Indeed, a graphic of a red horse with a white Mohawk elicits a hoot or two, especially when LaPlante asks if the posterior of the horse should be presented during a photo shoot at the company’s headquarters in the burgeoning South Meadows. The CEO of Twelve Horses North America, a company which was founded in Dublin, Ireland, can joke about the entertainment value of the Web site and clearly is a fun guy to work with. But spend a little more time with him, and it’s obvious he has a sturdy grip on the reins — he’s thoughtful, strategic-thinking — and has seemingly harnessed all the gifts of the legend.

“It’s a very brain-oriented clientele,” explains the articulate LaPlante, talking about the customers that value the commerce-based technology solutions Twelve Horses designs. The company’s business cards extol this phrase: “No Single Mode of Communication is 100 Percent Effective.”

Says the boyish-looking, big-picture LaPlante: “Our mantra reminds us that our job is to help businesses and the people in those businesses communicate more effectively. We call that relationship marketing and messaging management.”

In essence, “We build tools and sell expertise around a lot of common sense things,” says LaPlante, whose start in regional high-tech circles began as one of three partners in Aztech Cyberspace, an Internet professional services firm that merged with Twelve Horses in 2002. Founded in 1994 by Martin Gastanaga and Jay MacDonald, Aztech was an established value-added reseller of Twelve Horses products since 2000. These days, Gastanaga serves as the chief operations officer of the merged companies.

Previous to Aztech, LaPlante served as a marketing and advertising executive in the casino gaming industry where he was directly involved in the early 1990s boom of casino customer relationship management. In this role, he mostly worked on player tracking before being lured away by Gastanaga and MacDonald.

As Twelve Horses has evolved and grown, it has assembled an impressive client stable. It includes Deloitte, J.P. Morgan, Red Herring and Aer Lingus. “We’re doing very well in financial services,” says LaPlante, citing a profitable category of business. Hospitality and tourism are strong; governmental clients comprise the third-largest sector. “We don’t have a tremendous customer base here,” LaPlante says, although Heavenly, RSCVA and the City of Reno are on the client roster. He likes the variety of work. “We don’t have any one customer that represents more than 10 percent of overall revenue,” he adds.

Much of Twelve Horses’ focus is on customer relationship management, or CRM. What sets the company apart from other messaging companies? “Fundamentally, it’s that we practice what we preach and put ourselves in the shoes of our customers and our customers’ customers,” LaPlante says. “For example,” he adds, “nobody likes SPAM; therefore, we’re intolerant of customers sending SPAM. We like relevant and personalized content. Thus we are motivated to assist our customers to deliver relevant content to their customers at the right time through the right channel,” whether it’s Web-based, FAX, e-mail, mobile or voice mail.

Speaking of the synergy that brought Aztech and Twelve Horses together, LaPlante says Aztech was a channel partner of Twelve Horses’ MessageMaker product. At the time the M&A discussions started, the decision to bring the businesses together made sense. In essence, Twelve Horses had “product” — intellectual property — and yet, no “people,” LaPlante says. Conversely, Aztech had “people” — solutions experts — and yet no IP of its own. “So it was a good fit from compensating each other’s weaknesses,” LaPlante says. “The apple for us [with the merger] was Twelve Horses’ residual licensed intellectual property.”

To put one aspect of their work in perspective is David Archer, managing director of the Center for Entpreneurship and Technology, which was formerly known as TechAlliance. “Twelve Horses helps customers send e-mails that people want to read. They have designers that make [a client’s] e-mails visually attractive. Because of their expertise, “Their customers have some of the best ‘open’ rates,” Archer says.

With a background working for Netscape, Viacom and Time Warner, Archer has a unique perspective on the Internet side of things, and offers this observation of Twelve Horses. “In my experience with them, they are able to integrate a tremendous marketing and creative sensibility along with talented engineering. Those are two things that don’t always go hand in hand.”

Mike Reed, dean of the UNR College of Business, is LaPlante’s former college advisor and a longtime friend. He says Twelve Horses is emblematic of the “creative” Northern Nevada enterprises that will help shape the region’s economy in positive ways. “What David’s company allows you to do is move as smoothly as possible in that world as much as you want, whatever those contact points are,” he says, referring to the multimodal platforms created for marketers and purveyors of other commercial transactions.

But there is much more to this entrepreneur than the quirky name of his company. Indeed, Reed says,Twelve Horses is a homegrown example of the innovative kinds of businesses that Northern Nevada economic development officials are trying to lure to the region. Essentially, LaPlante is a classic member of the creative class, Reed says, referring to the demographic at the core of the book by Richard Florida. In “The Rise of the Creative Class,” the author says the prime movers are those who work in knowledge-intensive industries such as high-tech sectors, financial services, the legal and health care profession and business management. All of these are positions or pursuits that place a premium on knowledge, mental acumen and creative thought.

They also like to play hard, and LaPlante, an ardent powder hound, is no exception. Even when he’s tearing up the slopes, he’s still connected with colleagues and customers via a Blackberry.

Growing up in Crested Butte, Colo., LaPlante skied early. His father, Joseph “Doc” LaPlante, was a ski racer, souvenir shop owner and chemistry professor at Western State Colorado College. “He was an outdoorsman but an environmentalist as well,” says LaPlante, recounting intellectually rigorous dinner table conversation, and his dad holding forth on countless topics.

As a teenager, LaPlante also was gaining skills in another critical area that would serve him well in his future business career: the world of computers. It may have been a small town, “but our high school was very advanced in how much it emphasized computer education,” says LaPlante. While today he regrets that he didn’t gain fluency in a foreign language such Spanish, German or Japanese, he was mastering languages equally important: FORTRAN, PASCAL and BASIC. He also was playing games on his Commodore 64 and Apple II.

LaPlante says this “troubleshooting” computer knowledge made him “golden” in the eyes of his less tech-savvy instructors and afforded him an entrée to the adult world that his peers never had. “I was a good student, good when I needed to be,” he says smiling. “No surprise: anything to do with science I had a natural proclivity for.”

With a natural proclivity for winter sports, he secured a spot on the University of Nevada, Reno Ski Team. It was in a finance class that Mike Reed “got his hooks into me,” says LaPlante, who was then a pre-law major. “He inspired me to change my major to finance and economics,” LaPlante says of his mentor.

Reed remembers LaPlante as “one of those really bright kids, but not a pain in the butt. He was very creative and hardworking.” While Reed says he gets very few exceptional students, it’s apparent that LaPlante was definitely in that category and made a strong impression.

“He’s part of a generation of high-tech entrepreneurs that are coming on strong now, people who are mentioned in magazines like ‘Fast Company,’” Reed says. They are a bridge to what we don’t know yet,” Reed adds, talking about the Next Big Thing in the world of technology. “Indeed, they are defining that bridge.”

They are also redefining the culture of the workplace. “I can’t imagine David and those guys putting a company together that isn’t fun to participate in,” Reed says, a lesson not lost on the Baby Boomer. “It’s about toys,” Reed says, who succinctly sums up the Gen-Xers and Yers and their penchant for fun technology. “David has a 19-generation cell phone. He despairs of mine, but it works,” Reed laughs.

While success has brought speaking engagements and a high profile in the trade press, growing the business locally is a challenge, LaPlante admits. First, is the perception that “we’re too big for a local business, which is simply not true and I get frustrated when I hear that. That’s the downside of local media that perhaps gives local firms a false impression that we’re only concerned with Fortune-level customers.

“The reality is that we’re successful with working with all kinds of people and budgets. The size of the company is less relevant than ever. It’s about the desired results and required resources.”

The second challenge is a spin off of the old saying, “You must travel 100 miles to be an expert,” LaPlante says. “With a surprising degree of frequency, we get shot down locally for no apparent reason than someone else 100 miles away offers something similar,” says LaPlante, offering no names for the record. “Drives me absolutely nuts.”

These days, Twelve Horses is planted in several different locations. About 40 percent of the staff is in the Reno-Tahoe area. About 25 percent is in Salt Lake City and another 25 percent in Dublin. The rest are spread out in “unique locations” such as South Africa, Russia, California, Las Vegas and Seattle. The average age of the workforce is “probably 30,” LaPlante says. “But age isn’t so much the matter as is ‘attitude and experience-adjusted age,’” he adds.

“Show me a 60-year-old with a kick-ass blogging and podcasting experience and who understands the mobile marketing channel and I’ll show you where they’ll be sitting in the office.”

Twelve Horses currently has 60 employees and is privately held. Ownership is spread among eight major investors, LaPlante says. In terms of future growth, LaPlante disclosed that some “high ticket” deals are coming to fruition. “We’re dinking around a lot with delivering bar-coded coupons and tickets to mobile phones. Can’t talk much about that,” he adds.

“But we’re lucky to have some risk-taking customers now that are consistently willing and able to react quickly to new trends. While it may not be a huge windfall for us, our customers love it and, frankly, we’re here to have that kind of fun. It ain’t always all about the money [but] being first is always rewarding.”

By the end of 2005, LaPlante says the company ended up with about 30 percent growth in services. There was huge volume growth as Twelve Horses took on channel customers in the retail business. Net income improved about 50 percent.

While growing the company is a key concern, there’s another demographic that has LaPlante’s full attention: his wife, Jennifer, and their two little boys, Logan, 6, and Cody, 4. Give LaPlante half a chance and he’ll regale you with stories and mobile phone pictures of the pair. “He’s going to hate this, but he and his wife are a real Ozzie and Harriet,” says Mike Reed, talking about LaPlante and his spouse, whom he met his first week at UNR. “At the end of the day, this is my passion: my wife and kids,” LaPlante concurs. “That’s what it’s really all about.”

The family enjoys the many recreational pursuits in Northern Nevada and can be found climbing, skiing, fishing and biking the Sierra with family, friends and clients when time permits.

“Having a business in a [geographical] location that doesn’t suck is an asset,” says LaPlante, on the subject of Northern Nevada’s reputation as a cool place to relocate. “It’s not hard to get people to come here,” says LaPlante, who is famous for calling co-workers on a Friday morning and inviting them to join him on the slopes.

Indeed, with a boss like LaPlante at the helm, you are truly getting a horse of a different color.