Technology and Small Town America, Part 1

Associate Editor Rob Wright ventured to Nevada, Mo., and spent a week in the rural community of 8,600 residents to find out what's really going on in small towns and small businesses. Click here for the full report.

Boston
The alarm clock rang with a vengeance at 4 a.m. Monday, July 15th. I had just returned late the night before from a wonderful vacation on the West Coast. Now I had to go all the way back to Logan Airport, bound for Missouri.

I hopped in a cab and, despite my worries about jet lag being potentially fatal, headed for the airport. I was strangely excited; this trip is a major departure from the usual overblown trade shows and expos and the marketing-heavy partner conferences to which I have become accustomed over the last two years. I have commited to be immersing myself not amongst the corporations but the end users and the beneficiaries of the technology. No suits, no press relations, no marketing hype. No torrid tales of golden parachutes, no unscrupulous accountants, no bankruptcy notices.

I had been charged by VARBusiness to find a small town in America and nest in it for a week to get the real story about small businesses and how they use technology. The problem was that I wasn't sure where to start looking for "small town America."

Luckily, I e-mailed an old colleague and friend. Matt, a reporter for National Public Radio in Kansas City, and I were catching up and I wrote to him about my problem of finding a suitable small town for this case study. Pitching regions like Key West and Hilton Head to my editors had failed, I told him, and I was out of ideas. "I have a story for you," he wrote back, pointing me in the direction of Nevada (pronounced Ne-VAY-da), Missouri. He gave me some details that got me hooked on this small town in Southwest Missouri. For example, Yahoo! selected Nevada as one of the 50 "Most Wired" communities in America in March of 2000. The World Teleport Association last year named the city one of its "Top Seven Intelligent Communities," an honor bestowed to regions worldwide that embrace high-speed telecommunications and IT to better themselves.

Nevada
After a two-legged flight to Kansas City, I jumped in my red Mitsubishi Lancer at the airport and take Highway 71 south through the city and down to Nevada. I had been in contact with a number of local business owners and city officials and was eager to meet with them, so once I was outside of Kansas City, I took full advantage of the 70 MPH speed limit and the long, flat roads of southern Missouri.

On the hour-plus trip to Nevada on Highway 71, I saw quite a bit of cows, cornfields and vast strips of farmland so green it threatens to make Scotland look like New Mexico. Lots of large, cylinder-shaped bails of hay along the highway. After 30 minutes on the road, I pass Peculiar, Missouri. There's a sign off of Highway 71 that simply states, "Welcome to Peculiar, MO...Where the Odds Are With You!" Some time after that, I pass through Rich Hill, which has a billboard boasting "Big Mouth," which apparently is the world's largest coal bucket (8,800 lbs.). And in Butler, another interesting billboard for local eatery Southside Cafe states, "No Chain Food Here." Sure enough, those hideous road signs that advertise McDonald's, Burger King and other fast food restaurants are nowhere to be found.

I exited to Nevada and quickly found myself parking near the Vernon County Courthouse, nestled firmly in the middle of the city's downtown square. I felt like I was in a throwback era of black-and-white television. Walking by all the family-owned storefronts and diners put me in a time warp. Stereo speakers attached to light posts in the square played oldies elevator music and soft, jazz-influenced versions of popular modern tunes. Even the "Fallout Shelter" signs with the radiation symbols above the entrances of the courthouse recalled the bomb shelter craze of almost half a century ago. The only thing out of place was the view of numerous SUVs parked around Main Street.

The retro feeling couldn't have been more wrong. Despite the old-fashioned fa%E7ade of downtown, I soon learn after meeting with several business owners that Nevada was certainly not living in the past.

I walked across the town square to visit the offices of Jeff Tweten and Steve Highlander, who used to run a firm called Global Web Systems in Nevada, a small IT consulting outfit that specialized in Web site development for small and medium businesses. Global Web Systems has developed much of Nevada's commercial and government Web sites in the last several years. Highlander still does Web site development and also runs an Internet advertising outfit called CableNet Advertising. Tweten sold his share of Global Web Systems and now has an e-commerce business of his own, serving as vice president of sales and marketing for Lumber Buddy, a company founded by Tweten's brother. Interestingly, Lumber Buddy, which manufactures a patent-pending lumber stacking device among other things, describes itself as "A solutions company for the lumber industry."

I sit down with Jeff Tweten first, and he takes me through the brief history of the Internet and Nevada. Like most areas, the city's younger, college-aged residents who began using the Web first. But unlike other rural areas, interest in the Internet spread quicker than a tabloid headline. "When my dad got into the Internet and e-mail I knew it was for real," Tweten said.

Tweten talks about the height of the IT boom in the late 90s as being a bit ahead of the times for small businesses. Ironically, he said, more people are using the Web and IT to their advantage today than three or four years ago. The economy of the IT industry may be in the tank, but technology use and adoption is probably at its tallest level for Nevada. "I don't think people understood the real value of the Web back then," Tweten said, "but more businesses are recognizing the power now. A lot of people got excited early--too early-- but now I think the technology and the expectations are on the same page."

Highlander sat down and joined the discussion. With CableNet, Highlander is focused helping small businesses increase their presence through the Web, either through Internet advertising, e-mail or other types of digital marketing. He preaches e-mail, document management and messaging solutions instead of traditional mail, for example. Highlander said there's a lot of interest in IT from local businesses, but there's a lack of expertise, so a good chunk of Highlander's time goes into educating business owners. "Web sites for small businesses are like stepchildren--the company often doesn't commit itself enough to make it work and favors the [brick and mortar operations," Highlander said.

Talking with Jeff and Steve about their technologies of choice, I noticed a Sony laptop running Windows XP on Tweten's desk and pointed it out. Tweten quickly said, "It wasn't by choice." Tweten tells me he's a diehard Macintosh lover. "Superior technology to the PC. I just wish they had a better marketing department."

While both Tweten and Highlander's businesses rely heavily on IT and the Web, they are at a disadvantage in Nevada because the city doesn't attract much attention from technology vendors or suppliers. Tweten said Nevada businesses usually have to drive an hour-plus to Kansas City to buy their technology. Others, like Highlander, simply use the Web. "Pretty much everything I buy is purchased over the Internet because there aren't many resellers or retail stores around. I can download software from the Web and order hardware from a Web store," he said.

Jim Adams, president of Adams and Associates, is another Nevada business owner that fends for himself when it comes to IT. Adams and Associates is an architecture and electric cooperative consulting firm that has been a fixture in Nevada for more than 25 years. I walked into Jim's office near Cottey College, a two-year liberal arts college for women, and view an impressive array of technology--desktops, servers and architectural design tools. From the large number of Apple products at Adams and Associates, it becomes clear that Jim is also a Macintosh fan (I sense a pattern). In addition, Jim has learned to harness the Web, using the Internet to work with customers far outside of Nevada. "We serve clients all over the country thanks to the Web," he said.

Similarly, Jim buys most of his technology via the Web because of the lack of suppliers and vendors in the area. In addition, virtually every solution at Adams and Associates was built in-house. "We've developed all this on our own because we had to," Adams said.

It's not surprising that so much of the company's solutions are homegrown since the staff shows itself to be very tech savvy. Jim's son Jeremy, who is working at the firm this summer, has a master's degree in computer science and worked for Nortel Networks for more than five years. Jeremy said he doesn't see many large technology companies taking an interest in small towns and small businesses, and believes they're missing out on a lot of opportunities.

After spending my first day in Nevada talking with well-known business owners, I was left with two impressions. First, this is a town that takes the initiative and doesn't wait around for someone else to lead it. The second is despite the apparently high number of businesses and residents using the Internet, the city's thirst for IT is going largely unquenched. I'm guessing the remote location and the stigma of rural communities being behind the times has something to do with this problem.

Nevertheless, it looks like the people of Nevada are doing more with less. Tweten believes the lack of attention from major technology vendors and suppliers has helped Nevada. "It's made us work harder to get what we need," he said. "It will be interesting to see in 10 years whether small towns like Nevada have grown more through the Web than larger urban areas."

Stay tuned for part 2 of "Technology and Small Town America" and more from Nevada, Mo.