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Well connected

"EnvisioNet was first on the list" when Microsoft went looking for technical support for its Internet connection service. Share your thoughts about the glass ceiling in Abuzz.

When Maine's Independent governor, Angus King, stood up to deliver his 2000 State of the State address earlier this year, the Republican and Democratic legislators sat on their hands. No one applauded when the governor noted that the state's rainy day fund had grown from almost nothing to $130 million in five years or when he cited unemployment rates that had been cut in half. Not even a smattering of applause greeted the announcement that 65,000 new jobs had been created in the state since 1995. Not until halfway through his speech, when King launched into praise for a new Maine company, was there any reaction at all. But then it was a big one.

"Your Internet screen freezes up in Dubuque, San Francisco, Portland, or, for that matter, Tokyo," said King, rocking up on his toes and assuming the singsong cadence of an evangelist. "You dial an 800 number for Microsoft tech support, and the phone rings in Winthrop, Maine. A knowledgeable and friendly voice talks you through the fix, and everybody's happy. You're back online, Microsoft has a happy customer, and Maine has another good job. I've just described EnvisioNet, probably the greatest entrepreneurial success story in recent Maine history," the governor went on. "Heather Blease, who is with us tonight, started with four people and an idea barely five years ago and is now closing in on over a thousand employees at three locations.' "

At this point, the legislators came to life. Their applause was not for the governor but for the young blond woman seated in the balcony of the House chambers. It was the kind of congratulations mixed with native pride that might once have been reserved for Maine sports darlings such as Olympic marathoner Joan Benoit Samuelson or University of Maine basketball sensation Cindy Blodgett. But in a day and age when business leaders are stars, Heather Blease is the golden girl of the new Maine economy.

"OK, I want you to close out Outlook Express."

"We may have to reinstall MSN."

"Click on End Task."

"Are you in your in box?"

"Are you registered for Hotmail?"

"Do you see where it says POP server?"

"Let me consult a colleague."

As 37-year-old Heather Blease works in her sunny office at EnvisioNet headquarters, dozens of technicians sit outside her door in mouse-gray carrels wearing headsets and staring at Dell computers as they collectively handle 6,000 to 10,000 calls a day from frustrated Internet users.

The company Blease founded in 1995 is essentially a 21st-century appliance repair service that operates over telephone lines. As waves of new technology wash over American consumers, there is an increasing demand for someone to explain to them how things work and to hold their hands when they don't. That's what EnvisioNet does. Its employees provide technical support to Internet subscribers - helping them get online, download files on the Web, and figure out their e-mail. Currently, this tech support is offered free through Internet service providers that contract with EnvisioNet, but the company may eventually sell its services directly to consumers.

EnvisioNet corporate headquarters is located in the Brunswick Industrial Park, next door to an MBNA credit-card call center and across the street from a plant where L. L. Bean manufactures tote bags, dog beds, and moccasins. The gray-shingled building, which once housed Bath Iron Works offices, looks more like a ski lodge than a high-tech center, but 18 commercial phone lines, each capable of handling 24 calls simultaneously, stream into the building, where an automatic distribution unit sends incoming calls to 200 workstations.

A low brick building across the street houses another 150 workstations, and a huge, white temporary structure called Cloud Nine has sprung up in the EnvisioNet parking lot to accommodate even more Internet trouble-shooters. Another 350 workstations have been built at a new EnvisioNet facility in Augusta. And in June, the company broke ground for a building in Orono; currently, its temporary facility there employs 130.

The EnvisioNet team consists of high school students and college graduates, classical musicians and lobster-boat sternmen, retirees from Brunswick Naval Air Station, heavy-metal techies, moonlighting professionals, and single mothers right off welfare. Technical support personnel start at $9 an hour, jump to $10 an hour after 90 days, and can earn up to $15 an hour. EnvisioNet has been hiring workers by the hundreds to keep up with its booming business, training them at its own facilities and in partnership with the Maine Technical College System.

The company landed a major contract with giant Microsoft last year and is now on track to generate more than $40 million in revenues in 2000.

One reason behind EnvisioNet's rapid success was that it fit right into Maine's burgeoning call center industry, a booming sector of the service economy based on answering phones and taking orders. Maine committed itself to the call center phenomenon in the 1980s by installing one of the best telecommunications systems in the country, with 100,000 miles of fiber optics and a fully digitally switched network.

This new telecommunications infrastructure now supports an estimated 25,000 jobs in Maine, according to the Maine Department of Economic and Community Development. Retail catalog giant L. L. Bean has close to 2,000 employees taking orders and providing customer assistance at call centers in Portland and Lewiston. MBNA, one the nation's largest bank credit card companies, employs almost 5,000 at customer sales and service call centers in Belfast, Camden, Portland, Hampden, and Brunswick. AutoEurope, an international car rental agency, operates over the phones from Portland. ICT Group sells and services insurance and financial services from five call centers in Maine.

And then, of course, there's Heather Blease and EnvisioNet.

Growing up in Brunswick, Maine, Heather Deveau had a frenetic but organized childhood and adolescence. More interested in art and athletics than academics, she painted, played piano, tennis, field hockey, and basketball, served as president of the student council, sang in the church choir, and still found time to work as a cashier at Shaw's Supermarket after school.

"I remember getting home at 9 o'clock after working at Shaw's, still having homework to do, and thinking, 'I've got to lighten up my schedule,' " says Blease. "I was overextended even growing up." As she says this, Blease glances out the door of her office to see who is waiting and then at her watch. She has to be at a Chamber of Commerce dinner in an hour.

Blease credits her mother with setting her on this fast track. Polly Deveau says she herself grew up rather sheltered in Dudley, Massachusetts, and so she decided to expose her only daughter to as many opportunities and activities as possible. As a high school senior, Blease says she wanted to become an artist, but Roger Deveau wanted his daughter to become an engineer: "He said, 'Art is good, but if you want to get a job, get an engineering degree first. You could go into electrical engineering like I did.' And I said, 'OK, Dad, I'll do it.' "

At the time, Roger Deveau was in charge of overseeing shipbuilding for the Navy at Bath Iron Works. Today, he works for his daughter as EnvisioNet's director of facilities.

Blease struggled through the electrical engineering curriculum at the University of Maine in Orono. With no natural aptitude for mathematics, she found that it took "brute force to get through the program." When she graduated in 1985, she was the only woman in her class to earn a degree in electrical engineering. That determination to see things through would stand her in good stead when she stepped out on her own to start EnvisioNet.

After college, Blease went to work as a design and product engineer for Digital Equipment Corp. in Tewksbury, Massachusetts. She also married her college sweetheart, podiatrist Dwight Blease. In 1988, the Bleases returned to their native Maine, Heather to work as a quality engineer at the Digital Equipment plant in Augusta, Dwight to establish his podiatry practice in Brunswick. Sons Alden, now 10, Carter, 7, and Owen, 6, came along in rapid succession.

EnvisioNet was born out of Heather Blease's desire to protect her job. At Digital, she had become the manager of a technical support group for the VAX camera, a digital imaging camera that enabled videotape to be computerized. When she began to hear rumors that the Augusta plant might be sold, Blease first started what might best be described as a business-within-a-business, arranging a contract for her group to provide tech support for the VAX camera. In 1994, however, Blease decided to make a clean break with Digital.

"Every day I'd go running on a path through the tall pine trees behind the Digital plant, and I'd think about starting my own business," says Blease. "I just decided I couldn't live with myself if I didn't at least try. I didn't want to come to the end of my life and think, 'What if?' or 'I wish I had.' "

The EnvisioNet idea was pretty simple - if you could provide technical support over the phone for the VAX camera, you could provide technical support for all sorts of hardware, software, and Internet services.

To finance the scheme, the Bleases halved their living expenses by selling their home, putting their furniture in storage, and renting a second-floor apartment. Then Heather secured a $70,000 loan from Bath Savings Bank, the local bank that held her husband's business mortgage. With those funds, she hired two of her Digital colleagues, Paul Crockett and Todd Koenig, and her brother's wife, Kris Deveau, and went into business.

EnvisioNet opened in Augusta in March 1995, with Blease and her three employees working off folding chairs and tables in one end of a leased 2,000-square-foot office building overlooking the Maine Turnpike. On the first day, they celebrated with doughnuts and champagne and orange juice. Then the employees went to work servicing the Digital contract while the boss lined up another small contract with a local Internet provider.

"I'd hear myself saying, 'I'm the president of EnvisioNet,' " says Blease, "and then I'd think, 'What does that mean?' " Very quickly, however, the reality of being in business for herself and having others depending on her for a livelihood sank in.

Blease says she tends to forget the tremendous pressure and stress of the first year. "The money I borrowed from the bank ran out in a couple of months. I was balancing my home checkbook looking to transfer money into the business. I had to borrow money from my husband and his practice. Basically, I was draining all of our resources and wondering, 'What in the world am I doing?' " At one point, she was even forced to ask her parents for money to make the payroll. "There were times when things were so stressful that I just went into survival mode," Blease says.

But the circumstances weren't perilous for long. The first EnvisioNet accounts were small - a local Internet provider, a company that sold a software installation product - but soon the EnvisioNet phone lines were heating up. The company began taking technical support and customer service calls for Internet service providers CommTel and Prodigy and for e-commerce companies such as JuniorNet, Kmart, e-Toys, and Grolier Interactive. By 1998, the little start-up company was generating $5 million in revenues and employing close to 200.

A lot of little contracts built EnvisioNet up from four to 200 employees in three years, but the giant leap to 1,000 and beyond has all been Microsoft.

When Microsoft's manager of technical support, Greg Gilkeson, went surfing the Net from his office in Redmond, Washington, looking for companies that could provide technical support for Microsoft Network, or MSN, Microsoft's Internet connection service, he came up with a list of 26 "significant players." One of the names was EnvisioNet. When he pared that list to three or four to do business with, "EnvisioNet was first on the list."

What Gilkeson liked about EnvisioNet was its responsiveness. EnvisioNet's technical support had already won awards for Prodigy, and when Gilkeson called in June of last year to ask the Maine company if it would like to do some work for Microsoft, Heather Blease jumped at the chance. She also jumped on a plane to Redmond the next day, but not before calling the governor to ask him to contact Microsoft and put in a good word for EnvisioNet.

King, who likes to call himself "the VP of marketing for all Maine companies," had helped EnvisioNet land the Prodigy contract in 1997 by taking time out from a whitewater rafting trip to call Prodigy from a general store. King called Microsoft three times, however, before he could get Gilkeson on the phone.

"I thought someone was playing a practical joke on me," says Gilkeson of his failure to return King's calls. "Why would the governor of Maine be calling me?"

"You do this contract," King promised Gilkeson, "and I guarantee that in six to eight months EnvisioNet will be the most productive center in your system."

"Do you have a financial interest in EnvisioNet?" Gilkeson asked the governor in mid-sales pitch.

"No," insisted King. "They're just good people."

On October 12, 1999, EnvisioNet held a press conference to announce that it had entered into a contract to provide Internet technical support for MSN. When EnvisioNet demonstrated that it could perform to the company's specifications, Microsoft awarded the Brunswick company a second major contract.

In January, EnvisioNet contracted to operate MSN's Save a Member customer-retention program. Unlike the technical support contract, the Save a Member contract calls for EnvisioNet employees to be salespeople.

When MSN subscribers call to cancel their subscriptions, callers will be transferred to EnvisioNet operators, who will then try to talk them into remaining with MSN. As use of the Internet grows, gaining and maintaining market share has become the name of the game among service providers.

While EnvisioNet will not disclose the value of the Microsoft contracts, Heather Blease says revenues from all of the company's current contracts run between $25 million and $35 million.

"Microsoft told us, 'If you're good, you can have more business,' " says Blease, brightening at her company's prospects. "If you deliver, it's endless. You can't handle all the business we could give you. You can have as much as you can take,' " she recalls Microsoft saying.

"In our support partners," says Microsoft's Gilkeson, "we look for people who can do best-in-class support. What impressed us about EnvisioNet, and Heather in particular, was that they have a really great focus on their customers and equally on their employees."

EnvisioNet is a major Maine success story, but there have been a few bumps along the way. Heather Blease acknowledges rumors that during the quick rise of her company, she survived two attempts to unseat her: one by an investment group, one by a member of the management team. She is bound by confidentiality agreements not to discuss details of the takeover attempts, but she does say, "The spirit of the company would have been killed if those overthrows ever happened."

Blease believes gender bias may have been at work in the power struggles. She was apparently not the easy target others may have thought she was; she's still in charge. Blease describes her own business style as "competitive but compassionate." She plays to win, but she is not ruthless. As a high school tennis player, she did not lose a match during her junior and senior years, but when it came to playing her friends, she could never bring herself to blow them away.

"I care a lot about people," says Blease. "Everything about business is about relationships, putting yourself in the position of the other person. You have to sense what motivates other people, what's important to others."

What may sometimes look like indecision to others, says Blease, is actually a deliberate approach to decision making and a willingness to listen.

"I have never professed to know how to do anything," she says. "At every turn in the road where major decisions have to be made, my normal course is to seek out a couple of experts."

One of the Internet experts Blease has repeatedly turned to for advice is Robert M. Metcalfe, inventor of the Ethernet, founder of 3Com Corp., vice president for technology of the International Data Group in Boston, and widely read columnist for InfoWorld. Metcalfe divides his time between his office in Boston and his family farm in Lincolnville, Maine. Metcalfe met Heather Blease through his father-in-law, Robert Shotwell, who is a member of the EnvisioNet board.

"The biggest problem Heather faces is managing hyper-growth," says Metcalfe. "She's never run a company with 1,000 employees before, and it's folly to assume she has the skill set to run a company that size."

Metcalfe has advised Blease to hire senior managers who have experience working at companies much larger than EnvisioNet, to diversify both EnvisioNet's customer base and geographic presence, and to delay taking EnvisioNet public as long as possible. Blease has taken some of this advice to heart.

Currently, she is seeking to minimize EnvisioNet's reliance on Microsoft by securing contracts with other companies. (Despite the recent court-ordered breakup of Microsoft, which the software giant has appealed, the company has assured EnvisioNet that it will continue to provide Internet service access to the public and will continue to need technical support for that service, according to Catharine Hartnett, director of public affairs for EnvisioNet.)

Over the summer, EnvisioNet negotiated a contract with Dell Computer to provide customer service for its home systems divisions.

For her senior management team, Blease relied on some of Maine's largest corporations, hiring key personnel from Bath Iron Works, UnumProvident, Cole-Haan Footwear, and especially L. L. Bean. EnvisioNet's vice president for business development, its marketing manager, and Blease's administrative assistant are all former L. L. Bean employees, as was Scott Howard, the chief executive officer Blease hired in 1998 and let go a year later. Citing a confidentiality agreement, neither Blease nor Howard will discuss the "professional differences" that led to his abrupt departure.

Despite Metcalfe's warning that an initial public offering brings with it "legions of leeches and lawyers," Blease is planning to take EnvisioNet public within the next year.

"Three months after I started EnvisioNet," says Blease, "my accountant at Arthur Andersen in Boston asked me, 'Are you going to sell it, merge it, or take it public? What's your plan?' I hadn't really thought about that, but I knew I didn't want to sell it or merge it, so I said, 'I guess I'm going public.' We will require a public offering to continue to grow at this rate."

Unlike a lot of Internet companies, says Blease, EnvisioNet does run profitably on the contracts it has and would generate a profit immediately if she stopped expanding. But if EnvisioNet is to keep growing, the company needs money to cover the cost of new facilities, new technology, and hiring and training new employees.

"We've been growing so quickly - about 300 percent a year - that we have huge start-up costs," says Blease. "We need to raise cash."

EnvisioNet's operations and growth have largely been financed by venture capital firms such as Cambridge Associates Holding Corp., Keystone Venture Capital, and Masthead Venture Partners. Blease's company received an additional private multimillion-dollar investment this summer, but the need to give these investors a return on their investments will require an IPO within the year.

Dot-com IPOs were all the rage in 1999, attracting investment money away from the tried and true stocks of the old economy in search of instant fortunes. For example, Seattle-based Onvia.Com, a company that markets office supplies and business services online, had 350 employees and lost $43.4 million on sales of $27.2 million last year. When the company went public on March 1, founder Glenn Ballman's 13.5 percent share of his company suddenly became worth an estimated $651 million. Despite the recent cooling in Internet investing, taking EnvisioNet public should make Blease very wealthy.

Blease, however, says she has no intentions of cashing in. "I can't," she says. "As the founder, I'm more restricted in what I can do than anyone else. When we go public, I'll be more tied up with the company than ever, but that's all right with me. I'm not looking to get out. I will still be the largest shareholder, but I will have a lot more people to answer to, that's for sure."

Blease says she was more nervous in EnvisioNet's first two years, when she didn't know whether the company would make it or not, than she is now. Yet she does feel the enormous responsibility that goes with having 1,000 employees and several banks and investors depending on her. "It's like becoming a mother," she says. "I drive more carefully now."

Of course, Heather Blease is a mother, a soccer mom even. Last year, she helped coach one of her sons' soccer teams. At home outside Brunswick, she cooks, gardens, raises chickens, and paints the occasional watercolor. The idyllic life of a Maine CEO was captured in an economic development spot Blease filmed for the state last summer, which shows her strolling through the countryside with her husband and their three sons. But the reality is that the business's rapid growth has put a strain on the Blease family. Last year, Business Week featured Blease in an article on "How female entrepreneurs struggle to find the right balance." The article was titled "Mommy, Do You Love Your Company More Than Me?" This was a question 7-year-old Carter Blease had actually asked his mother.

Dwight Blease is enormously proud of his wife but acknowledges that her work necessitates his taking on a larger domestic role. "Five years ago, I didn't think I'd be working 40 hours a week and being Mr. Mom," he says with an air of resignation. Then, looking at the fish sandwich he is eating at a local tavern, Blease adds good-naturedly, "At this point, I could probably use a cooking class. If Heather's gone for a week, I run out ideas after four or five days."

To make his own schedule more flexible, Dwight Blease consolidated his practice with that of another local podiatrist and brought in a third doctor. He and the boys still look forward, however, to spending more time with Heather, a prospect that seems likely once she takes her company public and joins the growing ranks of dot-com millionaires.

But Heather Blease insists that what drives her is not the money. "Money's not the end to any happiness at all," she says.

"I've asked her, 'When does this all end?' " says Dwight Blease. "She says this has all been so week-to-week that she doesn't really know. She wants to see how far she can take it. She loves the challenge of it."