The IBJ Podcast

Pete The Planner on the new rules for saving money

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.

 

At Legislature’s midpoint, which bills survived and which bills are toast?

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.

 

Is downtown safe? Ask two business owners who reached different conclusions.

One of the most persistent questions about downtown Indianapolis since its 1980s resurgence has been, “Is downtown safe?” In the Feb. 17 issue of IBJ, reporters  Mickey Shuey and Taylor Wooten presented statistics for violent and nonviolent crime indicating that downtown remains one of the city’s safest areas, in particular in terms of crimes per capita.

Here’s the rub: Statistics often don’t matter as much as perception. And good luck quoting statistics to someone who has been the victim of a crime. Since safety is a prime concern of business owners and executives whose operations are based downtown, IBJ Podcast host Mason King spoke to two entrepreneurs who have drawn different conclusions about downtown safety and made very different decisions about their downtown operations.

Greg Harris is the founder of Backhaul Direct, and Andrew Elsener is a co-founder of Spot (formerly known as Spot Freight). Harris decided to pack up and relocate Backhaul Direct’s offices to Fishers after being attacked downtown and hearing other employee concerns about safety. Meanwhile, Elsener decided to open an additional office downtown—although he has concerns about incidents of theft and the shaky state of some downtown infrastructure. In fact, Elsener recently moved his entire family to the Mile Square, just a block north of Monument Circle.

The IBJ Podcast is brought to you by Taft.

 

Downtown fixture Wheeler Mission on verge of big transition

Wheeler Mission has been an integral part of downtown for more than 100 years and is intrinsically linked to quality of life issues and downtown’s image. It’s now in the middle of its first leadership transition in 33 years.

When Rick Alvis became president and CEO in 1990, Wheeler Mission had 17 employees and an annual budget of about $700,000. Today, it has about 200 employees and an annual budget of nearly $20 million. On any given night, it provides shelter for about 550 people, which is about a third of all people experiencing homelessness in Indianapolis. And it’s widely known for its shelter services—to the chagrin of some downtown residents—although those services account for just one spoke in a four-pronged strategy to help men, women and children get the basic services they need, acquire job skills, move to stable housing and eventually become self-sufficient.

Now 70 years old, Alvis is retiring soon and helping ease the transition for his successor, Perry Hines, who became Wheeler’s chief development officer in 2021. In this week’s edition of the IBJ Podcast, Alvis and Hines discuss Wheeler’s evolution over the last three decades, perceptions of Wheeler in the community, perceptions of the homeless population downtown in recent years and why they think it’s important that Wheeler remain based downtown.

The IBJ Podcast is brought to you by Taft.

 

 

He stitched handbags in his Irvington basement, and now it’s a $1M business

In his mid-20s, Christian Resiak decided to learn how to hand-stitch leather handbags. He went to thrift stores, bought all of the leather jackets he could find and set up a workspace in his basement. He sold his first bag on Etsy within a month. He called his fledgling company Howl + Hide, partly in reference to his talkative Siberian Husky. Eight years later, Resiak has built Howl + Hide into a million-dollar business with 17 employees without the help of any investors or bank financing.

Howl + Hide’s flagship location in Fountain Square doubles as its main retail site—where it sells a wide variety of handbags, tote bags, duffels, keychains and wallets—and its main production facility. But that will change in the near future as Resiak plans to at least double his employee base and double—maybe triple—his sales this year, with some partnerships with national brands on the way. In conversation with podcast host Mason King, Resiak details the process of building the business from scratch and his grand plan to become a global brand.

The IBJ Podcast is brought to you by Taft.

She went from a master’s in social work to tech firm CEO

Amy Brown is the founder and CEO of Indianapolis-based Authenticx Inc., one of the hottest technology firms the state. Despite the national slowdown in venture capital funding in 2022, Authenticx raised $20 million just before the end of the year. That’s almost $30 million total since Brown founded the firm in 2018, which speaks to investor confidence in the idea behind Authenticx as well as the management team’s level of experience and ability to execute.

But Brown took a very unusual route to becoming a first-time entrepreneur in her early 40s. As an undergrad at Indiana University, she earned a bachelor’s degree in human development and family studies. She then earned a master’s of social work in policy and program administration. She had several jobs with a focus on health care policy and health insurance programs. Before deciding to take the leap to create Autheticx, she was the chief operating office for a Carmel-based travel insurance firm.

It was there that the idea for Authenticx took shape: A company that could collect all of the feedback that health care companies get from their clients and suss out major weaknesses in the customer experience. The health care companies, such as pharmaceutical firms, insurers or medical care providers, could then use all of the data about their customers and their concerns to improve the bottom line.

In this week’s edition of the IBJ Podcast, Brown discusses what it took to bootstrap Authenticx and get it off the ground, including her desire to inspire her four children. She also sheds light on the experience of persuading venture capitalists to invest in Authenticx, including one distinction in her presentations that she said was invaluable.

The IBJ Podcast is brought to you by Taft.

A look back at celebrated Indy jazz guitarist Wes Montgomery

Celebrated jazz guitarist Wes Montgomery was born 100 years ago in Indianapolis and spent much of his career here, recording and performing on Indiana Avenue, sometimes with his brothers and often with some of the greatest jazz, soul and even pop musicians of his generation.

Montgomery died in 1968 at just 45 years old. But during his relatively short career, he won two Grammy Awards and was routinely selected as the top guitarist in Down Beat magazine polls, five times by critics in the 1960s and four times by readers.

We’re turning today’s episode of the podcast over to IBJ arts writer Dave Lindquist for an exploration of the ways that Wes Montgomery was an innovator of jazz guitar, why fellow guitarists continue to find inspiration in his playing 55 years after his death and how he was one of many world-class musicians to emerge from the Indiana Avenue jazz scene in the 1940s and ’50s.

Joining Dave for the conversation are Rob Dixon, a saxophone player and artistic director of the Indianapolis Jazz Foundation. And Lasana Kazembe, a poet, teaching artist and assistant professor of education at IUPUI.

Rob and Lasana will celebrate Montgomery’s legacy during a May 13 special event at The Cabaret, where Kazembe serves as the venue’s first artist in residence. The event is titled “In Our Own Sweet Way: Honoring the Artistic Legacy of Wes Montgomery.”

 

The IBJ Podcast is brought to you by Taft.

Internet banking pioneer Becker has bucket list but isn’t going anywhere

David Becker is considered one of the godfathers of the Indiana technology ecosystem, having started and sold several tech firms over the past four decades. But he’s probably best known for his current effort, which broke new ground in an entire tech sector. In 1999, he launched First Internet Bank of Indiana, an online-only bank that offered typical bank services without needing to maintain any physical branches.

First Internet Bank recently passed $4 billion in assets. Becker is 69 years old and says he has no plans to hand over the reins of CEO and chairman, given that developing new products and services for the bank scratches his entrepreneurial itch. In this week’s edition of the IBJ Podcast, Becker has a wide-ranging conversation with host Mason King, jumping from his motorcycle-trip bucket list to what he’s done to make the bank’s new headquarters in Fishers attractive to employees while the corporate world wrangles with the trend of working from home.

The IBJ Podcast is brought to you by Taft.

 

Jeff Wood’s white-knuckle ride from F-16 pilot to head of Tom Wood Automotive

Tom Wood Automotive Group is one of the best-known family businesses in central Indiana, with more than a dozen car dealerships and 1,000 employees. But relatively few people have heard of Jeff Wood, who took over the company after Tom Wood, his father, died from lung cancer in 2010.

Jeff Wood grew up in central Indiana and worked in the family business for a while, but he found his calling in the United States Air Force. He served for 20 years as a combat pilot who flew F-16s. As nerve-wracking as it might be to fly an armed aircraft at 1,400 miles per hour at an altitude of 40,000 feet, Jeff Wood wasn’t entirely prepared for the white-knuckle ride of taking over a huge family business at the request of his father.

It's been more than a dozen years since Jeff Wood became company president, and he has used that time to diversify Tom Wood Automotive Group—often following his own interests to see where they lead. In this week’s edition of the IBJ Podcast, he discusses his dad, flying F-16s and the hair-raising transition to company leader in 2010. It’s been a tough year for the car sales industry, and Wood provides an insider’s look and a sense of how the group is trying to ride out the turbulence. And he provides a 30,000-foot view of this sprawling conglomerate and how he has been able to keep aviation in his life—flying as often as once per week.

The IBJ Podcast is brought to you by Taft.

 

Digging into Salesforce’s ‘restructuring’ and what it could mean for Indianapolis

On Wednesday, global tech giant Salesforce revealed in a sparse regulatory filing that it planned to lay off about 10% of its employees companywide. The reason, in a nutshell: Salesforce hired too many people during a recent period of massive growth, and customers now are cutting back on spending in the uncertain economic environment. And speaking of uncertainty, cities with a significant Salesforce presence were left with many questions, since the firm declined to provide any more details about the layoffs than what was in the filing.

The company has about 80,000 employees worldwide, about 2,300 of which work in Indianapolis, where its operations are based in the 48-story Salesforce Tower. Although the company is about as high-profile as you can get in Indianapolis, one suspects many local folks are only vaguely familiar with what the company does here and why it’s an important part of the technology ecosystem.

For this week’s edition of the IBJ Podcast, host Mason King and reporters Susan Orr and Mickey Shuey discuss what they’ve learned so far about the restructuring. It's not just a tech story: Salesforce has revealed, somewhat cryptically, that it also plans to shrink its real estate footprint, which could have serious ramifications for Indianapolis’ premier office tower. It all sounds ominous for downtown, which is still trying to recover from the effects of the pandemic on its urban workforce.

The IBJ Podcast is brought to you by Taft.