of Miami, Peabody Institute at Johns Hopkins, Belmont University, and Florida State University (which had a GREAT classical saxophone program). I still joke that I think I made the right choice!
After college graduation, my only goal was to get out of the state of Florida to try out a new geography. I graduated just before the dot com bubble burst and had ample job opportunities in FL, GA, TX, and even NM. However, I ended up being drawn to an internet startup down in south Florida named Semtor Inc (founded by one FSU grad and one UF grad, I’ll let you figure out the name) which had a passionate staff and the promise of amazing stock options! I briefly moved to Fort Lauderdale, FL but once the bubble had burst and the country headed back into recession in late 2000 (forget the stock options), Semtor ended up contracting me out to a company called Convergent Group based in Denver, CO. I made my first trip to Colorado on October 13, 2000 and moved there in January 2001.
It was at Convergent Group that I fell into the world of GIS (geospatial information systems) as well as the electric & gas utility market. I was a certified VB (visual basic) programmer at the time and took a quick interest in writing code to analyze and traverse electric and gas networks (essentially the directional flow of electricity or gas through the network of conductor/pipe/devices). I learned the lingo of the business and met so many wonderful people whom have become career mentors for me. Convergent Group was purchased by Schlumberger right around the time I joined them. I worked there for a couple of years before moving on to do some GIS contracting for Douglas County, CO putting in their Esri GIS platform. I later worked for another GIS utility software company, Miner & Miner until it was purchased by Telvent (now part of Schneider Electric) and then I moved back to join a company that had evolved out of Convergent Group called Enspiria Solutions. You would have definitely called me a job hopper at the time but I like to say that I was learning exactly what worked and didn’t work when growing a small business. These formative years drove a LOT of the knowledge and skills I used in building my own company.
It was during this same timeframe that I founded my own geospatial software and services company called SSP Innovations in 2003. I have subsequently spent most of my adult life leading and growing this company. SSP was born in the basement of my house in Parker, CO in the summer of 2003. I was mostly doing side projects (the evening and weekend hustle) for the first several years until I had an opportunity to go full time with SSP in early 2007 when we signed our first yearlong project with a utility. We had slow and steady growth from then up until I sold a portion of the company to private equity ten years later in 2017. Since then, the company has grown and changed significantly and now employs over 300 people worldwide. I led the company as the principal consultant, president, and then CEO up until January 2022 when I stepped back for personal reasons. I still serve on the board and help out in the back office where needed. There is a lot more to this story which I cover on the SSP page!
After stepping back from the CEO position at SSP, I began performing business advisement and coaching of other entrepreneurs to share from my lessons learned, guide strategic planning & growth, and to help business leaders keep their sanity during periods of amazingly long hours & stress coupled with tremendous opportunity. I had a wonderful advisor named Scott Barth who supported SSP’s growth from ~2010 through 2017 when I brought in private equity. I honestly couldn’t (and wouldn’t) have done it without Scott’s guidance and partnership and realize now that I also have a passion to help others achieve their dreams and goals of building scalable and performant businesses. These experiences seeded the foundation for Perry Advisory where today I advise a small number of businesses and business leaders as they navigate growing a business.
In more recent years (2024-2026), I led portions of the implementation of Oracle NetSuite SuiteProjects Pro as the new project services automation (PSA) tool at SSP Innovations. Overall, this project went relatively well, and I had the opportunity to learn about the inner workings of SuiteProjects Pro (previously named OpenAir). SSP is a very high-performing company, and we have always made data-driven decisions which require a lot of reporting from a PSA system. Reporting was the one area that Oracle lacked within their PSA offering and I have recently launched a services and software company, SuiteProjects Reports, to help other business operators find success with SuiteProjects Pro.
Beyond all my professional work and continued music performance and board work, I have also fallen in love with the western way of life and since 2017, I have lived and worked with my family on a small ranch located in Sedalia, CO called Allis Ranch Conservancy (ARC). Today we own horses & chickens and I oversee the grazing operations on our larger community property (~835 acres in total) where we lease in cattle from a neighboring rancher to graze the land around six months of every year. It has truly been a blessing to live and work in this beautiful area of Colorado, and I enjoy everything from fencing to finance when it comes to ARC.
If you’ve made it this far down on this web page, I truly appreciate you giving it a read! Please continue to explore the site and reach out if I can be of any assistance with any of my business endeavors.