‘Lone Eagles’ Flying From Cities to New Job Horizons : Business: Small employers are filling the work force as the new breed of entrepreneurs heads for the country.
Weary of city life and corporate pressure, Dan and Laurie Jones left Los Angeles four years ago and moved back to this prairie town where they had grown up and dated as high school sweethearts. Their modest plans for the future did not include becoming Sterling’s leading entrepreneurs.
But soon an idea struck them: Why not train a brigade of technicians and contract their services to computer software firms, answering the thousands of inquiries those firms get daily from customers needing help installing or operating various programs? The computer industry said the idea wouldn’t fly: Sterling, 120 miles northeast of Denver, was too isolated and its work force was too unsophisticated.
The Joneses--he a former consultant in database design, she an ex-auditor for the Carnation Co.--founded Jones Technologies Inc. anyway and even managed to coax a prospective client to visit Sterling.
The client was impressed by what he saw: The office was abuzz with ringing phones and eager workers fielding calls at their computers. Had the visitor asked, he might have learned that the workers were actually volunteers the community had sent over to sit and look busy in the hope of attracting business to Sterling. The calls all came in a prearranged pattern from friends at the local bank, school and college.
It took the Joneses 18 months to find their first client, but today their office space in the corner of a defunct downtown department store is truly abuzz. Fifty newly trained technicians--among them a former nurse, a one-time accountant, several college students and a mother of five grown children who wanted to rejoin the work force but not leave Sterling--handle up to 1,500 calls a day from customers of 20 widely known software programs.
After the meatpacking plant, the Joneses are the largest private employer in Sterling, and their firm, recently purchased by a privately held company, Skyes Enterprises of Charlotte, N.C., will soon buy and move into the abandoned K mart store outside of town and expand to 200 employees.
In an era of corporate downsizing--U.S. companies laid off 1,500 workers a day in the first five months of 1992--Dan and Laurie Jones are at the cutting edge of a trend with broad economic and social implications for the workplace: Small businesses, not giant corporations, are creating the new jobs these days.
And as “knowledge workers” drift away from large organizations, often the victims of layoffs or buyouts, the resultant growth in self-employment is changing the way America works.
“We seem to be recreating the original structure of this economy, reverting to an entrepreneurial economy, which was what built the country in the first place,” said William Charland, a career counselor and fellow at the Center for the New West, a Denver think tank. The center has a name for the estimated 9 million knowledge workers who have left the city and started innovative businesses in rural America with the help of faxes, computers and overnight parcel delivery: Lone Eagles.
Consider the impact of Lone Eagles and the role of small business on the workplace of the 1990s:
* Last year Americans started 3 million businesses for primary or part-time income, according to independent researchers. Many will fail; some--although home-based and with no initial payroll--will grow, needing support services that will create other businesses and jobs. Thirty-nine million Americans today are working out of their homes, up from 6 million in 1974, according to the Center for the New West.
* Businesses with less than 20 employees--which account for nearly 90% of all businesses in the country--were responsible for the vast majority of jobs created from 1988 to 1990, according to government statistics. “This is a time with a lot of opportunity, and small business continues to generate jobs,” said Bruce Phillips, an economic researcher for the Small Business Administration in Washington.
* In 1900, 50% of U.S. workers were self-employed, according to Paul and Sarah Edwards, Santa Monica-based authors and lecturers on home-based self-employment. That figure fell to 7% in 1977 and has now risen to 13%. The Edwards project that by the year 2005, one in three U.S. workers will be his or her own boss.
“Specialization is the code word for survival for someone who wants to be self-employed today,” Paul Edwards said.
Among the examples of new niche businesses in a newsletter the Edwards publish are an insurance agent who specializes in policies for racehorses, an ex-tennis pro who matches student athletes with colleges offering tennis scholarships, a social worker who manages health care for elderly patients whose families are out of town and an ex-chef who designs and remodels kitchens for serious cooks.
Some communities, such as Steamboat Springs, Colo., are trying to recruit Lone Eagles with the enticements of a pleasing quality of life, reasonable living costs, access to sophisticated communications and upgraded airports.
“We’ve got the communications infrastructure and the jetport now that we need to recruit Lone Eagles and high-tech business,” said Linda Kakela, director of Yampa Valley’s Development Council in Steamboat Springs. “In cooperation with the state, we’ll make prospecting trips to the Midwest in August and California later this fall. We think Lone Eagles will generate business much as the ranchers used to when we were an agricultural service center.”
The rediscovery of rural America as a place to live and do business--23,000 Californians moved to Colorado alone last year--could be a boon to a region that has been losing population for most of the 20th Century.
Among the ramifications: Two-thirds of the nation’s 2,400 rural counties showed a slight population increase in 1991 after years of decline, and today, for the first time in 13 years, the unemployment rate in non-metropolitan areas is lower than that in metropolitan areas, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports.
For the rural Lone Eagles--the free-lance professionals, consultants, manufacturers’ representatives, financial advisers, analysts and others--the lesson of the new workplace is that having a Los Angeles or New York address is no longer necessary.
Technology has cut the ties that traditionally bound workers to cities--New York’s share of the securities industry’s employment, for example, has fallen to 30%--and with access to an airport and phone equipment for faxes and computer modems, Butte, Mont., and Burlington, Vt., can often be as good a business base as Chicago or Boston.
“With what I do, it really doesn’t matter where I’m based,” said Bernie Zurbriggen, the former president of a Texas communications company.
Now operating alone out of his home in Frisco, Colo. (population 1,600), Zurbriggen runs a used-car pricing service, handling up to 5,000 calls a month at up to $1.95 per minute.
The pricing information, supplied under contract by the Kelly Blue Book, can change daily. By using a touch-tone phone, the caller responds to a series of computer questions, enabling him to identify the make, model and year of a particular car. The computer in turn tells him its worth, based on what kind of condition it is in.
“Starting a home business like this puts you on the leading--or bleeding--edge of things,” Zurbriggen said. “It’s kind of like walking a tightrope. You’re always looking out and saying: ‘Am I going to survive? Is the independence worth more than the security of a paycheck?’ It depends on the individual, but I’m enjoying the challenge.”
And the challenges are many. More than 8 in 10 new businesses fail within five years, and starting a business in a rural area typically costs more and takes longer than most people had anticipated, several Lone Eagles said.
Additionally, the isolation--cultural and geographic--and the loss of privacy in a small town where everyone knows everyone else’s secrets can make the flight from the cities a difficult adjustment.
When Jeff Bauer--a health care consultant, lecturer, author and former Fulbright scholar--quit his job as chief planning officer at the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center in 1984 to live and work in Hillrose, Colo. (a town with 200 residents and one unpaved street), his friends asked: “ ‘Bauer, are you insane?’ Then, after a pause, they would say something like: ‘Geez, I wish I had the courage to try something like that.’ ”
Bauer answered the knock on his office door the other day wearing jeans, sneakers and a denim shirt. The office is in a small wooden building behind his home.
After some lean years, Bauer’s consultancy is prospering. He keeps his $250,000-per-year business thriving by spending half his time on the road, offering his views on health care at hospitals, rural clinics, universities and government forums and on videos that he produces himself in a state-of-the-art film studio in his home office.
He said his next goal is to produce a weekly cable TV health care program from his studio.
He said he misses singing in the Denver Symphony Choir and having access to a good local library, but otherwise finds that he has had to make few sacrifices.
He said he has learned to live with the anxiety of looking at a calendar that is often empty two months down the road. He harvests beans and corn on his 76-acre farm and said he believes that having a computer and an airport close at hand have made rural isolation largely irrelevant, even for someone who has to stay abreast of developments in a rapidly changing science.
“I didn’t move here for the peaceful idyllic life,” Bauer said. “My wife (an attorney in nearby Brush, Colo.) and I figured we’d have to work our butts off. And we have. We work just as hard here as we did in Denver. Only now we work on our own terms.”
