HOULTON– It has been close to a year since Stewart Response Group set up a virtual call center in southern Aroostook County

Two months later, the company secured the 20 people it initially expected to hire during the start-up phase of the operation. Since then, the company has expanded rapidly and now has 75 agents scattered throughout southern Aroostook.

And, once again, they are looking to expand.

"We’ve had a presence in the Houlton area for over a year now, and it has just been amazing," Dan Connor, vice president of sales and marketing for the company, said Monday evening. "The people we have been able to recruit have been wonderful. They are reliable, dedicated and professional."

Stewart Response Group is a center for incoming and outgoing calls that specializes in direct marketing. The firm recruits, contracts and certifies sales agents who work from home and become part of SRG’s virtual sales team.

At this point, said Connor, the company is looking to boost its employment roster.
"We want to move pretty fast," he said. "By the end of this year we think we can keep 200 people busy. We’d like to be at 200 agents total."

Emily Putnam, who serves as call center director, estimated that 40 percent of its employees are in the greater Aroostook County area. "We’ve had great luck with finding employees in Maine in general, but we’ve had very good luck in The County," she said. "We came to the Houlton area because of the good work ethic there, and we knew we could help people who are looking for work because they can work anywhere. They don’t need to come to an office every day. They can have flexible schedules, which makes this a good opportunity for people who need to work around commitments such as school or child care."

Putnam credited several County entities, including the Southern Aroostook Development Corp. and Pioneer Wireless, with being key in helping the company with the expansion process.