Small Wetzel County, W.Va., tech firm grows.
The Charleston Gazette (Charleston, WV)| August 01, 2004
Byline: Paul Wilson

Aug. 1--NEW MARTINSVILLE, W.Va. -- The 50-year-old building on Main Street isn't much to look at. There's a second-floor apartment, and the first floor is being remodeled, but the new tenants have yet to put up a sign.

But inside, employees are working with businesses across the country, including divisions of Bose and Sprint, and dozens of satellite and home-theater installation companies.

"If you've ever had a telephone installed or a satellite installed, you know the horror stories," said Riche Varner, who founded Prosite Business Solutions with Jason and Cynd Warren. "They'll tell you to wait all day for them to get there. We want to take that part out of the equation.

"Our product is really generated toward individuals or companies with technicians out in the field. It's for anything that gets installed with work crews."

In summer 2001, Varner was running a satellite and home-theater installation business in Chicago, and he wanted an Internet-based system where his employees could check and print work orders. That way, he reasoned, he could expand regionally and his workers couldn’t have to report to a central office.

At the time, the Warrens were in Phoenix, Jason’s hometown, programming e-commerce sites and site with databases. Varner found the Warrens’ names on their Website and contacted them.

But when Varner relayed to the Warrens what he wanted, “I told him it would take about six months and six figures,” Jason Warren said.

That was much more than Varner has to spend, so he made a sales pitch: What if the Warrens developed the software and he, with his contacts in the home-theater industry, go the work out?

So, as We businesses across the country were drying up, Varner and the Warrens formed their company. At first, the group offered free services to a handful of businesses. Then the client list grew to 30, and – when PrimeTV came on in late 2002 – to about 100.

By that point, it became clear that the new business, and modern technology, would allow the Warren to work wherever they wanted. Cyn’d, born in New Martinsville and raised in Braxton County, returned to her hometown with Jason in 2002.

“I wanted to come back here after I got out of the Navy, but there were no jobs,” Cyn’d Warren said. “One of my goals was to be near family, but one of the goals was to be two hours from a major airport [Pittsburg].”

“The amazing thing is I see how much [government] money things like Wal-Mart and Cabela’s get to open here,” Varner said.

“We’ve never been approached about that. Not that we haven’t tired,” Jason Warren said.

The company now employs 18 people and has clients in about 40 states. No West Virginia-based company used the software.

“Local leaders don’t seem to notice,” Varner said. “They don’t understand because we’re not bricks and mortar.”

Mike Hicks, associate professor of economics at Marshall University, said West Virginia should look to attract operations like Prosite Business Solutions as the state’s, and the nation’s, industrial base shrinks.

At the end of 2003 8.1 percent of Wetzel Count’s residents were considered unemployed, 2 percent higher than the state average, according to the state Bureau of Employment Programs.

“I hate the term ‘new economy,’ but this is it,” Hicks said. “These people are creating value. States that have been successful have found jobs like these.

“But these types of things are invisible. Industrialists and financiers just don’t understand.”

Hicks has said it’s difficult to attract high-end service jobs to West Virginia because outside businesses consider the work force less educated than those in other states. A lower percentage of Wetzel County residents graduated from college than the state average – which is already about 10 percent less than the U.S. average. But higher percentage of Wetzel County residents, 77.6 percent, graduated from high school than the state average, according to the U.S. Census.

But residents’ education levels aren’t always as telling when it comes to high-tech workers, many of who are self-taught, Hicks said.

“There’s where the measurement of education on human capital fits loosely,” Hicks said. “I know a bunch of Ph.Ds. who couldn’t find their [behinds] with a flashlight in a dark room.”

The Warrens, Varner and most of Prosite’s staff have only high school diplomas. Jason Warren, a programmer, and Cyn’d Warren, who coordinates support services and accounting, are self-taught. So are two of the company’s three other programmers.

Many of Prosite’s workers came from lower-paying service jobs in the area. Starting this year, Prosite employees were offered health benefits, and the company’s founders – taking a page out of the prototypical Web company – have employee perks such as high backed chairs, staff lunches and three weeks of vacation after six months on the job.

That Web-company label scared off employees early on.

“When we started in 2001, a lot of mom-and-pop companies thought the Internet was a place to play games or to view adult material,” Jason Warren said. “That’s changed a lot in the past three years.”

The company also had t ofight through the fear surrounding Internet companies after many crashed after flying high in the 1990’s.

“People said, ‘Omigosh, a dot-com? All the dot-coms went out of business four years ago,” Varner said. “Well, we’re here, and not all of them did.”

For more information about Prosite Business Solutions or ProBusinessTools, please visit www.prositeone.com or www.probusinesstools.com or call 1-877-583-3232.