Transcription of Susan Corbett for the show Accessing Maine #259
Dr. Lisa: It is my great pleasure today to spend time with Susan Corbett who is the Owner and CEO of Axiom Technologies, a telecommunications and information technology company headquartered in Machias that has been creating and developing solutions for rural broadband deployment since 2005. Axiom has brought high speed internet service to Washington County with over 90 access points creating an umbrella of coverage over 2500 square miles. Susan has been a public speaker throughout Maine and the United States advocating for rural broadband and is dedicated to the mission of bringing broadband to every resident and business. Actually, paused when I was reading this 2500 square miles. That’s a lot of distance. You’re covering a lot of space.
Susan: Sure. Washington County, it takes four hours to drive from one side of the county to the other. I love when I speak in the United States because then I will tell my audience, and there are only two traffic lights, and the closest one is one hour from my office, so that’s rural.
Dr. Lisa: That’s right. There’s not a lot of cars going back and forth there. How did you come to be doing the work that you do?
Susan: Thank you for inviting me to chat with your today. We always love to talk about broadband, and broadband in Maine, in particular. I came to Maine in 1998. My background, I was an office nurse for 25 years and did practice consulting. I was around when computers were first coming in to physician offices. For many physicians practice, they would get a computer and couldn’t figure out how to get everything out of the computer. I started doing consulting, and eventually started doing consulting here in Maine and down East Maine in particular.
Back in ’98, I made the decision to make the move here. I had a billing service on the side. I had staff in Massachusetts. I relocated that to Jones Port Maine. In the height of the billing service, we had about ten employees that worked either at the office in Jones Port or remotely. Our practices, many were from the Greater Boston area, and expand all the way through Maine, right up to down East Maine. This is when I first started hearing about economic development because I had local people that I hired and paying them Boston wages with all of those benefits because the money was coming in from the Greater Boston area.
Eventually, the docs in Boston wanted to connect to us electronically. I thought that might be easy. I called the telephone company at that time and said, “I’d like a broadband connection.” Of course, they laughed at me because, at that time, there were only two towns in all of Washington County that have Broadband, Machias and Calais. I started searching and searching, and eventually ended up for something called a Fractional T1, and I paid $750 a month. My dad who lived in Massachusetts and had Comcast was paying $50 a month and his was faster than mine.
At one point, I talked to an engineer at the telephone company in Massachusetts, and my claim to fame is I stomped my foot and said, “They have wireless in Taipei. Why can’t I have it in Jones Port?” He said, “You can. It’s just that we’re not going to help you.” A little bulb went off. Eventually, I met the engineers that put in the DSL, and I pitched the idea of a wireless network in Jones Port, and bought into the company in May of 2005. In June of 2005, we put our first wireless access point in Jones Port. That was my intention. That was all I want to do. Then, the rest of Washington County started contacting us and saying, “Help us with this.”
Now, we have these 90 access points all over Washington County. We do Fibr. We do DSL. We’re working with communities throughout the state, and helping them figure out broadband solutions, and what’s their plan going forward. That’s the background of how I came to be.
Dr. Lisa: I think you very quickly went over the fact that you are 25 years as an office nurse. That’s a big jump?
Susan: It is but then, when you think about it, in the evolution of medical practices, they went from paper systems to electronic system. That’s not any different than any other business really. Paper ledgers, the old green ledgers with the pencils to programs like QuickBooks and Excel Spreadsheets. The jump from paper system to electronic regardless of what your background is all the same. We all have to face that over a period of time. Certainly, having the medical background, you’re driven by helping people, and helping people get connected. Helping people learn how to use technology is really the big driver behind us.
In 2006, we hired an educator. That educator worked with businesses and taught employers and employees how to use technology to become technology proficient. That, we have stayed through to that mission since 2006. In 2014, we span off a nonprofit side of the company called the Axiom Education and Training Center. We’ve moved all of our education programs to that side of the company. We oversee and manage the adult education throughout all of Washington County. We continue doing digital literacy training, not only in Washington County but throughout Maine. Our program is to recognize not only statewide but nationally and internationally.
In the past couple of years, we’ve had over 4000 adult learners come through our programs and over 400 businesses have connected to us. The connection, we have to have connection to every home and business in Maine, but teaching people and learning what to do with the technology is as important, if not more important. We can have the best system in the world but if people don’t know how to use it, then what good is the system?
Dr. Lisa: It seems as though there’s a hunger for this. It seems as this desire for connection has really grown over the last, I don’t know, I want to say 20 years. It’s interesting to me that when you first asked about the ability to connect, the answer was a straight up no, but somehow you got around that.
Susan: Perseverance, I don’t like to take no for an answer. My poor techs have to listen to that. “No, we can’t connect someone.” “You need to try harder.” We are committed to making sure that every home and business here in Maine has connectivity. Right now, there are about 2% of homes that have zero access to broadband connection. That comes to about maybe 20,000 or so homes based on US census. If you think about all the homes that are not included in the US census like our seasonal homes, we’re probably doubling that number. Making sure that every home and business has the ability to connect is extremely important for so many different reasons. Healthcare, education, business growth and development, economic development, connecting to the world. It’s one of our missions.
Then, the second thing, the mission, or the second, it’s our mantra, with technology and education, we can change the economic status of a region. We see that every day. We see that as we work with businesses, small businesses, home businesses, big businesses that when they can then sell their product worldwide, and they can bring in and go back to my billing service, I brought in revenue from outside of Maine. It’s the same thing when you can get a business up online and they can sell their product to anyone in the world. It’s a game changer for me and for United States. We just stay very focused on the importance of all of this.
Dr. Lisa: Why Jones Port?
Susan: It was so beautiful. It was so beautiful. I first came up here consulting in December of 1995, and I came in on Route 187. Jones Port, the road in Jones Port is like a peninsula. You drove in on one side, and I got down to the Beals Island Bridge, and it was snowing lightly, and there were boats in the harbor, and I thought, “Oh my heavens, I’ve just stepped into a Norman Rockwell Calendar.” They say that if you fall in love down East Maine in the middle of the winter, you are hooked.
The following summer I came up to do some more consulting, and I stayed in a little cottage on the beach in Jones Port, and I woke up. I arrived very dark, didn’t know where I was, and get up in the morning, and had a cup of coffee, and wandered down this path, and came on this beach, and the sun was rising, and I thought this is absolutely stunning. I bought a little cottage. This was back in ‘96. The fall of ’96, I bought a little cottage and used it as a retreat.
Eventually, by ’98, I decided this where I want to live. Both my kids were in college. They were off to conquer the world. They weren’t supposed to come back home. That’s what the whole idea of getting them out of the nest and giving them good education. I made the move to Jones Port in January of 1998 and have not looked back. It was the best decision I could make.
Dr. Lisa: They weren’t supposed to come back home. Did they?
Susan: No, they didn’t. They went on, and they finished college, went on for Masters’ degrees. One went into the Peace Corp. They both have children. I have three beautiful grandchildren from them. I’m proud of both of them.
Dr. Lisa: Do they have your same affinity for Maine?
Susan: They love to come visit, and the grandchildren, the two oldest, one will be ten and one is six, love coming to Nanny’s house, Nanny camp. They can come and play on the beach. Is the tide coming or going? When the six-year-old was about, I don’t know, three or four years old, he would tell his mom that his milk was either at high tide or low tide, and depending on how full the glass was, or the bath was at high tide or low tide. There’s a connection they have back to Jones Port. They love to come and I love to have them.
Dr. Lisa: It is interesting that what you’re providing for down east is the ability for people to live in a beautiful place, and be nurtured, their souls really to be nurtured, to be connected, when you talk about your grandchildren and their connections with the tides, but also in the living. That’s really been, I think, somewhat of a bugaboo for the State of Maine for a long, long time because it’s hard to live and work here and how to be sustainable.
Susan: I think that as we work with communities across the state and in other rural areas of United States, that is the discussion we have. You have quality of place, but can you survive? Think of my first business when I came here, my clients were from outside of Maine. My staff came to work, but we weren’t working within those physician offices. We were working remotely. There are many businesses that can do that.
I wish that when we started in 2005, and it’s you can look into the future, I wish I had started to figure out that when the seasonal residence would come, and they would arrive, and we would turn on their internet, and then they’d leave, and we turn off the internet, I see those emails come through trough the support system, and I’ll say, “We’re here. Turn us on. Okay, we’re going.” That time period has gotten further and further apart.
What I feel is that they may have come up in Memorial Day, and went home on Labor Day., Now they’re coming up in March or April, and they’re staying until maybe Thanksgiving or Christmas. Instead of the, “We’re here for three months and someplace else for nine,” we’re seeing a lot of that reversal. That is really economically impactful for communities. If we can keep our seasonal people here longer, that is a benefit for all of those local businesses that are sustaining them whether it’s the local supermarket, or all the sports and recreation, or anything that our businesses are doing to call it a living. The reason that those seasonal residences are staying longer is because they can stay connected to their place of business.
If I’m traveling, and I think back when my kids were little, can I go to camp for a month with my kids, and they can have a great month playing in the lake, or doing whatever they’re doing, but I can still work at the end of the day, or at night, or whatever? When my kids were little they use to do that. If we can do that, then people stay longer and supporting all of those of us that are making a living here in a very rural state.
Dr. Lisa: My medical practice is in Brunswick, and that’s where I also went to college. What I’ve noticed overtime is a fair number of people who are retiring to the Brunswick area, and I think that’s true across the state, is your business been impacted by people who are coming to the state of Maine, and living here many months out of the year, sometimes to be near grandchildren, sometime because it’s where their family is from. Has this been something that you’ve noticed as well?
Susan: In Jones Port, I really noticed it. There were many retirees, young retirees, many from professional backgrounds that it became quality of place. They could find a place on the ocean. Pricing was reasonable. They could build their dream home. We started to see a lot of retirees, young retirees come in to the area, not really in Jones Port but throughout all of Washington County, specifically around those coastal communities.
Dr. Lisa: Do you notice a difference between what people who are younger might want out of the educational experience with your organization versus people who are older?
Susan: In our [inaudible 00:51:54] side, we just graduated 18 students who received high school completion. That’s really exciting for the staff that’s teaching them. We do college transition. We’re working with adults, all ages. They may want to go back and maybe finish a post-secondary or start a post-secondary degree. On the digital literacy side, if you think about anyone who’s over 35, computers were not around when they were going through school. They’ve learnt on their own and they’ve learnt because they’ve said, “Hey, how did you do that?” That’s what I’ve done for years. We should be pretty proud of the fact that we’ve been able to figure this out on our own. I like to tell people walking to Best Buy, and go on technology overload. What is all of these stuff?
The take rate in Maine which means that if there are a hundred available connection in a neighborhood, only 75 will subscribe. Maine is on par with the United States. It’s about 75% take rate nationwide and 75% here. There are many reasons why people do not use technology. They may not be able to afford it. They may not be able to afford the connection. They may not be able to afford the equipment. They may have no idea what this is, “Why do I need to do this? Why do I need to learn how to use a computer?” We are very dedicated to the digital inclusion movement. We’re involved in a national level on that. Digital inclusion includes affordable broadband, affordable equipment, digital literacy training, and public computer access.
Working with adults who are entering the technology world for the first time, there’s typically a reason what has sparked them to do that. They got a new Kindle. They got an iPad. Their boss said, “You need to learn how to use excel.” They want a Ruku. “I can go on and I can get movies on demand. How do I do that?” That typically is the beginning for someone who is just starting out in learning technology. There’s something that’s sparking them. Once you have them in one of our classes, it then opens up to their world to all of the other programs that are out there.
Our Director of Educational Services Jane Blackwood, what she’s known for is that how we teach is more important than what we’re teaching. Making sure that those classes and the environment is really comfortable, and friendly, and someone can take the same class over and over again. That’s really important. We also move classes around throughout different regions. We utilize all the libraries. The libraries are a great place to hold classes. There is broadband at those. It’s 100 megs at most libraries in Maine. Many of those libraries have public computers that people can go in and use technology. Libraries are just good friendly places. We partner with libraries in Maine and about 25% of our classes are held in libraries. Very, very happy with that relationship.
Dr. Lisa: What does the future hold for Axiom Technologies. Where do you hope to see your business going or what do you hope to offer to the state of Maine in the upcoming years?
Susan: Almost two years ago, I brought in a partner, Mark Ouellette, who has a very strong background in economic development. He has taken over the operations of Axiom. The goal is, and we are doing that now, is to bring what we’re doing statewide and across the country in rural areas. That process began almost immediately after Mark came on board. We are passionate about helping communities figure out what to do for their community because there’s just no one answer. There’s no one technology. Every community is different and they have different needs. We’re very excited about just continuing that work, helping people get connected, understanding why it’s important to get connected, and just staying true to the mission of what we do. Every connection counts. We’re committed to make sure that everyone has the ability to be connected.
Dr. Lisa: I’ve been speaking with Susan Corbett who is the Owner and CEO of Axiom Technologies, a telecommunications and information technology company headquartered in Machias. We will have a link to the Axiom Technologies website on our show notes page. For people who are interested, please do go and find out more. Susan, I’m so pleased that you are bringing this connectivity to the State of Maine and I really appreciate you talking with me today.
Susan: Thank you for having me. It’s been a pleasure.