E-ureka!
Hailey’s new pioneers mine
global economy
By TRAVIS PURSER
Express Staff Writer
Hallie Shealy
Hallie Shealy, owner of Trouver.net, seems keenly aware that 18- to
30-year-olds making six-figure annual incomes could cause people to feel a little uneasy.
"I’m from the South," she said during an interview at her
office in Hailey last week. "In the South we don’t talk about money."
But it’s hard not to, given the phenomenal financial success of her
business that is perhaps pioneering a new way of working in a county built on mining,
agriculture, tourism, construction and retail sales.
For better or for worse, welcome to the Information Age.
The 37-year-old Shealy’s dozen or so employees work together on River
Street in a single-room office about twice the size of a two-car garage. Each employee
sits in front of an Internet-connected computer, wearing a telephone headset, making one
phone call after another—up to 150 a day, according to Shealy—trying to clinch
employment contracts between high-tech professionals and employers in places like Los
Angeles and the Bay Area of California.
Recruiters at Trouver.net make about 150 phone calls a
day trying to clinch employment contracts between high-tech professionals and employers in
places like Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area. “It’s a different
generation now,” said Trouver.net founder Hallie Shealy (Express photo by David N. Seelig)
Across town, at another nearly identical company called Futurelink, from
which Trouver.net spun off a few years ago, owner Lisa Wood, 35, said she believes about
150 high-tech recruiters now work in the valley for her company and several others like
it. Add to that existing high-tech Internet-dependent companies, such as Environmental
News Network, Wood River Technologies and Marketron, and the Wood River Valley is gaining
a reputation for offering well-paying, high-tech employment that is beginning to draw
people from out of the area, Wood and Shealy said. Wood confirmed she just recently hired
two people from New York.
The impression someone gets talking to one of Shealy’s recruiters
over the phone must be vastly different from the impression a person gets walking through
Trouver.net’s front door. One of the first things a person sees—and
smells—is a turtle named "Dollar" lounging in its bathtub-sized aquarium.
(Shealy: "It smells like success in here.") A dozen people talk simultaneously
while popular rock music emits, more than softly, from two large speakers mounted on the
wall.
Computers sit on collapsible tables. Baseball caps and tee-shirts are de
rigueur. Shealy says she could care less if her employees come to work barefoot in
pajamas—and they have—so long as they maintain a professional phone manner.
Salaries are a subsistence $1,000 per month. The real money is in
commissions, the amount of which Shealy would not reveal. However, recruiters are earning
between $10,000 and $60,000 for every deal they close, according to Wood. Futurelink
doesn’t track the specific numbers, but "as a recruiter, you should be placing
three, four, six candidates a month," Wood said during a telephone conversation
Monday.
Yes—every month.
Both Shealy and Wood said they could not run their businesses in the Wood
River Valley without the Internet. Half a century ago, when the recruiting business was in
its nascent years, Wood said, the telephone, the local library and the U.S. Postal Service
were the major tools of the trade.
Times change.
"Speed is everything in this new global economy," Wood said.
Recruiters now surf the Web for all the information they need on a new
company they’re after, call the company’s human resources department and shoot
off a candidate’s resume in an instant through a fax server. It all happens
inconceivably faster than it did before the Internet.
"We lose commissions in a matter of minutes," Wood said, when
another recruiter gets there first.
Not only has the Internet turbocharged communication, it has also made
geographic location irrelevant. When every business transaction you make happens
instantaneously across a wire, whether you’re next door or in Timbuktu, why stay in a
major city, if you’d rather be someplace else? Shealy perhaps summed up a common
sentiment in her mostly twenty-something workforce when she said, "My view when I was
younger was I wanted to live in a big city. Now, I want to live in a small town and travel
to big cities."
According to their owners, both Futurelink and Trouver.net employ, almost
entirely, people who were already living in the local area.
"We’re lucky to be in the valley," Wood said. "We have
a captive audience of well-educated go-getters—a lot of type-A personalities."
Agreeing with that assessment, Shealy said most of her employees were
frustrated before coming to work for Trouver.net because they couldn’t find jobs that
would allow them to support a family.
Despite the recent success, pioneering a technological revolution in the
Wood River Valley has not been easy. Shealy said local business people have called her
company a "get-rich-quick" scheme. They see the folding tables and, because they
don’t understand what Trouver.net does, they assume the company will disappear
overnight sometime soon, Shealy said—or they think the business is sucking money out
of the local economy and transferring it someplace else.
Both Shealy and Wood are quick to dispel those ideas. In fact, they claim
their businesses, considering their small size, create a boost to the local economy like
no other existing business in the area.
"One year," Wood said, "I had three of my guys go out and
buy houses all in the same week."
Both women gave laundry lists of the big-ticket items their employees
regularly purchase in Hailey: cars, land, boats, snowmobiles and motorcycles, to name a
few.
And that brings up yet another problem, as far as Shealy is concerned. She
would rather not publicize the phenomenal financial success of her
twenty-something-year-old employees, for fear of political ill will.
"It’s a different generation now," Shealy said.
"People understand being a doctor or a lawyer. Maybe they don’t understand the
information revolution."
Regardless of their perceived dilemma, all evidence suggests Trouver.net
and Futurelink are here to stay.
A week ago, Hailey city officials approved plans for a new
state-of-the-art, 12,000-square-foot office building, which Futurelink and Trouver.net
will share.
Designed by Ketchum architect and yoga practitioner Dale Bates, the
downtown building represents a radical departure from corporate culture’s mainstay of
rank-and-file gray cubicles, florescent lighting and endlessly recirculated air.
With the Fed-ex man about the only visitor high-tech recruiters receive
from the non-virtual world, there is no reception area in the blueprints, but instead a
low-key oriental entrance garden that greets employees. Porous walls allow the building to
"breathe," copious natural light makes florescent lights unnecessary and radiant
heating and cooling along with an abundance of natural building materials and plants
ensure a healthy environment for employees, Bates said during a presentation at city hall.
"When you sit in front of a monitor all day, you need contact with
nature," Bates said. "In a way, the building functions like a private
residence."
Hailey planners all but applauded Bates’ concepts. Councilman Rick
Davis said, "This is a low-impact business, and from what I understand, a fairly
decent wage."
Members of the public present at the meeting agreed the growing businesses
are an asset to the Hailey community. Shealy, clearly pleased with the positive response,
said after the meeting, "Anytime you’re in the public eye, you get a mixed
response."
In the face of praise and criticism, Shealy and Wood insist they’re
only getting started and that, as Shealy said, "traditional business is being
exchanged for e-commerce."
"This is the greatest thing since the Industrial Revolution,"
she said.
