Page 6 - May 2015 Volume 9, Number 5

The King Air’s role in this rural revitalization – for the past 15 months or so – has been to connect Onshore Outsourcing’s information technology workers, who all work in rural communities, with the Fortune 500 businesses based in large metro areas.
The Perfect Example
It’s a three-hour drive to St. Louis from tiny Macon, Mo., population 5,500 and home to one of Onshore’s main campuses, which it calls a rural delivery center. A project with a large client based in St. Louis wasn’t going well; communication had broken down between the company and the IT team. A team of six IT professionals made the quick flight on the King Air to work at the customer’s site and save the project.
“We did that in a matter of hours. If you think about whom our competitors are – offshore software developers from India – they just can’t do that,” Mayes said.
The delivery center in Macon, Mo., is set up in team-based pod structures. About 180 employees deliver business analysis and architecture, data
and infrastructure management, software development, business process outsourcing and help desk administration to national clients like Schneider.
“Remember, all of our customers are in metropolitan areas and we are in rural areas. I literally don’t think we could run this model without the airplane.”
The Business Model
Mayes, who grew up in St. Louis, found himself in the north-central Missouri town of Kirksville when his wife was going through medical school. An IT project manager without a college degree, Mayes couldn’t find that type of job in rural America. He started building websites for local businesses and when he needed more employees, he realized he would have to train them himself.
“I found these communities were full of underemployed and dislocated workers,” Mayes said. “As I worked with them and taught them IT skills, I saw the challenges they were going through. We were a small team and you see what poverty does to people, and you see them overcoming life situations and chasing their dreams. I fell in love with that. That’s my life’s work.”
In following this calling, Mayes said he accidentally created the domestic rural outsourcing industry. Onshore’s own rural delivery and organic workforce development models offer a low-cost, domestic alternative to offshore outsourcing. These models allow individuals in rural areas to learn skills, obtain great jobs and continue learning and growing throughout their career. The models come together to form a service that provides IT workers customized specifically to a customer’s needs, yet remaining incredibly flexible and ready to
adopt new technologies.

Chief Pilot Thomas Goad, who majored in flight operations at the University of Dubuque, said he’s flown Onshore’s 1981 King Air B200 300 hours through its first 14 months of ownership.
4 • KING AIR MAGAZINE
MAY 2015