Bring Back the Kids

“Our theme isn’t jobs, jobs, jobs. Rather it is to bring back the kids to their hometown,” said John Larsen, CEO of HomeMovie.com (www.homemovie.com). He was telling me this week about his efforts to create a better working environment in the small town of Winthrop, WA (population 350) where he moved his company a year ago.

“People who grew up here can’t always come back. You lose vitality in the town as a result. These kids would sacrifice to be able to come back home, but they aren’t going to come back to wait tables. Ten of our sixteen employees are local kids. When they grew up they all wanted to get away. Then they got to a certain age and all they could think about was moving back. They’ve told me that they had hoped that someone like me would start a company like this and show people what was possible.”

Larsen started his first company in Seattle but moved it to Lake Tahoe, growing it to over 100 employees. He sold it and started up HomeMovie.com 3 months later in Everett, WA, a Seattle suburb. He moved to “out of the way” Winthrop 3 years ago, running the business remotely. “Then I got to Winthrop, saw the dynamics of this community and decided to move the company here. It would have been easier to run the business with all of the infrastructure that is already in place in the Seattle area.”

The initial move did not go well. Plans to provide the fledgling company with high speed fiber fell thru. Larsen had to run his own fiber 40 miles to the town to be able to accommodate his streaming video operations. He started in a run down old mill in 3,000 sf, has remodeled a 10,000 sf old skate barn and is planning a move into a new 20,000 sf building that will include a conference center that he hopes to use to entice other Seattle entrepreneurs to move to Winthrop.

He’s gotten buy in from the local people for his campaign of bringing back the local kids (www.bringbackthekids.com). “This is a very environmentally sensitive area, but even the most green person around can’t quibble with Bring Back the Kids. I’m convinced that the only way to preserve great areas like this is to create good paying jobs here. We are going to do it.”

Larsen is the kind of entrepreneur that many agurbs® would love to have. He is making an impact in tiny Winthrop with a plan that will be interesting to follow.