‘Unlawful power grab’: Co-owners’ accusations paralyze permitting firm

A five-story apartment complex under construction at 2141 S. Broadway in Denver in September 2021. (BusinessDen file)

The bank accounts of a local construction permitting business have been frozen as its two co-owners accuse each other of trying to “torpedo the company,” hijack it through an illegal power grab, and waste hundreds of thousands of dollars in company cash.

Service First Permits, which employs a dozen people at its offices in Golden Triangle, helps contractors obtain government permits in Colorado and California. It was founded in 2009 by Andrew Fairbairn, who then hired an administrative assistant named Noelle Mantas.

By 2017, Mantas was SFP’s chief financial officer and a 49% partner. She also moved to Massachusetts that year, and her work began to slip, according to Fairbairn.

Invoices went unsent and unpaid as Mantas worked for her dad’s development company and romantic partner’s cannabis grow, Fairbairn said in a March 25 lawsuit. It alleges that Mantas hired her sister, who did lackluster accounting work, and a full-time assistant, who didn’t do any work for SFP. Mantas also used a company credit card for an array of personal expenses, according to Fairbairn.

That has cost SFP dearly, he said. A deep-pocketed construction company, Sevan Multi-Site Solutions, passed on acquiring SFP “because of the disarray in its books,” Fairbairn wrote, and revenue dropped by $1 million between 2023 and 2024. There was also $350,000 in unexplained spending and $150,000 paid to Mantas’ private assistant, according to Fairbairn.

“It is unfortunate that Mr. Fairbairn’s personal vendetta against Ms. Mantas has caused him to stray so far from the truth,” Mantas’ lawyer, Lauren Thompson of Foster Graham Milstein & Calisher, told BusinessDen.

Ultimately, it was not accusations of waste or negligence that caused the current rift between the co-owners of Service First Permits, but technology, as explained in Fairbairn’s lawsuit.

The CEO said that he began dreaming up an online portal for tracking permit status as early as 2018. But the first software developer Mantas recommended proved to be a fraudster who ran off with $300,000, and a second failed to get the job done, Fairbairn’s lawsuit explains.

Andrew Fairbairn. (LinkedIn)

Finally, after burning through $40,000 per month by Fairbairn’s estimates, Mantas and SFP’s chief technology officer created Permio, which uses artificial intelligence to speed up permit applications. While set up as its own entity, Permio was to be SFP’s “technology arm” and complement the company, according to Fairbairn.

He said that Mantas approached him last year with big news: Permio would receive funding and training from Techstars, the startup accelerator that Jared Polis and others founded in Boulder, if Fairbairn would dilute his shares in Permio from 49% to 3% and sign the technology’s rights over from SFP to a new company, Permio AI.

Fairbairn says he did so reluctantly, only to later learn Techstars would not be investing in Permio.

“We can only confirm that we are not investors in the company,” Amalia Lytle, a spokeswoman for Techstars, told BusinessDen last week. “As for any other information, we don’t confirm or discuss applications to our accelerator programs without the applicants’ consent.”

Permio AI is not the technology arm of Service First Permits but its own company, led by Mantas. Fairbairn claims he has never been provided a full accounting of the money SFP spent to develop Permio, which he now considers a competitor to his company.

On March 17, Fairbairn called a meeting of SFP’s managers — he and Mantas — and voted to remove his business partner as CFO “due to her gross negligence, fraud and intentional misconduct,” according to meeting minutes. Four days later, FirstBank emailed Mantas to say SFP’s accounts were frozen “due to an account dispute between you and Andrew.”

“Vendors cannot be paid and payroll is locked,” a lawyer for Fairbairn complained to Mantas’ lawyer, “and this state of affairs serves neither of our clients’ respective interests.”

“This is a direct result of your client’s unlawful power grab,” Mantas’ lawyer, Thompson, wrote back, according to a copy of the exchange obtained by BusinessDen. “If he didn’t think through what would happen if third parties didn’t acquiesce, that is nobody’s fault but his own.”

Noelle Mantas. (LinkedIn)

Fairbairn’s lawyer, Reid Allred of Cambridge Law, responded, “The question is whether or not we can agree on a way to allow the company to move forward. Your client may have decided she doesn’t want to let that happen. If so, that’s her prerogative to torpedo the company.”

On March 25, Fairbairn sued Mantas and asked Denver District Judge Kandace Gerdes to temporarily bar her from telling FirstBank that there is an account dispute between her and Fairbairn. Gerdes issued a temporary restraining order to that effect hours later.

Fairbairn’s lawsuit was filed so quickly that it does not include claims against Mantas; he has told Gerdes that he will amend it to add claims. He and his lawyer declined to be interviewed last week about what claims he will make or how much money he will seek.

“His primary focus for now,” Allred said, “is ensuring the continued success of SFP.”