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How well does your firm communicate with clients? MARKETING Kay Millar: Businesses that serve customers effectively offer a welcome reminder of how things ought to be handled

How well does your firm communicate with clients? MARKETING Kay Millar Businesses that serve customers effectively offer a welcome reminder of how things ought to be handled Having spent four months with my husband preparing one house to sell and another to move into, I’m sharing our observations on the behaviors of small businesses – using as examples our contractor, carpenter, electrician, painter, roofer and mason. Hopefully, this will help managers of other businesses review their own practices. Communication with…

Accounting employees in demand: Sarbanes-Oxley requirements spark hiring surge of experienced accountants, creating openings at smaller firms

Little did Josh Malarsky know five years ago when he began pursuing his master’s degree in accounting that firms would be hiring in such unprecedented numbers. But that was before federal legislation tightening auditing and accounting rules and regulations turned the profession on its head. Known as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, the law and its stiffer controls have caused accounting firms and corporations to ratchet up staffing numbers. The Big Four firms that audit public companies mostly are searching for seniorlevel…

VIEWPOINT: Arts education is not disposable

Our forefathers had it right. In planning for the eight symbols of Indiana’s values that grace the high arches of the rotunda in the state capitol, art ranks right up there with commerce, justice, liberty, history, agriculture, oratory and law. Each of these is depicted in 20-foot statues that hold a color palette, a book or a shock of wheat that reveals in iconic form the tools of that particular area. Interesting to note that, without art, none of the…

SPORTS: A history lesson for 21st century stadium critics

It is Oct. 20, 1971. I am standing near Market and Alabama streets, where the groundbreaking has taken place for a venue to be called Market Square Arena. The price tag is a salty $23 million, and the project has attracted critics and naysayers who wonder about the city’s priorities, especially since our mayor, Richard Lugar, is using federal revenuesharing funds to help pay for the arena. Plus, Lugar has this wacky idea about using the arena as a catalyst…

Ex-IPL officer fights utility: Claims wrongful termination, financial trickery

Not even a lineman at Indianapolis Power & Light Co. has more nerve than Dwane Ingalls. Floored that IPL’s CEO, Ann Murtlow, didn’t share his concerns that IPL was sending excessive cash to parent AES Corp. at the expense of electric-service reliability, the IPL vice president scheduled a meeting in mid-2003 at the Maryland home of AES CEO Paul Hanrahan. Hanrahan apparently didn’t see things Ingalls’ way. Within a year of the meeting, Murtlow terminated the 14-year AES employee. Now,…

Cook County jail contract gives local firm big boost: Government Payment Service could double business

Government Payment Service Inc.’s credit-card-based jail bond service has proven to be a successful alternative to traditional cash transactions. Now the Indianapolis-based company, which has experienced tremendous growth since its founding in 1997, could double in size, having secured a contract with the country’s largest jail system in Cook County, Ill., home to Chicago. Cook County, with 5.3 million people, is the second-most populous county in the nation, topped only by Los Angeles County in California. Processing credit card bail…

Tax credits aid blighted areas: Help open to firms targeting Center Township projects

Federal tax credits supporting roughly $6 million in economic development projects are still available for small-business owners considering expanding or locating in Center Township. The funds are administered through the New Markets Tax Credit Program, which was established by Congress in 2000 to help revitalize blighted areas. In Indiana, the locally based Urban Enterprise Association Inc. helped secure tax credits that can fund $50 million worth of projects, including $12.5 million in Marion County. The tax credits already are supporting…

Forum tops local list of largest credit unions: $25M headquarters expansion caps decade of growth

This year, for the first time, Forum has passed Indiana Members Credit Union on IBJ’s annual list of the largest Indianapolis-area credit unions (see page 28). What’s more, with $913 million in assets, 84,159 members and 11 branches, Forum has a market foothold on par with some well-known local banks, such as the National Bank of Indianapolis and Plainfield-based Lincoln Bank. On Aug. 9, Forum will formally dedicate the latest symbol of its financial services firepower, a $25 million expansion…

ECONOMIC ANALYSIS: Manufacturing sector keeps Indiana economy chugging

There is mostly good news on the economy. Both in Indiana and in the nation as a whole, we appear to be heading into the year’s second half with reasonably strong momentum. Buoyed by surprisingly low interest rates, a weak dollar and a strong rebound in business spending nationwide, the state economy has turned in a solid performance in the last six quarters. Through the first six months of the year, the Indiana economy is on a pace to create…

Making way for a MONSTER: Airport to dish out millions to accommodate Airbus A380

The 7,700 acres that are Indianapolis International Airport may soon look like the city squashed by Godzilla-when big, bad A380 comes to town. And it is likely to cost tens of millions of dollars to keep the beast happy. The A380 is the Airbus Industrie superjumbo jet. Airport managers want to start crunching-er, make that estimating-what it will cost to accommodate the world’s biggest airliner. They plan to ask the Indianapolis Airport Authority board for $200,000 from the 2006 airport…

EYE ON THE PIE: Brothers set example for today’s execs

Most of us know the fabled heroes of Bean Town. They include the Adams cousins (John and Sam). Paul Revere. The Kennedy brothers (John, Robert and Edward). Ted Williams, Carl Yazstremski, Bobby Orr, Bob Cousey, Bill Russell, Larry Bird and Tom Brady. Yet Boston’s most significant business heroes are not well-known today, at a time when their example could be most useful. Two brothers, Edward and Lincoln Filene, inherited their father’s department store in 1890. They spent the rest of…

Radio Disney catching the ears of youth-and advertisers: Event marketing key to getting local kids to tune in

Two years after its launch, Radio Disney’s local WRZD-FM 98.3 affiliate is outperforming many affiliates in the 55-station network, even though traditional measures of its success are anything but magical. WRZD’s rating by New York-based Arbitron Inc., the industry’s standard media research firm, shows the station barely cracking the top 20 in this market. But WRZD has prospered through another number: listener calls per day. The station averages an eye-popping 4,070 calls a day, according to officials at Radio Disney’s…

Docs asked to put ownership stake in writing: State now requires disclosure for some patient referrals

A new state law aims to shine more light on the touchy financial relationships that can crop up when a doctor refers a patient to another health care business. Since July 1, physicians have had to provide patients with a written disclosure when they make a referral to another business in which they have an ownership interest. That could mean a laboratory, specialty hospital or an imaging center, among other possibilities. State Rep. Vaneta Becker, R-Evansville, said she wrote the…

NOTIONS: Pugilism, Parkinson’s, politics, DNA: a powerful combination set to win

If you knew only that Scott Newman is a former prosecutor, you might think his new workouts apt. The man known for courtroom sparring now feints, weaves, jabs and thrusts with a former Golden Gloves boxing champion. But that’s not all we know about the 44-year-old Republican twice elected Marion County prosecutor. For in 2002, Newman also became Indianapolis’ most public Parkinson’s patient. Today, Newman says boxing provides the perfect exercise for the neurologically challenged. “Parkinson’s is a movement disease,”…

Wells Fargo sees city as ripe for expansion: Commercial banking, capital management key to Indianapolis plan

Wells Fargo & Co. took a couple of quiet but important steps earlier this year as part of a plan to build a major presence in the Indianapolis banking and financial services market. The San Franciscobased corporation in March opened a local Commercial Banking Division headed by longtime banking executive Lex Curry and a capital management office headed by well-known stock manager Tom Pence. The moves, by the nation’s fifth-largest bank in terms of assets, are part of a corporate…

An old-school approach: Woodley Farra Manion takes its large-cap strategy into the institutional market

Circa 1999, high-tech growth stocks were going up, up, up. Professional investment advisers hardly seemed necessary. And a strategy focused on unadventurous large-cap value sounded downright old school. “There were clients at the cocktail parties,” remembered Woodley Farra Manion Portfolio Management Inc. cofounder and principal George Farra. “They heard about their friends who had [quickly] doubled their money, and it all looked pretty easy.” But today, most investors still feel the sting of their recession-induced losses. Ironically, the dot-com bust…

Insurers look to make uncommon comeback: Pafco, Superior hope to leave rehabilitation this year

Only the hum of central air-conditioning broke the silence when Doug Symons recently led a quick tour of the Indianapolis office where his Superior Insurance Group once employed about 180 people. Rows of gray cubicles sat empty. Boxes filled with old claims and underwriting files lined the aisles. “This,” Symons said as he waved his arms around, “is what an empty office looks like waiting to be filled.” Those bare cubicles could fill up with dozens of new employees and…

Planner sinks his teeth into dentists’ finances: Four Quadrant builds business around one industry

Dentists know a lot about operating a dental drill, but sometimes not so much about operating a business. That’s where Four Quadrant Wealth Advisors likes to comes in. Indianapolis-based Four Quadrant provides its dental clients with financial advice on everything from running the money side of their practices to building their retirement funds. As one of a fairly small number of financial advice firms that focus on a single type of client, Four Quadrants limits its clients to dentists or…

Tech-park program tightens guidelines: Daniels administration hopes grants spur more innovation

In Shelbyville, home of the state’s third certified technology park, economic development officials are excited. They just broke ground on a promising new park business: A Santa Fe Steakhouse. Since 2003, the state has approved $1.2 million for Shelbyville to help develop its technology park-one of 17 now scattered across Indiana, each meant to modernize the state through the attraction and development of high-tech companies. In total, the state has approved $9 million in grants since the certified technology park…

INVESTING: Performance of stock indexes hasn’t told whole story

The S&P 500 finally broke out of its seven-month trading range, and there are stories coming out that the bull market is on again. To us, the bull market never left. It all depends on your perspective. Since the late 1990s, the structural makeup of the major averages has served to mask the underlying action and confuse the average and professional investor alike. By the spring of 1998, the vast majority of stocks on both the New York Stock Exchange…