Choose Your Lifestyle: Best Internet for Working From Home

Paige Stradtner supports her family and helps other small businesses thrive through her marketing company, Stradtner Strategic. Her Smithville Fast Fiber Internet — the best internet for working from home — makes it possible to live the lifestyle she wants while staying connected to business opportunities outside of her small town, Ellettsville, Indiana.  

Watch Paige’s video interview at the end of this post.

Live and work where you want

Paige and her husband both work remotely. As a Smithville customer since 2019, Paige is grateful for her Fast Fiber Internet because she can live where she wants while pursuing her career.

“Previously, if you wanted to have greater access to job opportunities, you had to be in a city,” Paige said. “Now, you’re better able to choose your lifestyle first over your job, instead of having your job, your career, dictate your lifestyle.”

Paige and her husband Josh have three children, ages 11, 8 and 6, and a dog, Maple. After moving back to Indiana after Josh finished serving in the Navy, they settled in Ellettsville. They chose Ellettsville because they wanted to raise their children close to family and in a safe town similar to where Paige grew up in Jasper, Indiana.

“Ellettsville in particular is good for families,” Paige explains. “It’s close enough to Bloomington that you can take advantage of all the opportunities over there … and it gives you a little distance from the hustle and bustle of the university. It’s a nice small town. There are a lot of nice people that live here.”

Helping other small businesses thrive

At Stradtner Strategic, Paige assists local and regional small businesses by providing marketing support, such as digital ads, search engine optimization, website design and branding. She started her business four years ago after shifting gears during the pandemic.

“I feel very fortunate. I work with a lot of great people and a lot of great businesses,” Paige said. “It’s really neat to see [the impact of] communications that you help put out there … whether it’s an increase of foot traffic in their store or in general greater business success.”

For Paige, she sees it more than just helping a business, it’s helping the people behind the business — it’s personal. Growing up, she often helped her dad at his small business pharmacy in Jasper, which provided medicine and home medical equipment. It was her first job, and it shaped how she saw small businesses and the role they play.

“You get to see firsthand the community connection and the impact that business has on the community,” Paige said. “Having a small, local business myself now, those are the aspects that I enjoy — that community connection.”

“I know there are families behind these businesses, and so I enjoy knowing that the work that I do is helping to support a lot of people,” Paige said.  

Running a business with the best internet for working from home

Paige maximizes her time and grows her business by often meeting with clients via video conferencing. She remembers before video conferencing was available, and she spent a lot of time arranging and traveling to meetings. Now, her work is more efficient.

With Smithville’s reliable fiber connection with upload and download speeds up to 1,000 Mbps, Paige and her husband Josh, a software developer, can be on video calls and work online simultaneously without issue.

Preparing for success with online education

Paige has nearly 15 years of experience in marketing, and her education supported the journey to start her own marketing agency. After earning her undergraduate degree from Indiana University on the Bloomington campus, she later pursued degrees online due to the convenience and flexibility.

“I wanted the opportunity to work at the same time that I was doing my master’s,” Paige said. “My husband was still in the Navy at the time, and we were moving around a decent amount … so I knew that I likely wouldn’t be able to attend a program in its entirety in one location.”

She earned a master’s degree in business from an online program through Instituto de Empresa Business School in Madrid and earned several certificates online, including professional web design and digital marketing, social media, and analytics.

“It was very important to have a program that was online that I could essentially carry with me wherever we went,” said Paige.

Reliable broadband internet and online schooling opened new opportunities for Paige to pursue her career and become an entrepreneur.

Remembering life before the internet

Growing up in an age before the internet, Paige remembers when her uncle first helped her family get connected online with dial-up when she was a teenager. She recalls arguments with her three sisters about who got to be on the phone or use the internet to check their email — something that folks old enough will recall was not something you could do simultaneously.

“It was a lot of fun, you know, the early search engines … when you type something in it was kind of like magic,” Paige recalls. “It definitely changed our lives — it changed the lives of everyone, of course. You can’t even really state the impact that it’s had on all of our lives.”

Serving community locally and globally

Paige helps make her local community bright not only through her job, but also through volunteering. She currently serves on the PTO board at her children’s school, assisting with social events and luncheons for teachers. She also serves on the Marketing Committee for the Greater Bloomington Chamber of Commerce and runs her non-profit, Volunteer Dubois County, which connects local nonprofit organizations with volunteers.

Additionally, Paige helped brighten global communities when she spent a few years teaching in Lesotho while serving in the Peace Corps. The experience provided a new perspective. “In Lesotho, the jobs aren’t there. I think about the opportunities that we have here, and the technologies like the internet that are at our disposal,” said Paige. “Having a good internet connection here where we live in a small town allows us to live this lifestyle. It allows us to live in this small area and still be able to have good job opportunities.”

Smithville Fast Fiber Internet lights up more opportunities for Hoosiers and in turn, Hoosiers light up our communities.

Watch for our next Bright Communities spotlight soon.