The IBJ Podcast with Mason King – Details, episodes & analysis

Comparing company employees to a sports team is a well-worn management trope, but Kelley Gay knows as well as anyone the value of translating the experience of a championship-level athlete to the corporate world. She graduated from one of the most lauded team cultures in the history of college athletics: the University of Connecticut’s women’s basketball program. In 1995, Gay played forward on UConn’s first women’s national championship team. Earlier this month, the UConn women’s program won its 12th national championship, all under coach Geno Auriemma.   Today, Kelley Gay is senior vice president and chief marketing officer of OneAmerica Financial, the largest private company based in Indianapolis. But the lessons she learned from her father, a former NFL lineman, and on the court with UConn are still top of mind. In this week’s edition of the IBJ Podcast, Gay discusses the importance of learning your role in a large organization while understanding how everyone contributes, when to celebrate your successes and when to push your team to accomplishments they might not believe they can achieve. She also explains her role on the local host committee for July’s WNBA All-Star Weekend in Indianapolis—essentially an all-star team of Indy-area executives comprised largely of women.  

This week’s IBJ Podcast features a conversation from our Forty Under 40 awards breakfast last week with Maureen Weber, the winner of this year’s Alumni Award.  Maureen was originally a Forty Under 40 honoree in 2010. Back then, she had just finished reorganizing the Indiana Department of Education and had taken a job as director of community outreach and engagement at Clarian Health, now Indiana University Health. Sixteen years later, Maureen is president and CEO of Early Learning Indiana. She said she took the job because she saw the opportunity to transform the lives of young children, especially vulnerable ones. IBJ Editor Lesley Weidenbener talked with Maureen on stage about the work Early Learning Indiana is doing today and about leadership and learning from failure. You can read more about Maureen and see our latest Forty Under 40 class here.

You don’t need to be too technically savvy to pick up on the charged atmosphere surrounding large-scale data centers. Various technology-heavy industries need data centers as a kind of way station and storage point for all the electronic information they generate and process. As technology evolves at a breakneck speed, the size of these centers grows. In October, the financial firm Blackstone forecast that over the next five years, the United States will see $1 trillion in data center investments. Indiana really wasn’t on the map of the big tech firms, at least in terms of building centers, until very recently. In the last 14 months, seven data center projects have been announced for the state representing more than $15 billion in potential investment. Some Indiana legislators see them as huge economic development opportunities. Indiana House Speaker Todd Huston, R-Fishers, has said, quote, “I want every data center that we can get in the state of Indiana.” But the sudden surge in announced centers has generated a lot of concern as well about their drain on Indiana utilities and, in some cases, their water-intensive cooling systems. Indiana lawmakers are considering a spate of bills regarding data centers in the current legislative session. IBJ technology reporter Susan Orr is our guest this week on the IBJ Podcast to get us current on the demand for data centers and how that’s manifesting in Indiana.

You might recognize Indianapolis-based Bosma Enterprises as a not-for-profit that helps Indiana residents who are blind or visually impaired. Its business model includes providing products and services for the public and private sector. This provides jobs for people with vision loss who otherwise would face a 70% unemployment rate. In fact, more than half of Bosma’s employees are blind or visually impaired—including its vice president of external affairs, Lise Pace.  She was climbing the ladder in the banking industry in the early 1990s when she learned that she would eventually lose her sight to a disease called retinitis pigmentosa. Married and the mother of a young son, she slowly retreated into a dark and isolated life as she lost most of her sight, stopped working and became a stay-at-home mom. As she says, “I didn’t know how to be someone who was blind.” In this week’s episode of the IBJ Podcast, Pace tells the story of how her son inspired her to break out of a years-long funk and start volunteering. That led to a full-time job at Bosma and then a raft of promotions that brought her to her current position as a company executive. You could see her as a prime example of how someone with limited sight can excel in the corporate world. Indeed, one of Bosma’s missions is to help clients learn the skills required for succeeding in almost any business environment. But as Pace acknowledges, employers considering visually impaired applicants also need to see beyond sight impediments and trust the results from past work history.

In 1979, musician Chuck Surack started a business in Fort Wayne called Sweetwater Sound by creating a mobile recording studio in a Volkswagen Bus. Fast-forward a bit more than four decades, and Sweetwater has evolved into one of the nation’s most prominent e-commerce sites for musical instruments and audio gear, with $1.6 billion in sales for 2022. Surack and his wife, Lisa, had total ownership of the company until 2021 when they sold a big stake to a private equity firm. The Suracks have used that money to help further their already extensive philanthropic giving. Chuck also has more time to focus on Surack Enterprises, a collection of companies unrelated to Sweetwater, including several that stem from his interest in aviation. And that’s the reason why Chuck has been in the news in Indianapolis in recent weeks. The Indianapolis Airport Authority wants to decommission the Indianapolis Downtown Heliport, a move that’s supported by the city of Indianapolis due to the site’s attractiveness for redevelopment. Chuck is helping lead the charge to persuade the Federal Aviation Administration to deny permission to decommission the heliport. Chuck has a helicopter charter company that uses the heliport, but he also joins aviation experts and the Indiana Department of Transportation in arguing that the heliport is uniquely positioned to advantage of new developments in urban aviation. That includes electric aircraft that can take off and land vertically. In this week’s edition of the IBJ Podcast, Surack sheds more light on his decision to sell a controlling stake in Sweetwater and step away from day-to-day operations. And he explains the reasoning behind his desire to keep the heliport open. The IBJ Podcast is brought to you by Taft.

In the 38 years that Steve Sanner has owned and operated Jiffy Lube oil change shops in Indiana, he has laid down some serious tread marks. He is owner and president of Jiffy Lube of Indiana, which counts 51 locations and about 510 employees altogether. That’s the vast majority of the Jiffy Lubes in the state. But he hasn’t been content to simply make his mark as a major Jiffy Lube franchisee. He has volunteered at the highest levels of some of central Indiana’s highest profile organizations, including the Indiana Sports Corp., the local organizing committee for the Big Ten Football Championship and the Washington Township Schools Foundation. And he has used his Jiffy Lubes as a platform for some surprising community-minded initiatives. He has supported Indiana artists by commissioning 30 murals for his stores. He’s kicking off a campaign called “No ticket, let’s fix it,” in which police officers around the state give motorists $25 Jiffy Lube gift cards to get minor car repairs, at a total retail value so far of $300,000. It’s a great way to get motorists into Jiffy Lube, but Sanner says he also wants to promote positive interactions between police and motorists while keeping roads safer. Sanner is the guest for this week’s edition of the IBJ Podcast. He starts with a few wild stories about his early days as an entrepreneur and how he got a foothold as a Jiffy Lube franchisee. He reacts to some of the common complaints that consumers have about oil change shops. And he talks at length about his secondary career as a volunteer, including being in charge of all of the laundry in the March Madness bubble when Indianapolis hosted all of the NCAA men’s basketball tournament in 2021. The IBJ Podcast is brought to you by Taft.  

The owners of Homefield, a maker of T-shirts, sweatshirts, and other apparel for college sports fans, haven’t necessarily been upset with all of the upsets during March Madness this year. The firm was founded by recent Indiana University graduate Connor Hitchcock and his wife, Christa, built off of a side project called Hoosier Proud. It seems like college gear is everywhere, and that initially gave Connor pause when considering whether to take the Indiana-focused venture national. But he and Christa landed on a formula to help Homefield to stand out: Using premium materials and creating unusual designs that draw on a school’s vintage iconography, and then moving at the speed of the internet when a particular school hits big. So, for example, in the first few hours after Fairleigh Dickinson University beat Purdue in the first round of the men’s tournament this year, Homefield was in touch with licensing officials for FDU, designing a series of shirts and notifying its followers on Twitter. It did the same thing last year when St. Peters University made a run in the tournament. Both schools are squarely in Homefield’s comfort zone as small universities that don’t necessarily have robust apparel programs. In this week’s edition of the IBJ Podcast, Connor and Christa explain how they parlayed their success with small schools into agreements with the bigger names. They also dig into how they landed on Homefield’s winning strategy and how they’ve grown the firm to 40 employees in five years while maintaining a four-day workweek and keeping the emphasis on their staff’s quality of life. That includes all weekends off, even during the tournament. The IBJ Podcast is brought to you by Taft.  

After the immediate fallout of the Great Recession, apartment development in downtown Indianapolis surged. Just in the last decade, the number of downtown apartment units has more than doubled to the current total of about 15,000 units. Indianapolis and other major cities across the nation are trying to encourage apartment development, especially as downtowns face an existential crisis brought about by the pandemic—namely, the loss of office workers in their downtown cores to remote working. One of the hottest trends is to take existing office towers and convert them into apartment buildings. And it’s happening with other major commercial structures, like downtown malls. We’re seeing that now in Indianapolis, with the conversion of the AT&T building and the plans for the Gold Building. The redevelopment of Circle Centre Mall very likely will have apartments, and as the city tries to find new uses for past-their-prime municipal properties, it’s often making residential uses a priority. For this week’s edition of the podcast, we have a three-person panel to explore the reasons behind the recent surge, the city’s desire to encourage apartment development, and future prospects for continued development and how that could affect downtown. Joining us are apartment market specialist George Tikijian, real estate developer Eric Gershman and deputy mayor of economic development Scarlett Andrews. Here’s our conversation. The IBJ Podcast is brought to you by Taft.  

The Federal Reserve is expected to raise interest rates again next week as it continues to try to cool inflation. The silver lining is that when lending rates rise, savings rates also rise. It’s not unusual now to see certificates of deposits with 4% or 5% annual yields locked in over 12 to 24 months. Money market accounts are now paying healthy returns as well. Millennials and members of Gen Z should take note, because they probably haven’t experienced interest rates this high for savings in their adult lives. It's difficult to get many Americans to put away an appropriate amount of money for retirement or a financial emergency. Late last year, Congress passed a significant revision to the rules for retirement plans with the intent of extending and expanding your saving opportunities and ability to put away money for retirement. It’s not just for folks preparing to hobble across the finish line. The changes also can help people still paying off their college loans and those who need to establish their first emergency funds. For this week’s podcast, IBJ columnist Pete Dunn, aka Pete The Planner, explains these new opportunities for savings. He also shares a tip for avoiding an interest-rate trap that current homeowners could fall into if they try to level up on housing. The IBJ Podcast is brought to you by Taft.  

The Indiana General Assembly just reached the midpoint of its 2023 legislative session and passed some deadlines for advancing bills, which has pushed at least two-thirds of them back to the curb—at least for this session. So this is a great time to take stock of the bills that made the cut and those that tanked. As usual, education funding has been at the center of major debate. Lawmakers also are hip-deep in social issues, such as so-called “ESG investing” and potential bans on library books some people believe are inappropriate for minors. The Legislature likes to trumpet its efforts to make the state more business-friendly, and different ways to lower business taxes have been under discussion. For this week’s edition of the IBJ Podcast, regular host Mason King is turning the discussion over to Managing Editor Greg Weaver, who’s been covering state government for decades, and IBJ statehouse reporter Peter Blanchard. And they have invited a guest to help flesh out the discussion: Casey Smith, a reporter for Indiana Capital Chronicle, who recently authored a scoop on a major omission in the Indiana House Republicans’ school funding plan. The IBJ Podcast is brought to you by Taft.