UPS AND DOWNS in the fortune of a dot-com company are to be expected. But the future of SafeHarbor Technology Corp. is in question. A former dot-com darling that hit upon hard times, the company was turning a corner in recent months.

Apparently not fast enough. Annette Jacobs, chairman and CEO of the Satsop based firm, has resigned her position after a three-year stint aimed at turning the struggling Internet company around. The company, which provides online and telephone customer support for Web companies, turned an operating profit in four out of the last six months of 2006, but has yet to fully crawl out of the red. Jacobs' resignation was effective July 27.

When reached on her cell phone shortly after stepping down, Jacobs is mum, "It was the right timing for me to really make a transition. I've accomplished everything I wanted to with the company." She declines to discuss SafeHarbor's present condition or its future, referring those questions to Brian Vincent, executive chairman of the company and former managing director of software for Vulcan Capital.

Jacobs' departure is the latest jolt to a company that has been struggling to steady itself for some years after wobbling under the dot-com implosion and working to improve a problematic relationship with its landlord, the Grays Harbor Public Development Authority, which is redeveloping a never completed nuclear plant in Satsop.

Jacobs says Vincent and other senior company leaders are now running SafeHarbor until a permanent CEO is found, adding that she worked with Vincent to make the transition a smooth one.

Marc Droppert, SafeHarbor's outside counsel at the law firm of Graham & Dunn, says that "the company restructure process is still under way" and has significant distance to go yet. "I believe Annette made significant contributions to getting the company turned around."

It is now unclear what the company will do next. The 49-year-old Jacobs took over SafeHarbor in 2004 with a mission to make it profitable. She now says she wants to pursue other opportunities but didn't want to do that while still at SafeHarbor. She is pursuing "a couple different options," and would like to stay in the Puget Sound area, she says.

Jacobs, whose experience includes leading major business units with Qwest Communications, Verizon Wireless, GTE Wireless and AT&T, was making progress at SafeHarbor: She flipped the company's business model, resulting in three-quarters of the company's revenue now coming from Web-based self-service support instead of call center services.

SafeHarbor had managed to turn an operating profit in recent months, with Jacobs telling Washington CEO Magazine in an interview earlier this year that the company was on track to having a profitable year in 2007. "We improved our operating loss by more than 50 percent from 2005 to 2006," she says.

Those gains were predicated on landing marquee clients such as IBM, American Airlines, T-Mobile and Washington Mutual. For American Airlines, for example, SafeHarbor reduced costs by organizing content on the airline's employee website so that its employees could easily access information and get answers to questions about everything from benefits to internal job application procedures.

Brad Aspgren, senior manager of enterprise programs for American Airlines, says SafeHarbor has been "extremely proactive in developing ideas and coming to us with suggestions, not just taking what we tell them."

Chad Waite, a SafeHarbor board member and a partner with OVP Venture Partners in Kirkland, said shortly before Jacobs stepped down that she "has the operations expertise that we needed" and that she "doesn't get ruffled."

The SafeHarbor of the late 1990s rode a massive wave of confidence stirred up by the euphoric dot-com economy. This was also the time when SafeHarbor, then a fast-growing Internet start-up, began cementing a problematic relationship with the entity that's redeveloping the SatsopDevelopment Park in Grays Harbor County: The Grays Harbor Public Development Authority. The authority, created in 1998 and launched in 1999, has as its mission to transform a never-completed nuclear plant in Satsop into a 1,700-acre, environmentally friendly business and technology hub, attracting technological and manufacturing companies and pumping jobs into a rural area.

SafeHarbor, under the leadership of original founders Brian Sterling, Bo Wandell and Bill Miller, was an early tenant for the Public Development Authority. The company dreamed of going public and, by 2001, boasted a workforce of more than 200 people. But reality blew through the dot-com euphoria, and SafeHarbor suffered for it. According to Waite, "We had 28 to 30 customers, all of which were dotcom bubble companies. We lost them all. They all went away."

SafeHarbor also was hobbled by a lack of expertise. "None of the founders had ever run a call center," Waite said. "We were running a very, very inefficient call center."

In 2002, SafeHarbor and the Public Development Authority both got a public black eye when the Washington State Auditor's Office and an investigation by the News Tribune of Tacoma detailed their messy relationship. The auditor's May 2002 report on the development authority's actions in 1999 and 2000 found the authority violated state bid laws and kept poor control over projects when it was constructing office buildings for SafeHarbor. Ultimately, the Public Development Authority and SafeHarbor cleaned up their operations. In a follow-up report in July 2002, the auditor gave the development authority a clean slate "due to significant improvements made in authority operations by its current management team."

In 2004, SafeHarbor hired Jacobs to oversee the company and to steer it in the right direction. For her, the dreamy dot-com days were in the past. She brought knowledge, determination and a résumé illustrating a 20-year career leading multibillion-dollar business units with Qwest Communications, Verizon Wireless, GTE Wireless and AT&T.

NEW BOSS, NEW DIRECTION

Jacobs remodeled SafeHarbor's business model, emphasizing Web self-services, which are in strong demand, instead of call-center services. "If you look at the call center business per se, it's a very difficult business to compete in because there is so much offshoring to India or the Philippines," she said earlier this year.

When Jacobs arrived at SafeHarbor, the company had 184 employees. Now it has about 100. "The majority of those job changes have been around the call center operations," Jacobs said. "There's also been an incredible amount of work on delivery of services, and also just streamlining our organizational structure."

Tension between SafeHarbor and the Grays Harbor Public Development Authority lingers. SafeHarbor pays the development authority $50,742 per month in base rent to occupy the company's 47,833-square-foot building. Add such things as utility expenses and diesel generator backup services, as well as charges SafeHarbor is paying to be let out of a long-term lease obligation on a second, 43,000-square-foot building built for but no longer occupied by the company, and the per month price tag rises to $69,265.

The number will drop $7,600 per month in October, once the lease buyout note is paid in full.

Waite acknowledges the effects of a contract that previous managers signed with the development authority: "We're paying too much." The company continues to try to renegotiate the price, but the development authority isn't budging. According to Waite, "That probably remains our single most compelling challenge as a business."

Jacobs put it this way: "Since we've been at the park, we've paid more than $13 million in rent, and I'll let you draw your own conclusions."

Tami Garrow, chief executive officer of the development authority, says the authority has "renegotiated that lease several times" to lower the cost to SafeHarbor and said that SafeHarbor pays a "very reasonable rent for the building." Considered Class A office space, it includes such features as a cafeteria, showers and conference rooms. "We're happy to have SafeHarbor here," Garrow says, adding that the development authority has invested millions in new infrastructure for SafeHarbor and other companies at the park to succeed.

The park began with two tenants ? SafeHarbor and Northwest Specialty Wood Products ? which were already there when the development authority launched its operations in 1999. Those tenants are still there, and now they are joined by 24 others, including The Bank of the Pacific, Office Max, Blue Sky Café, Faber & Sons Recycling and Grays Harbor Energy. The park has 18 co-location customers, companies that are purchasing services such as data backup services or that are renting space to house their off-site data servers. And the park has received awards for its emphasis on economic development, including the 2005 Excellence in Economic Development Award from the U.S. Department of Commerce.

It's uncertain how the relationship between SafeHarbor and the development authority will evolve, or even what direction the company will go. While the company counts IBM, American Airlines, T-Mobile and Washington Mutual as clients, and has racked up 16 industry awards, including Best Overall Company at the 2007 American Business Awards in June and recognition for Jacobs as a finalist for Best Chairman, the impact of her loss is likely to be felt at least in the near term.

American Airlines' Aspgren was impressed that Jacobs answered the airline's phone calls, offering them personal service.

"She makes a point of indicating to us how important American Airlines' business is to her," he says. "She wants to go out and meet the customer."

In an interview at the company's Satsop headquarters earlier this year, Jacobs gave an indication of her proactive outreach to potential clients: "Every phone call can change your life. I try to answer my phone as much as possible."

Aaron Corvin is a senior writer at Washington CEO Magazine.