Montana Business

"We have probably the most perfectly balanced economy that you can have right now," he said. "A national park, a beautiful area and a major research university spells a pretty good recipe for success."

"We have worked in nearly every state in the U.S. and six foreign countries, but our headquarters will always be in Butte," said Peoples.

"RightNow’s powerful web-based incident management capabilities make it an ideal solution for a distributed, high-volume operation like ours," John Delgado, customer care manager for Reader’s Digest, said. "The savings we’ve achieved thus far have more than paid for our implementation."

One of 2004’s bigger winners was RightNow Technologies http://www.rightnow.com/ , a company based in Bozeman, Mont., that sells customer service products. Its stock price rose 130 percent for the year, despite a lack of profits when it decided last winter to go public.

Headquartered in Kalispell, Semitool maintains sales and support centers in the United States, Europe and Asia.

Years of hard work are starting to pay off for Mary Hurley and her husband, Don, as their handmade wooden toy business expands. The Stevensville couple started D and Me Toys LLP http://www.dandme.com in the late 1970s as a hobby, and sales are now booming with the help of the Internet.

He said, while he’s enjoyed some success, he just did what so many other Gallatin Valley residents have done: created a job for himself so he could stay in the area.

"I’m just happy to be in Montana," Weber said. "I want to stay here and have our mandolins to stay American made."

"Fifty percent of our non-resident visitors come in the summer months, and they tend to stay longer," she said. "But our winter visitors are important, because they tend to spend more money."

"I find a lot of potential for growth here in Great Falls," he said. "The community has a positive attitude towards growth and really responds to individual needs of businesses."

The Blackfeet are among the few Montana tribes without a state gambling compact that would allow offering Class III games.