Cape Breton’s unlikely hero: a Trump-loving Iowan
The American businessman who bought one of Sydney’s largest employers saw an opportunity. And hundreds of laid-off call centre workers saw their jobs reappear
The failure of one of Sydney’s largest employers set a Dickensian scene last December — hundreds laid off and denied pay just a few weeks before Christmas — but when a new owner swept in, the outlook quickly changed.
In the days after buying the bankrupt ServiCom Call Centre in a Connecticut court auction and visiting Cape Breton for the first time, Anthony Marlowe relayed a message to its former employees: “We’re proud to be part of your family and thank you very much for the classiest of warm welcomes.”
In a phone interview from Iowa about six weeks later, he told the Star he continued to have the best interests of those employees at heart.
“We have plans to do nothing but to treat everyone well and right,” Marlowe said.
More than 600 people were suddenly unemployed when the ServiCom Call Centre announced Dec. 6 it was boarding up shop.
It had been a fixture in the Cape Breton community for almost 20 years, and em- ployees said they were blindsided.
Though signs may have been ominous — the call centre’s American parent
company, JNET Communications, had filed for bankruptcy protection in October, and paycheques were delayed for weeks — Canadian employees were given reassurances. Some were expecting bonuses, not pink slips. When the shutdown came, people started scrambling. The public donated to local charities, which in turn handed out groceries and paid for heating oil and electrical bills. At the same time, an auction opened on the call centre’s remaining assets.
Three bidders jockeyed for the rights to the call centre’s contracts — an apparently lucrative opportunity that retained its sheen while the rest of JNET’s American operations tarnished — but it was the founder and CEO of Marlowe Companies Inc. (MCI) who won it for $1.5 million.
The day after the auction, he flew to Nova Scotia for the first time, where hundreds of workers waited eagerly to meet the man who said he would give them back their jobs.
Marlowe, 39, renamed the operation The Sydney Call Centre Inc. and gave it a new logo with the austere face of a bald eagle staring out from a round, yellow frame. The bird is a symbol of both Cape Breton and America, but the connections between the two places don’t end there.
American interest was piqued in 2016 when a tongue-in-cheek campaign invited Donald Trump objectors to immigrate to Cape Breton, should he win the presidency. Marlowe, who backed the current president, praised the island where he saw a great business opportunity, “a community that we’re privileged to have been welcomed to with open arms.”
The call centre reopened Jan. 2. In its first month, it brought in more than $1million in revenue, Marlowe said. The sum didn’t match pre-bankruptcy benchmarks, he said, but he still considered it “unbelievable.”
Marlowe has been in the telemarketing industry for more than 20 years. He started on the phones at a call centre in Iowa City as a teen and college student. “I wasn’t very good at it for a couple, three weeks,” he said modestly, then added that once he “figured it out” he became one of the best at the company. The company was MCI (not to be confused with the namesake enterprise Marlowe founded in 2015). Microwave Communications Inc. was founded in the 1960s and by the time it hired Marlowe in the late 1990s it was a major player in international telecommunications.
According to media reports from 1998, WorldCom bought the old MCI. By 2002, a major accounting scandal had come to light and ultimately led to WorldCom’s bankruptcy. Losing his job gave Marlowe “some extra sympathy for the workers of ServiCom,” he said.
He became an entrepreneur. He had dropped out of college when he realized his knack for sales and telecommunications, and soon by started up his first venture: a call centre under the company name TMone. Sixteen years on, Marlowe is at the helm of MCI and its four subsidiaries, employing more than 2,000.
“The workforce in Sydney is probably the biggest asset this organization has,” said George Karaphillis, dean of the Shannon School of Business at Cape Breton University. He said jobs at the call centre — despite most of them offering little more than minimum wage — are plum gigs. Ninety-three per cent of ServiCom workers returned under its new ownership.
“They’re not the best jobs, but they’re good jobs,” said Karaphillis, noting of the health benefits and safe working condi- tions. “We don’t have that many of those lying around.”
He estimates that the call centre is Sydney’s third largest employer, after the school board and the health authority. According to the Finance and Treasury Board of Nova Scotia,15.1per cent of Cape Breton’s labour force was unemployed in December 2018.
Statistics Canada figures show that even as unemployment rates have dropped in most of the country over the past five years, they’ve held steadily around 15 per cent in Cape Breton.
The bidding war over the ServiCom assets was, in and of itself, “a good sign,” said Karaphillis. Add to that an eager and capable workforce and a precedent of government incentives for the operation. (Marlowe secured an agreement with the province for a $2.4-million payroll rebate at the start of February.)
Despite his country’s president regularly chiding and threatening Canada during trade talks, Marlowe said his business remains apolitical, even if he personally is not.
The day after the 2016 presidential election, Marlowe posted a photo to his public Instagram account of him standing with Trump, both grinning, Trump giving a thumbs up. Marlowe highlights the fact that MCI was contracted to do phone banking for Trump’s presidential campaign.
Marlowe said he’s aware of how polarizing Trump is — Canadians largely disapprove of him — but he thinks Cape Bretoners may differ.
“Frankly, I wouldn’t be very much surprised if the president of the U.S. would have a good amount of support from Cape Bretoners given his ethnicity (part Scottish), where he and his family are from and his kind of pragmatic approach about the workers first,” he said.