THE FOUNDERS
Patricia Gallup
David Hall
Age at founding
28
32
Hours worked per week, 1982
80+
80+
Hours worked per week, 1989
65+
65+
Percentage of company owned
50%
50%
Business function
President, personnel director
CEO, treasurer
Education
University of Connecticut
University of New Hampshire
Degree/major subject
B.A./prehistorical anthropology
None/chemical engineering
Home before moving to New Hampshire
Mansfield Center, Conn.
Amityville, N.Y. (continued)
HELP WANTED
Tackling turnover
PC Connection's phone-handling course is so thorough that, to sharpen the conversational skills of new customer-service trainees, in one simulation session the instructor feigns foreign dialects in case a customer with a hard-to-understand accent dials in. The trainees also are exposed to other aspects of the mail-order trade during a four- to six-month apprenticeship, including two blue-collared weeks working in the warehouse picking and packing orders so that they will appreciate the potential for error when an order is entered incorrectly.
PCC's entry wages, which start in the low twenties, are competitive with those in Boston, 120 miles away -- a factor that has helped keep turnover low. But, president and personnel director Patricia Gallup acknowledges, maintaining service standards has become more demanding than it was four years ago, especially in the competitive New England market. Because of the local labor crunch (unemployment in 1988 was 1.6%), activity on the PCC sales floor is nonstop, and burnout has become a genuine concern.
As a reward to salespeople who put in a lot of overtime during the normal 9:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m. order-taking day, PCC dangles substantial gifts. Many of the incentive items, such as canoes and tools, are ordered from another renowned mail-order specialist, L. L. Bean, just up the road in the neighboring state of Maine. PC Connection -- sometimes called the L. L. Bean of computers -- purchased so much gear this year that Bean rang back warily, concerned that PCC might be thinking of going into competition.
THE DELICATE BALANCE
Growing a company in a nongrowing town
For seven years now, PC Connection (PCC) has hired mostly within a 40-mile radius; therefore, few newcomers have moved in to strain the modest services of Marlow, N.H.
But you can't blame the populace for becoming a bit edgy. Who wouldn't, what with PCC's ground breaking for a $5-million commercial edifice that will centralize all its operations within the tiny municipality? To be sure, the company has pledged to make the building as unobtrusive as 120,000 square feet can be made, siting it well off the road, screening it with trees, and camouflaging it to blend with the bucolic background. Then again, when it comes to an aggressively expanding seven-year-old business versus an idyllic two-centuries-old town, guess which stands to lose.
In this case, though, PCC cofounders Patricia Gallup and David Hall have pledged themselves to planned growth. A hard-to-sell concept, perhaps, but one Marlovians can appreciate: history is repeating itself, and it wasn't that bad the first time around.
Indeed, PCC isn't the first enterprise to practice mail order in Marlow. For more than 70 years, starting in 1833, the Farley family posted printers' inks from the 155-year-old Victorian homestead that PCC now owns and is in the process of restoring. Besides, reports Tracy Messer, the company's in-house historian, PCC isn't even Marlow's first high-tech endeavor. In the 1890s the Granite State Evaporator Co. introduced a sap boiler that stood maple sugaring on its ear. Adding in the then-active sawmill (also owned and rehabbed by PCC today), industry was so brisk in the eighteenth century that town officials tried to direct the region's proposed railroad line through Marlow, rather than see it squandered on a southerly track.
Again the road of commerce is leading to little Marlow (population: barely 600), and it will be bearing more vans and semis than ever. But there are quid pro quos. In 1988 PCC accounted for some 15% of Marlow's tax revenues, even though its employees have added only three students to the town's schools. (There have been 34 marriages involving PCC employees, so that statistic is apt to change.) PCC already has donated six computers to the school and another to town government, has repaired the crumbling dam outside its headquarters to create a swimming hole, has proposed building a baseball field, and is supporting a group of local musicians.
Not every benefit is as tangible: stirred by pride after Messer mounted a show of antique photographs documenting Marlow in the old days, townspeople began fixing up houses that had hardly been touched since. For its part, PCC features both the old photographs and old, real-life Marlovians in colorful ads that highlight the attractions of country living.
PCC has acquired an additional 100 acres on which it plans to build housing for employees, triggering concerns that Marlow may turn into macadam. "But we're not developers," protests PCC customer-affairs director Peter Haas, a former exurbanite who happens also to be chairman of the planning board of the next town. "The pattern to really worry about is a developer coming along, buying up a nice piece of farmland, and making a big profit selling three-acre lots to New Yorkers who can't believe how low the prices are. Then the developer takes off, leaving it to the community to cope with the demand for services." PC Connection, of course, is staying and helping. One way: each house the company builds is to be on an average of 10 acres of land, twice what the zoning requires.
Though PCC is growing at a furious pace, would it have become yet stronger in a more accessible locale? "Possibly," grants president Gallup. "But the main thing is, we want to live here, and the people who work for us want to live here, and that's why it has been worthwhile to have to overcome the obstacles.'
