Montana's new, broadband economy

Global Business Thrives in Small-Town Harlowton, Montana

By Matthew Frank, 5-04-07

At the Montana Economic Development Summit in Butte earlier in the week, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, live via satellite, told the 2,000 attendees there that “the Internet is connecting up people in new ways.”

The Internet allows a 14-person company in the tiny central Montana town of Harlowton (pop. 941), for instance, to have more than 30,000 clients in a dozen countries.

That company is Elk River Systems, and Gates mentioned it more than once during his speech. At a conference that brought together business leaders, foreign dignitaries and politicians to talk about innovation, entrepreneurship, and international trade, Elk River Systems was Gates’ poster child for Montana’s “new economy,” and the built-in idea that with today’s technology businesses can operate from anywhere, even in the most rural of locales.

Elk River Systems runs TicketPrinting.com, a site that allows users to design their own tickets for events (performances, concerts, plays, sporting events, etc.). The company then prints the tickets out and tosses them in the mail. Clients range from Friday Night Fights in New York City to the Michael J. Fox Foundation; from Shakespeare in the Park to a recent Barack Obama rally in Tampa Bay, Florida.

“It’s truly a paradigm-changer to have a business like this in Harlowton, Montana,” says the company’s CEO Lance Trebesch, who was raised in a small town himself and worked through the Silicon Valley boom and bust.

Elk River systems exists in Harlowton thanks to four things, he says: the Internet (with a nod to Microsoft); the transportation network (a nod to UPS); the quality telecom network in Montana; and the expertise of TechRanch‘s economic development network.

Equally important, Trebesch says, are the people now working for him in Harlowton—“smart, high-quality, hard-working people that value their jobs.”

Nine years ago when the company was founded, by Mike Yinger, a concerted effort was made to place it in an economically disadvantaged community, Trebesch says. Harlowton was chosen, he says, because of its solid labor force and welcoming Chamber of Commerce.

But choosing Harlowton wasn’t just an altruistic act: the inexpensive location coupled with the solid labor force simply “makes good business sense,” Trebesch says. “Small towns are great, vibrant centers with incredible histories and good people…it’s a competitive advantage for us.”

The company has grown 25 percent every year since its inception in 1998.

Elk River Systems’ success is part of a larger trend in the Rocky Mountain West, “its natural scenery attracting knowledge-based activities,” Trebesch said, paraphrasing another speaker at the Summit—former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin.

“It’s not resource extraction, it’s high-value activity,” Trebesch says. And, he adds, “When you look around now, it’s happening faster than the technology pundits anticipated.”

Trebesch doesn’t necessarily see the knowledge-based industries appealing only to out-of-staters drawn to the region’s natural amenities. Rather, he says, it’s often young Montanans who had left the state for school, say, coming back.

In addition to the the company’s 14 workers in Harlowton, Elk River Systems’ development team is based in Bozeman, where it’s able to recruit students from Montana State University. Aside from TicketPrinting.com, the company’s other subsidiaries include PerforatedPaper.com, Elk River Software, and, coming soon, TicketRiver.com, which will offer broader event management solutions, Trebesch says.

At the Montana Economic Development Summit, Gates said the personal computer, connected to the Internet, might be the most powerful human invention in history. “It’s amazing what it’s done for the community of Harlowton,” Trebesch says.

Editor’s Note: In the spirit of full disclosure and transparency, we should note that Lance Trebesch is a friend of New West and holds a small equity stake in our company.

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