Bringing jobs back to the Treasure State

If you are from Montana, reading this outside Montana, Greg Gianforte wants you to move back to Montana …and bring your job with you.

Twenty years ago, Gianforte and his wife, Jan, moved the family to Montana and started a small business out of a spare bedroom in their home in Bozeman. It was 20-years later that the Gianfortes sold the business to Oracle for almost $2 billion, but not before turning the tech company into a business boasting 1,100 jobs – half of those in Bozeman making the firm the largest commercial employer in city -- with an average Montana salary of $86,000.

The Gianfortes are travelling Montana visiting 30 different communities to spread the message of brining high-tech jobs to Montana and in the process bringing Montana natives back to Big Sky Country and met with folks in Malta last Thursday.

“In each of the communities we have visited we have found telecommuters,” Greg said. “People are doing this and I think the reason it is important is because our communities need more high wage jobs and our kids have been leaving for decades. We are saying ‘come on home, and bring your job with you’.”

“The whole idea here is to just see if we can add some high-wage jobs into the community and put families back together,” Greg said. “It is a simple concept, and clearly it is already happening in our communities, we are just trying to put the pieces together.”

On the state level, the “Bring our Families Back Tour” is put together with the Montana High Tech Business Alliance in conjunction with the Montana Chamber of Commerce. On the local level, telecommunication companies are overseeing the program which aims to create more high-paying jobs in the state.

“The internet is sufficient in most communities,” Greg said. “We are a little jealous of Malta because you have better internet connectivity than Bozeman does, or Missoula or Great Falls.”

Malta’s Anna Merriman makes the most of the high internet speeds offered here in Phillips County. Merriman works for Computers Unlimited, located in Billings, and does so by telecommunicating from her home in Malta. Merriman is originally from Malta and started with Computers Unlimited while living in Nevada.

“I have worked for them for the past nine years and the last eight I have telecommunicated,” Merriman said. “I like working from home. Sometimes it can be tough balancing the kids with work, but I really enjoy it.”

Merriman works with a customer base located all over the world with about 90-percent of her clients via email. She said that most of the time, her clients don’t know that she works from home or that she lives in Montana. Computers Unlimited provides integrated software solutions, cloud computing and support services to three primary markets – Industrial Gas & Welding Supply Distributors, HME/DME & Closed Pharmacy Providers and Audiologists & Dispensers.

Given the choice of working in an office or telecommuting, Merriman said it is a bit of a toss-up.

“Some days it would be nice to be in an office around other people and then others days it is nice to work from home,” she said. “But my husband farms fulltime and I work from home so it works out really well.”

The Gianfortes said that Marriman likely would not have had the choice of working from home in Malta a decade ago.

“This telecommuting concept wasn’t even possible 10-years ago,” Greg said. “And we are not here to tell Malta what to do, but we share these ideas with some of the leaders in the community and said ‘decide if it is right for you’.”

For more information on the Bring our Families Back program, visit http://www.bettermontanajobs.com.

“Montanans have an incredible work ethic,” Greg said. “That was really our competitive advantage. We competed against the largest software companies in the world in every market in the world and we won a lot. The Montana work ethic was really at the heart of it. I think if we combine the Montana work ethic with some new approaches, we can complement our existing Ag-foundation so that our kids don’t have to move away, or if they have, they come on home.”