Reflecting on 20 years: Other 20-year-old companies look back

Photo / Tim Greenway Jesse Abbott, founder and CEO of Advance Technology.

Photo / Matt Dodge Fred Forsley, president of Shipyard Brewing Co. in Portland.

Photo / Tim Greenway Ed McKersie of Pro Search in his office in Portland.

Photo / David A. Rodgers Alan Spear and Mary Allen Lindemann, owners of Coffee by Design.

Photo / Tim Greenway Fletcher Kittredge, CEO of GWI.

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While this issue is devoted to the 20th anniversary of Mainebiz, we asked founders or leaders at other area businesses celebrating 20 years to put together some thoughts. Here's what they had to say:

Cutting clutter with the cloud

By Jesse Abbott
Founder/CEO
Advance Technology Inc., Scarborough

Twenty years ago the security industry installed products that lacked networking and much added intelligence. Now, we're focused on technologies based on the cloud and networking. What we have witnessed over the last two decades has changed the way we do business.

Cloud computing has had a profound effect on Advance Technology. We use cloud computing to provide proactive services — instead of being reactive. Twenty years ago, if a customer had a problem, we had to schedule a service call and dispatch a truck and a technician — at a trip charge plus an hourly rate. Thanks to the cloud, that's no longer the case.

Advance Technology provides more than half our customers with our “white glove” service plan. For an additional monthly charge we use managed switches and other devices to tap into the customer's system, where we regularly assess the health of the network and devices. This can range from sound and theater to teleconferencing systems, surveillance cameras or access control. More than 80% of the time we don't have to send a technician. We fix things before they become an issue, many times before the customer is even aware of a potential problem. That's the web and the cloud — you can do everything quicker and more efficiently. This has resulted in a whole new business model for us.

With a bank, wouldn't it be great if they knew ahead of time that one of their security cameras wasn't working or needed adjustment? We can accomplish all this via the web and that's huge for them and us. Not having to roll a truck? That's where the industry is going. Now we can simply dial into our customer's systems to keep them up and running.

Advance Technology has won awards and a great deal of that is implementation. That's where I credit our president, Rob Simopoulos, who shares this vision. We have technicians who embrace change and we've grown, from just myself and one technician to a staff of more than 40.

Growing with craft beer

By Fred Forsley
Co-founder/President
Shipyard Brewing Co., Portland

When I stop and think about it, it's amazing how much effort it takes to put a beer together and to put a brewery together. Many breweries have come and gone in the 20 years Shipyard Brewing Co. has been in business. To have Shipyard survive 20 years is truly amazing. I'm proud to say that all the hard work done by our team has created a legacy I believe will live on for generations.

Recently, I watched the video from our 10-year anniversary. It was inspiring to see all the faces and how many people are still with us. There's a very strong core group who have been with the company for many years, some since the very beginning.

As Shipyard moves into future, we're going to capture all the experiences and moments along the way so every 10 years we can reflect back and celebrate a major milestone of brewing — and enjoying brewing — Shipyard Export Ale and all the other great beers we brew at Shipyard. Export was the first beer we brewed when we began in 1992 at Federal Jack's in Kennebunk and we still proudly brew it today.

One thing that's always true about a great beer is that there is a community behind it. Really, it's the community of Maine that makes Shipyard a great beer. Without Maine, without the spirit of Maine, without all the hardworking people who work at Shipyard and without the Mainers who support us, Shipyard would not be here today.The spirit of Maine is the spirit of Shipyard. The hardworking brewers and people who sell our beers truly exemplify what being Maine handcrafted is. It's funny, when I think back on having a job as a young man and all of our employees who grew up in Maine and had jobs when they were young, I believe it instilled a work ethic in all of us.

I am thankful for my family, our employees, and the community of Maine. Cheers to the next 20 years!

Adversaries became allies

By Ed McKersie
Founder/President
Pro Search Inc., Portland

In 1994, starting up a recruiting and staffing company in Portland meant jumping into a crowded market, with several national firms and a number of well-respected local firms already established. Much has changed in 20 years and today Pro Search is the largest recruiting and staffing firm in the state of Maine.

When we started out, there wasn't an Internet, or job boards or resume databases. With the help of a friend, I built a candidate and client database and all advertising to job seekers was done through the newspapers. In 1996, Jeff Taylor, the founder of Monster.com, famously stated that his new site would put the recruiting business out of business. Monster.com and other job boards made it more efficient for us to do our job, so while many people in our industry feared this new “competitor,” we embraced it as a great new tool to advertise jobs and recruit candidates. I believe our investment in the latest technology, and embracing the Internet over the years is one of the reasons we have been so successful.

The No. 1 reason for our success is the team of people that have dedicated themselves to Pro Search. We have very little turnover and our culture is customer-focused. We define customers not only as the client companies that partner with us for their recruiting and staffing needs, but also the job seekers looking for that next career move, and our temporary and contract employees. Our unique “Pro Search Gives Back Program” reinforces our brand and our company culture. We established the program to be more strategic in our financial support of the nonprofit community in Maine.

Looking back on 20 years, the greater Portland employment market has grown. Recruiting strategies have become more sophisticated. In 1994, clients would tell me they didn't want to interview any candidates “from away” since they didn't expect them to make it through the first winter. Now clients expect (and get) candidates from all over the country from us on a regular basis. Many people have come to discover the real quality of life here in Maine, so attracting hard-to-find talent from out of state has become one of our strengths.

Buy fresh, brew local

By Mary Allen Lindemann
Co-founder/community builder
Coffee By Design, Portland

Coffee By Design is a company born out of a financial downturn, a passion for coffee and a dream of making a difference. From the beginning, my husband and business partner, Alan Spear, and I talked about core values and the way in which we choose to conduct our business. When we started CBD in 1994, there was a 40% vacancy rate in downtown Portland. We remember the day we opened the doors in what was then the “Pornography District” and slept on the shelves in the basement of our Congress Street coffeehouse. Due to the hard work and vision of several small, locally owned businesses — some of which are still here, while others are gone — the seeds of bringing our downtown back to life were planted.

In 1999, we created our first vision statement, which included things like, “remove fax machine from bedside stand.” We think about our first trip to a coffee farm in Costa Rica and the honor to be invited to be part of the international jury of Best of Panama and Best of Bolivia, knowing that the scores we gave would make the difference in the livelihood of a coffee farmer and his community.

We have faced many times of change — some due to growth and opportunities, others due to the economy here and abroad. We as people are older. Our priorities and range of knowledge are much broader. Yes, we are small business owners, but we are employers to many, we are parents, we care for our aging parents. Portland as a city has changed; our industry has evolved from specialty into “third wave.”

With the expansion of CBD into a 44,000-square-foot building in East Bayside, how we are perceived has changed. By Maine standards, we are a big company. With Dylan Hardman, our head roaster and production manager, I was explaining how important it was to me that everyone understand that even in a larger space we were the same company. Dylan listened patiently and then stopped me. “The bottom line: we're bigger,” he said. “And that's something we can be proud of.” He was right.

A pioneer of Internet

By Lori Valigra

Fletcher Kittredge
Founder/CEO
GWI, Biddeford

GWI CEO Fletcher Kittredge started his Internet career in 1984 in Cambridge, Mass., at a private laboratory called Bolt Beranek and Newman (now BBN Technologies), where he focused on a defense distribution contract for the Internet. In 1993, when the Mosaic web browser — credited as the first graphical browser, hit the market, Kittredge, who says he never felt at home in Cambridge, saw an opportunity to return to his home state of Maine.

There also was plenty of opportunity to help form Maine's Internet, as he says there were virtually no Internet service providers then. The communications infrastructure was made of copper wire rather than today's fiber optics, and Internet access was through regular phone lines, also called dial-up Internet access, using a square box called a modem.

“We still didn't know what Internet service would look like,” says Kittredge. “We thought it would be small and local [to Biddeford], but almost immediately it expanded to Portland. Then in 1997 we went statewide.”

In the early days, he recalls, Internet service was almost entirely residential. In 1996, faster broadband speeds were available via cable TV modems from Casco Cable, which is now Comcast. That's when big customers started using the Internet.

“As dial-up went away, 65% of the Internet was to business,” he says. “Email was really big in the early days of the Internet. Now it has died down, and Facebook and Twitter are active.”

Kittredge says broadband started to take off as early as 1996, but it really took five to six years to really bloom, and then the Internet bubble came in the early 2000s.

GWI has grown to $17 million in revenues this year, is profitable and has 65 employees.

Going forward, Kittredge foresees a day when communications products will be so advanced, pervasive and ingrained in society that people may not know whether they are on a conference call or actually in a room with the other party. “We are nowhere near the end of this,” he says.

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