Our Story

The year was 1988...

Ronald Reagan was in the last year of his presidency.  The Hubble Telescope was launched into space, PTL leaders Jim and Tammy Baker were indicted on fraud charges, the Dow was hovering around 2000 and in the basement of a townhouse in Virginia; Dwayne and Jay decide to start a marketing communications company.

Some video equipment was purchased along with 2 PCs complete with 30MB hard drives (that's right, 30 megabyte hard drives). A plan was put into place and a business was launched, creating videos, logo designs and printed publications for associations and high tech companies.

Jay left his job as a computer design engineer for IBM and Dwayne left his job as a Sous Chef for L&N Seafood and Kidwell Mcgowan Associates was born.  Fast forward several years following our first recession, Jay had a chance encounter in an elevator with some fellows who had just started a company called PSI, while across town Dwayne did a cold sales call on a small start up called America Online. After some discussion Jay and Dwayne decided it was time to find out what this Internet thing was all about.  Our two founders realized that since the World Wide Web was going commercial it would be big.

Jay was off and running, setting up a server and building out HTML web pages by hand.  Dwayne immediately went to his association clients and managed to convince a few of them that putting their marketing info on the web was the way of the future.

Fast forward a few more years and most of our association clients were up on the web, but looking for a better way to manage their information.  They didn't want to pay a designer rate to simply up date phone numbers so the engineer in Jay took over and he built what was one of the very first CMS systems, albeit a completely custom system of scripts for one of our clients, the Composite Panel Association.  They loved it and kept requesting more and more functionality.  They started to brag to some of their association colleagues about their new system and they also wanted to have this capability.  So we started building custom CMS systems for the early adopters in the association space.

More associations were added and more ideas and more functionality was requested.  Jay decided that is was a waste to build the systems custom so that no one could share in the others ideas and functionality, so he at night and in his spare time he went to work building a core engine that used common functionality so that all could share in the work of the others. 

The year is 2000 a new millennium and the launch of the first Contensive system.  Dwayne immediately went about trying to sell the concept of a CMS engine to the association space and after some very good initial success it was decided that Contensive was the direction the company would go.  We jettisoned our print work and focused our efforts on the Internet.

With continual excellent feedback from our clients we have continued to improve the system to make the most flexible, extensible and powerful CMS on the market today.  Staying with the best practices and latest trends in programming Contensive provides the most rapid development enterprise framework available.

Our company has built technical support systems for Northrop Grumman, sales support systems for Toll Brothers, customer support systems for Elevate, we developed the first web site that was allowed to be presented inside the Chambers of the Supreme Court of the United States,  hundreds of association sites, hundreds more small business sites, and that very first system we built way back in 1993 for CPA...well they are still a client and they still use Contensive.