Borough adds economic director

PALMER — He grew up in Los Angeles, but has lived in Utah, Seattle and Juneau, and has experienced the ups and downs of business.

Now, Don Dyer is in the Valley hoping to make sure the growth the area is experiencing turns out to be more boom and less bust.

He’s put in two weeks now as the Mat-Su Borough’s Economic Development director, helping business move here or overcome obstacles they might consider leaving the Valley to avoid.

Though in his time he’s spent two years in Seattle on an Latter-day Saints mission and a few more in Utah attending Brigham Young University, Dyer’s first business experience came right after high school when he went into the aerospace industry in Los Angeles.

Later, while studying accounting in college, he got interested in computers and wound up working in the tech sector, eventually starting his own business.

“It was amazing to me how fast it caught on and how fast it all developed,” Dyer said.

The business eventually grew to employ 18 people and take in nearly $1 million in revenue. Dyer said he thinks that experience will be very helpful in the growing Valley economy, where new businesses are common.

“That’s one of the things that I see here is there’s a lot of people who have the entrepreneurial spirit and a lot of potential.”

He said quite a bit of the Valley’s potential resides in Port MacKenzie.

“I don’t think a lot of people in Mat Valley really realize the opportunity that’s coming up on the horizon for them,” Dyer said. “There’s just this huge opportunity to really be involved in an economy that’s not just important to Alaska, but internationally as well.”

While he’s seen success, he’s also seen businesses fail. That tech company he started? It didn’t fare well in the dot-com bust.

“We tried to make the transition into the dot-com world and it just didn’t work out right. The Internet changed the whole basis for the technology sector,” Dyer said. “I made a huge investment in doing that and just as we were getting ready to go to market, the bubble burst. The venture capital funding that was promised to us just evaporated. I was stuck with some big bills, but we got them paid.”

In hindsight, Dyer said, he’s found a reason to be thankful he crashed when he did. On the horizon were many more pitfalls he hadn’t anticipated.

“Had we gone forward it would have been an even bigger crash for the company and for myself personally than it was. I can see now that all I got was a bump rather than wiped out. But at the time it felt really bad,” Dyer said.

Out of that experience he went to work as a consultant. It’s that kind of work that brought him to Alaska. An Alaska Native corporation brought him to Juneau to work on its computers.

“I did that for about six months and then they made me an offer to be their chief technology officer,” Dyer said.

He took that gig, but eventually moved into the real estate sector, taking over a branch office of a real mortgage company and, according to a borough press release, capturing 15 percent of the market. He was moving that office to the Valley when the company was bought out and the new owners decided to close the Alaska office.

“Luckily I had already moved my family up here,” Dyer said with a chuckle.

He went to work for Wells Fargo for a time and bought some acreage in the Butte to start growing and selling vegetables.

“When we bought the place we did one small test season and then I would call the 2011 season proof of concept,” Dyer said.

And by “proof of concept” he means he and his family sold 5,000 pounds of tomatoes and peppers and 2,000 pounds of potatoes, carrots and cabbage. They also raised and sold 500 chickens.

And while it might seem odd that a tech entrepreneur turned mortgage broker might get into agriculture, Dyer said really it’s not.

“Though I grew up in Los Angeles, all of my family had grown up in farming communities and were farmers in their younger years,” he said.

He spent vacations on the farm. In Utah, he and his wife bought acreage to grow things. Really, he said, the farm is just a continuation of that.

Dyer described the Valley as a “uniquely wonderful” place to live. He said he moved five of his six kids with him when he came. The oldest had a job in Juneau and stayed there.

“Normally when you have kids in high school and middle school and you take them away from their friends they think you’re destroying their lives,” Dyer said. And there was definitely some worry there. But at dinner a week after moving here, “They all said, ‘dad you made the right choice moving here.’”

Contact reporter Andrew Wellner at andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com or 352-2270.