Mainebiz

V O L . X X I I I N O. X V I 10 FA C T BO O K / D O I N G B U S I N E S S I N M A I N E I n the L.L.Bean conference room in Barclaycard's bustling service center in Wilton, striking photos of the western Maine mountains and deer in the snow complement wood paneling designed to look like it's from a weathered barn. A signup sheet on the wall invites volunteers to make a company fl oat for the town's Blueberry Festival. Barclaycard, which is part of Wilmington, Del.- based Barclaycard US and backed by the British bank- ing company Barclays PLC, creates credit cards and manages payments for L.L.Bean and other co-branded credit card clients. e site at 128 Weld Road in Wilton provides customer support for cardholders. e low brick building, which once was a Bass shoe factory, is an hour from the nearest interstate exit. Not much in the town of 4,100 — the sec- ond biggest in Franklin County after 7,700-person Farmington — is open after 9 p.m. e winters are long and cold. e Blueberry Festival in August is about as exciting as things get. But the setting is just fi ne with Barclaycard. e service center had 10 employees when it opened in 2008, and now has 360 — far more than the 200 projected when the site opened in 2008. e company would like to add another 100 people at the site, says Jen McEntee, Barclaycard director of Maine operations. McEntee, a Maine native, worked for MBNA in New Jersey before joining Barclaycard in 2008 to help get the Wilton center running. "It's really interesting to be here in Maine," she says. She was happy to come home, but as she sits in her sun-fi lled offi ce, one window overlooking a sea of cubicles, the other framing thick green woods, she says the best thing about the service center is the people who work there. "It's really awesome to get this talent," she says. "We have a great team here." Attracting businesses to Maine Like Barclaycard, more frequently national and international companies are fi nding success off Maine's beaten path, far from the southern Maine economic hub of Portland, the state's largest city. "We do the bulk of our projects outside of the Portland area," says Peter DelGreco, president and CEO of Maine and Co., which helps businesses locate in Maine. ere's "very little margin for error" when locating a business in Maine, he says Still, none of the projects his organization have been involved with have failed. He says the perspective that comes from businesses working with businesses can't be matched by non- profi ts or government organizations. Businesses invest in Maine partly because they want the type of worker McEntee is so happy with — those with the soft skills of motivation, work ethic and empathy. DelGreco says employers also want to be a com- munity's "employer of choice," something that's easy to do in a largely rural state of 1.3 million people and many municipalities. Companies that have 100 employees and are growing "want to be able to have a positive impact in the community," he says. From T-Mobile, which opened a call center in Oakland a decade ago, to online home furnish- ings seller Wayfair, which in the past year opened a 500-person call center in Bangor and plans to open another in Brunswick, Maine communities are becoming that place for out-of-state businesses. e trailblazer was MBNA, which in 1993 opened a call center in Belfast, a city of 6,500 on the midcoast. Co-founder Charles M. Cawley had a summer home in nearby Camden. e legend that grew up around the MBNA move was that when Cawley was a young man, his car broke down in the area and he didn't have the money to fi x it. A local mechanic fi xed it for free, forever impressing him with the state's generos- ity and work ethic. Cawley told the Boston Globe in 2006 that while the story was mostly true, the high Maine's edge Across the state, corporations have found a fit in fine places B y M a u r e e n M i l l i k e n P H O T O / E L I S E K LY S A Q UA L I T Y O F L I F E Jen McEntee, director of operations at Barclaycard's Maine operations, oversees an offi ce in Wilton that has 360 people, far exceeding the 200 projected when the site was opened in 2008. She plans to hire another 100 people for the location.

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