Community Development Director Janet Jeremiah and I did one of our regular Meet & Greet visits to an Eden Prairie business yesterday. This time it was a visit to a local company called ThreeWire.
ThreeWire is an interesting story and an interesting company. We visited with their President, Mr. Mark Summers. Mark is a veteran Med-Tech executive originally from Texas who worked at several other places before starting ThreeWire in his home. Then is got too big for his home, so he rented some office space from someone who was renting some office space. Then it got too big for that, so he picked up the balance of a sublease from a company that was moving out of some space here in Eden Prairie. Then they rented that same space on their own. The company that started with three guys at Mark’s house nine years ago now employees 70 people here in Eden Prairie doing millions of dollars of business every month with companies from around the world.
ThreeWire’s tag line is “We deliver patients“. Their business is complex, but in a nutshell, they do a couple of basic things. They identify and recruit patients for medical trials. They do direct marketing of specialty medical devices and pharmacy products to patients. And they assist medical device companies with patient identification and consultation for such things as marketing, but also in the event of a medical device product recall. They have a thirty seat call center at their facility here in town that is operated by Register Nurses. They can receives calls from all over the English, Spanish, French and German speaking world right here in Eden Prairie.
Mark was extraordinarily frank with us. He told us that Minnesota is a corporate-friendly state. He likes being in business here. However, he also told us that he has been surprised by how the government (mine included, I think) has let our collective infrastructure (especially our transportation systems) slip into such poor repair and have not kept up with growing demands for increased capacity. Guilty. He’s right, but I also took the time to tell him about planned improvements at T.H. 169 & 494 and the future extension of LRT into Eden Prairie. He appreciated hearing that news.
We always ask the people we meet with at Meet & Greet visits what their experience has been with city government. They almost always tell us that they don’t have a lot of experiences with city government, but the experience they do have is almost always positive. This was the case with ThreeWire. They’ve had a couple of experiences with our Police and Fire Departments. Mark reported that the City personnel he dealt with were polite and helpful and did their jobs very well.
We completed our visit with a tour of the facility. Mark told us the company is doing some facilities planning this year because they believe the company will double in size again soon. He wants to stay in Eden Prairie. I told him that we wanted his company to stay in Eden Prairie and that we’d work with him to try and make that happen.
It was a good visit to ThreeWire. We’ll do our best to help them stay part of our vibrant local economy.
