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On the road again: telecommuters in Big Sky Country

The saying in Montana is you can’t eat the trees.

But you can bring your meal ticket with you, as some Gallatin County residents have discovered.

By NICK GEVOCK Chronicle Staff Writer

Dubbed "telecommuters," "modem cowboys" or "lone eagles," a small group of professionals has found that the antidote to Montana’s wages, which hover among the lowest in the country, is new technology that allows a big city career while living in Big Sky country.

"I really liked being able to go to New York and enjoy the city for a few days, but know you were leaving," said Lisa Tuckerman, who just quit after working 11 years from Bozeman for a New York City financial advising company.

Telecommuting often requires regular travel — Tuckerman spent about three months a year away from Bozeman. That’s a fair trade off, however, given that she was able to come home to Montana, she said. And many financial, consulting or other professional jobs require a lot of a travel anyway.

According to the 2000 Census, 396 residents of Gallatin County work outside of the state, including 142 people in Bozeman. Those figures don’t include people who have moved their businesses here while keeping established clients.

Rapid advances in technology, including high-speed Internet service, better cellular phone coverage and video conferencing, have made Montana less remote and more accommodating to professional businesses.

And Gallatin Field’s air service, with multiple daily flights to major airports like Minneapolis, Seattle and Denver, make business trips a mere extra connection.

The move to Bozeman made sense for Andrew Martzloff, who had a small financial consulting company in San Francisco. The 46-year-old father of two said he started thinking about moving his company, Bitterroot Capital Advisors, in 1999, seeking a nice place to raise his kids.

Before he made the move, he floated the idea with clients for about a year to see how they would react.

"The hard part’s getting started, because you never know what people are really going to think until they’ve sort of voted with their feet," he said. "I didn’t lose a single client."

Martzloff did his homework before moving the company, researching Montana taxes, the cost of office space and travel expenses. He said technology like high-speed Internet and video conferencing costs a little more here, but that’s offset by lower office space rents.

Locating here wouldn’t be possible without the technology available today, Martzloff said.

"I could not have done it in 1997, the technology just wasn’t there," he said.

At first, Martzloff figured he would need to keep the San Francisco office open to maintain the image. Although he has maintained the office to accommodate one of his employees, Martzloff said getting clients to visit Montana, where they can turn a business trip into a vacation, has been easy.

"I’ve had more visits to my office in Bozeman than I ever did in San Francisco," Martzloff said. "Bozeman has a certain mystique to people outside of Montana."

People bringing businesses with them to Montana is something of a cottage industry because they create jobs. For example, Martzloff has hired two consultants to work with him, both of whom are Montana State University graduates.

Martzloff still spends two weeks every month traveling. But he would have to travel to meet with clients, who are spread all over the country, whether he’s flying in and out of Bozeman or San Francisco.

Like anything, telecommuting has its pros and cons. The obvious pluses include the ability to earn a good salary while living in Montana, setting your own schedule and, for those whose offices are in their homes, short commutes.

Downsides include working alone, the absence of the office camaraderie, less face-to-face contact with clients and the extra travel.

"I spent my share of Friday nights in either Minneapolis or Salt Lake, trying to get home," Tuckerman said. "That occasionally was a bummer. But again, in the scheme of things, it wasn’t that bad."

Tuckerman quit her job to raise two young kids. She said although she could have kept telecommuting with kids, her career gave her the opportunity to stay home and she’s grateful for that. Tuckerman might go back to telecommuting in a few years.

The home office can cause a bad case of cabin fever for some telecommuters. Work can become all encompassing because you can’t get away from the computer, said Jeff van den Noort, a self-employed corporate economist who moved to Montana seven years ago.

"It’s hard to turn off work when it’s right there," he said. "You can’t turn the computer off and your commute is 20 feet."

A week-long camping trip while visiting a friend near Anaconda brought van den Noort to Montana from San Francisco seven years ago. He never left.

He said although he finds himself working late at night sometimes, he’s a night owl and doesn’t mind. And the flexibility of being a telecommuter allows him to ski on weekdays, when the slopes are less crowded.

Some telecommuters create a separation between work and life by dressing in office attire. But others work in pajamas and slippers, or even less.

"I’ve taken calls in hot tubs, trying to sound professional without splashing the water," van den Noort joked.

Like Martzloff, van den Noort was worried his clients would be leery of someone moving to Montana, because from a business standpoint there’s no reason to come here. But clients come around quickly and don’t really care where you are as long as the work gets done.

"They understand why people would want to live here," he said.

Telecommuting doesn’t work for everyone. Living more than 2,000 miles from a company’s main office definitely puts a ceiling on one’s career.

"When you’re not in the office day in and day out, you can’t expect to be the one who gets the prime clients and the prime contracts," Tuckerman said. "From the company’s point of view, if they were thinking of appointing a new vice president or whatever, they would have never in a million years thought of me.

"But to me it was never about the last dollar."

http://bozemandailychronicle.com/articles/2003/01/26/news/02econbzbigs.txt

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