Arvig
Headquarters:Perham
Inception: 1950
Family name: Arvig
What the company does: Telecommunications services, including fiber-optic installation
Type of ownership: S corp.
Principal owners: 60% Arvig family, 40% employees
Employees: 859
Family members in the business: 11
Family members on the board: 4
“Knowing that it was the technology of the future, we just kept going. And it started to turn around in the early 2000s.”
-Allen Arvig, President and CEO
Back in the 1990s, you could have excused the family running rural telco Arvig if it had pulled the plug on the internet.
Based in Perham, a city of 3,500 about 180 miles northwest of Minneapolis, Arvig launched in 1950 when founders Royale and Eleanor Arvig purchased the local phone company. From a base of about 830 customers who were still using hand-cranked magneto telephones, Arvig introduced rotary phones and other modernizing technologies. Over the next few years, the company acquired more than a dozen other rural telephone exchanges in the region while continuing to innovate.
Most notably: “We were kind of a pioneer in rural fiber,” says Allen Arvig, the founder’s son and the company’s current president and CEO. In 1990, “we were a beta test site for what is now Calix [a California-based telecommunications equipment supplier, which has an office in Minneapolis].” Arvig installed fiber connectivity for telephones and TVs in New York Mills, a city about 11 miles from Perham, connecting about 110 rural homesteads in that community. The fiber network is still there, though it has been changed out several times since that first installation. “That was one of the bleeding-edge developments that we’ve been a part of in our history,” he adds.
But in those early days, “the internet did nothing but bleed,” Arvig recalls. His son David, then a recent college graduate and now the family company’s vice president and COO, was tasked with building out the company’s online connectivity business, starting with regional schools and libraries. It was stimulating work, but not always fun.
“It took a long time to make any money, and it was expensive for people,” David Arvig recalls. Still, he kept installing fiber capable of carrying internet traffic throughout the 1990s, even though “he was deep in the red, and he kept getting deeper and deeper,” Allen Arvig says. “But knowing that it was the technology of the future, we just kept going. And it started to turn around in the early 2000s.”
Still, most of the use of the fiber was for telephone connectivity: “Back then, voice paid for everything,” David Arvig says. As for the internet, “when we started, it was pretty much email,” he notes. “There wasn’t even the World Wide Web.” With the advent of the Web and Netscape browser, “that’s when you could see a future and a value to it.”
What’s more, other communities and other telcos are seeing a value in Arvig’s installation services. “In 2010, we started branching out in the metro area, Rochester, and St. Cloud,” David Arvig says. “That’s when we really started growing our fiber network and our customer base.”
In addition, “we’ve done a lot of fiber to the tower,” he notes. “We have a larger network, and we can connect to a lot more towers.” In some projects, Arvig partners with another telco or with a cable company. “That’s where a lot of our growth has happened,” David Arvig says.
Bringing fiber to a tower has opened up other fiber location opportunities for installing fiber for Arvig.
Looking ahead, David Arvig says that “we’re just trying to get fiber in the ground as fast as possible, and to as many people as possible. All over the country, there’s so much money going into putting fiber into the ground. There are programs out there that companies are going after, and we’re going after them, too.”
And speaking of the future: “Right now, the fourth generation is working in the company,” Allen Arvig says. David Arvig’s daughter Elena Weller currently runs the company’s customer experience operations. She’s a graduate of the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management. “She started in our answering service,” her father says.
David Arvig has four siblings in the business: programmer analyst Dennis Arvig; marketing department executive Michele Arvig-Biederman, fleet director Jay Arvig, and Ashley Arvig, who’s vice president and COO of Arvig’s Answering Solutions business unit. Another family member, Brent Weller, is a security systems supervisor. The company is 40 percent employee-owned via an Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP) the company established in 2002.
The next generation of Arvigs who choose to join the company will have a much different apprenticeship than David Arvig had in the
late 1970s.
“We used to have to clean, shine, and test the old telephone equipment to make sure it was still good,” he recalls. Modern technology can be troublesome, but there’s a great deal to be said in its favor.
