Far-Out Offices : Many business people use high technology to live in rural areas while still operating their firms.
While many of his big-city counterparts are stuck in morning traffic, businessman Mark Ewing is often swooshing down the ski slopes near his home in Squaw Valley, Calif.
Afterward, the 40-year-old vice president and co-founder of Pacific Medsoft, a computer software company, drives five minutes down the lush Truckee River Valley to his offices near Lake Tahoe.
“We’re connected all over the U.S. by telephone and fax machines,” said Ewing, who notes that nearby customers account for only a tiny fraction of his firm’s sales. “We work exceptionally hard. Our location just makes it much easier for us to tolerate all that much work.”
From the snowy Sierra to sunny Santa Barbara, a small but growing legion of business people have harnessed some of today’s suddenly affordable technology to turn their backs on big-city living to work amid the splendor of California’s backcountry and resorts. They have made their businesses suit their life style.
Life--and business--in paradise are not without headaches and drawbacks. These latter-day pioneers tell of struggling to find highly trained employes and to keep up with industry news and distant clients. They must also deal with the raised eyebrows, smirks and questions when they bring up their out-of-the way location.
“What’s Ojai?” is the response public relations and advertising man Dick Hackmeister often receives when he tells people of the small Ventura County town where he runs his one-man firm. “To be sure,” said the former Los Angeles executive, “it does not have the class that an office at 3435 Wilshire Blvd. had.”
And while urban dwellers may have little sympathy, the rural exiles sometimes lament the the temptations of nearby golf courses, ski slopes and hiking trails.
“There is such a temptation not to work when you’re in an environment like this,” said Edwin C. Bliss, a time management consultant who works amid the pine forests of the Sierra foothills. “When you have five acres, you’re just very likely to be puttering around the place instead of sitting down at the typewriter or the desk.”
Such predicaments, however, are a small price to pay, say the consultants and professionals who have put life style first.
“We picked where we wanted to live and then we figured out how to make it work,” said Edwin Lee, president of Pro-Log, a maker of computers for factories, which moved from Pomona to Monterey in 1972.
These executives in the outback brag about short or non-existent commutes, clean air, peace of mind and travel-poster scenery outside their office windows.
“We see the town, we see the harbor, we see the sail boats and we see the islands in the distance,” said Robert A. Grayson. He and his wife, Suzanne, moved their personal-care products consulting business from an office in Paramus, N.J., to a Spanish-style home tucked into the hills above Santa Barbara.
Independent consultants like Bliss who do not have to see clients on a daily basis are prime candidates for setting up a business in the boonies.
Jack Nilles, a Los Angeles-based consultant on information technology, said he sees hordes of middle managers forced out by recent corporate cutbacks taking to the hills to set up one-person firms.
“A lot of these people still have very viable skills,” Nilles said. “It becomes relatively easy to be a consultant or work part time for a company. And they don’t necessarily have to come into the office all the time.”
The move to the country has been aided by new and affordable technology--such as facsimile machines and personal computers--and the availability of overnight mail delivery to even small towns.
“Telecommunications really makes location not so relevant,” said Ram Willner, who studies business and technology issues as a professor at Dartmouth College. “We find people are able to enjoy life outside of cities.”
Must Adapt Business
The Graysons, for example, use a computer to write articles for an academic journal they publish. The text is then transmitted electronically on telephone lines to a typesetter. “I’m not at a loss in Santa Barbara because all I have to do is push a button,” said Grayson.
Besides adapting technology to their needs, business people in remote areas find they must adapt their entire businesses.
At Pacific Medsoft, for example, Ewing and partner Mark Spohr decided their firm could continue to grow and remain in Lake Tahoe if they sold their product through distributors instead of managing a sales force to call directly on clients.
At Pro-Log in Monterey, the company was losing business to low-cost competitors overseas. The company decided to automate much of its operations to cut expenses. Equipment orders to Pro-Log’s key vendors are now sent automatically by computer.
“We asked ourselves, ‘What does this company have to look like to stay in Monterey and yet remain internationally competitive?’ ” said Lee.
Companies like Pro-Log that need highly trained and sophisticated workers find their out-of-the way locales a mixed blessing. Executives say employees who have made a conscious decision to live in such areas tend to stay much longer than their more mobile urban counterparts.
“We haven’t lost an engineer in almost two years,” said Lee.
But attracting sophisticated new employees to the boondocks can be tough going.
“The skills we need are frequently not here,” said Peter Hawes, president of Monterey-based Design Professionals, a former San Francisco company that writes liability insurance for architects and engineers nationwide. “It’s kind of a pain to recruit here.”
Forced to Travel
Despite the technology that connects them to the outside world, rural consultants and business people say they still need to make face-to-face contact with their clients. That often means long drives or taking connecting flights to major airports and switching planes for cross-country flights.
“It’s impossible to stop by and see people and get together for lunch,” said Bliss, whose ranch is a 1 1/2-hour drive from the closest airport in Stockton. Like many others, Bliss schedules several meetings during weeklong jaunts to cities.
Getting away from it all also makes it harder to stay on top of the latest industry news. Said Grayson, who makes weeklong trips to New York every month to stay in touch: “You have to find ways to stay up on the gossip you pick up on at cocktail parties and at meetings.”
And if these business people feel isolated from their peers in the big city, they often find themselves out of synch with their small town business community as well.
“We are an outsider in that regard,” said Hawes in Monterey. “It’s a small-town business community and everybody does business with each other, but we are not a factor,” he said.
“It would have been a whole lot easier to be in Southern California,” said Pro-Log’s Lee. “But I have never regretted this move. I’m driving home and come around a curve at the top of this mountain and I watch the sunset. I love this place.”
