Youthful Dynamo Uses Maine PTAC to Help
Power Her Company’s Success

Ann Yahner has retired from the U.S. Navy and from a career in nursing. Yet this 62-year old active businesswoman, who along with two partners brings over 25 years of business management experience to their eight-year-old company, has been strategic in identifying the tools and resources to help power her company’s success.  Because Penobscot Bay Media’s information technology solutions focus on government sales, Yahner made sure, her resources included the Maine Procurement Technical Assistance Center (Maine PTAC).

The Maine PTAC is part of a nationwide network of Procurement Technical Assistance Centers, or PTAC’s that helps Maine small businesses obtain government contracts with the Department of Defense, other federal agencies, state and local governments and federal prime contractors.

Yahner asked how Maine PTAC could help Penobscot Bay Media find federal and state government agencies that needed her company’s high-performance systems and software solutions for geospatial data processing, digital mapping, sensor integration, and web application development.  One answer was PTAC’s Bid Match Service, which created a precise description of Yahner’s company to use in a daily Internet search for government announcements and requests for bids.  “We definitely have had some matches,” says Yahner, “We’ve completed a project for USDA and the forest service in Seattle as well as projects with Maine DOT, Maine PUC and the Maine Army Guard.”

While the Bid Match Service provides efficiency in following the trail of lucrative federal contracts that is not the only value Yahner says Maine PTAC has for her company.  Speaking of Maine PTAC staff, Yahner says, “Both Pat Rice and Ed Dahl have visited our company headquarters in Camden to get updated on our different types of projects and our latest areas of focus in order to know more about us and how they can help.”

Their knowledge of her company has been important, says Yahner, explaining, “They have become very good friends – they talk about us to other people, they usually give me a heads-up on things they think I should know, and I see them at conferences where they’ve introduced me to people.”

Yahner recently met with some of the almost 80 federal government contractors and federal prime subcontractors at a Matchmaker Event sponsored by Maine PTAC in the Portland area.  “They really did a nice job with that,” Yahner says of the Matchmaker Event, “I made a couple of interesting contacts; the Army Corps of Engineers  and Facilities Management people in the Military who are very interested in how we measure interior spaces using the spatially intelligent robot.” 

“Working with other IT businesses, the Economic Development Council and the Hutchinson Center, we are striving to be a center of excellence for IT in the mid coast area,” says Yahner, “to draw other IT businesses into this area and create more jobs in order to keep  the young talent in the state.”  Maine PTAC is one of the tools this savvy business woman and youthful dynamo is using in her bid for excellence.

Archived Success Stories