Visionary Broadband is Serious about Serving Rural Communities

Brian Worthen, CEO of Visionary Broadband

Ask Brian Worthen what it takes to run a successful company and he’ll answer three things: A passion for the challenge, a love for the place you do it, and respect for your employees and customers.

Brian, the CEO of Visionary Broadband, ticks all those boxes.

Put another way, Brian has no desire for the corner office in New York or Los Angeles. He doesn’t want a view or an urban skyline. Instead, he’ll take vistas of the eastern Wyoming prairie, or the towering cliffs and mountains of the American West.

The rural west is where he grew up, where he raised his family, and where he is growing Visionary Broadband, making it one of the premier broadband providers in all of rural America.

Armed with a degree in small business management from the University of Wyoming, Brian joined the founders of Visionary in 2001 and immediately started working on a new Internet product – broadband.

In 2004, a white-board session at the office produced a eureka moment. Under Brian’s leadership, Visionary was soon wholesaling service to ISPs in Montana, Utah, Colorado, Idaho, Wyoming and Washington state.

By 2014 Worthen was running a company that was selling services to 220 wholesale customers—ISPs, wireless ISPs, CLECs, small telephone companies, small cable companies, utilities, and national carriers.

Virtually all of his customers lived and worked in small towns in the western United States. Small towns much like Orofino, Idaho, where Brian grew up.

It’s easy, in communities like that, to get to know your customers and your employees and be responsive to their needs.  You see, in rural America, you bump into customers and employees at the gas station, at the grocery store and at sports events.

Work is important and Brian is rightly proud of Visionary, and the team he put together to build the company.

When time permits, he can be found road racing cars on a closed course, or skiing, or even paintballing. Or perhaps reading. His favorite business books: Henry Knox: Visionary General of the American Revolution, by Mark Puls and How to Castrate a Bull, by Dave Hitz.

He also travels. One of his favorite adventures happened on an overnight train he and his wife took from Singapore to Bangkok. “At one point in the evening,” he said, “a man came by and asked us to stand. He proceeded to fold our seats into beds. At each stop, vendors would come up and down the cars and offer eggs, chicken and other food and drink. I felt like I was crossing the Plains on the trains of the 1800s.”

The people who built those railroads nearly two centuries ago were really the forerunners of the people who today build internet infrastructure across the Plains and mountains of the West. Much like the men and women who work for Brian Worthen at Visionary Broadband.

Brian can be reached at BWorthen@VisionaryBroadband.com. Learn more about Visionary at vcn.com.