The IBJ Podcast with Mason King

Independent bookstores have been on the retail death watch for a few decades now. But, as one American author might put it, reports of their impending demise have been greatly exaggerated. For many, the recipe for success is local ownership, strict attention to local needs and concerns and calendars packed with special events to help create a sense of community. This is what Tiffany Phillips has f...

Coming after the baby boomers, Generation X is often referred to as “the forgotten generation,” the self-reliant generation and perhaps the last free-range generation. Today, you certainly could argue that it's  becoming the financial-panic generation. The first Gen Xers hit the workforce right around the time pensions gave way to 401(k) accounts with self-directed invested assets. Recent studies...

Nearly one year ago—July 1, 2024—the urban university in downtown Indianapolis known as IUPUI—or Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis—officially split into two separate campuses. This created Indiana University Indianapolis, a standalone campus in the IU system, and Purdue University in Indianapolis, which is considered an extension of Purdue’s main campus in West Lafayette. IU Ind...

Indianapolis-based housing developer Onyx + East recently scored a three-peat on IBJ’s annual list of fast-growing companies—all of which were on the watch of CEO Kelli Lawrence. She took the top job in 2019, when its annual revenue was about $19 million. By 2024, its annual revenue had climbed to $90 million—a nearly 375% increase over five years.   Founded in 2015 as an offshoot of Indianapolis-...

Doug Boles already had his dream job as president of Indianapolis Motor Speedway since 2013. Then Roger Penske, owner of both IMS and the IndyCar Series, asked him to be president of IndyCar following the departure of Jay Frye in February. The pitch: Boles would retain his first job while also taking on the second. “It wasn’t something that I expected,” Boles says in this week’s edition of the IBJ...

With an estimated value of $4.8 billion, the Indianapolis Colts franchise is arguably the best-known family-owned business in Indiana. While we reflect on the passing of team owner Jim Irsay, who had significant influence on building the physical plant and identity of modern Indianapolis, we have the luxury of knowing that three more Irsays are in a position to continue that work and stewardship o...

The week between qualifying for the Indianapolis 500 and the actual race is usually pretty quiet from a news perspective. But there’s nothing usual about the last week in this year’s Month of May. Major penalties assessed to two cars owned by Team Penske—including the car driven by two-time defending champion Josef Newgarden—inflamed long-running concerns about Roger Penske’s ownership of both the...

You may have become so used to them that you no longer notice, but snaking through downtown Indianapolis’ northwest quadrant are the remains of a revolutionary public transit system that transported riders on elevated tracks 30-feet high. It was called the People Mover, developed for $44 million by Clarian Health Partners, the hospital system now known as Indiana University Health. From its launch...

These are uncertain times for the U.S. economy. We’re in a grace period for many of the Trump administration’s promised tariffs on dozens of trading partners. U.S. consumer confidence plunged again in April, hitting its lowest level since October 2011. First-quarter gross domestic product for the U.S. hit negative territory for the first time since the first quarter of 2022. On May 7, the Federal...

In the early hours of Friday, April 25, Indiana legislators passed a $46.2 billion budget for state expenses over the next two years—specifically, from July 1, 2025, to June 30, 2027. Legislators knew going in that state revenue to fund the budget would be tight, and they got a nasty revenue forecast with about a week to go in the session. The last week of a budget-writing session is usually prett...

Any day now, a federal judge is expected to give final approval to a $2.8 billion settlement of three antitrust lawsuits that could dramatically alter the landscape of college sports. And given the tumult since the creation of the transfer portal and name, image and likeness opportunities for athletes, that’s saying something. In addition to awarding damages to athletes over the last decade who lo...

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 UCo...

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 U...

In this era of online entertainment, you could switch to a steaming service this very second and watch one of many classic movies filmed in Indiana. You would be hard-pressed to find many movies and TV shows that recently were filmed in Indiana—even those where the stories are set in Indiana. Other states, including several of our immediate neighbors, have been much more aggressive than Indiana in...

Neelay Bhatt was born in Mumbai, India, and didn’t move to Indiana until 2006, after he finished a graduate degree in sports administration. But he found a home here because he speaks the language of sports and developed a strong network of local sports executives. In 2023, he founded a consultancy in Carmel that focuses in part on master planning, strategic planning and business planning, which i...

If you’re of a certain age—or you anticipate being of a certain age—and you’ve been keeping up with the news lately, there’s a lot out there that can trigger your anxiety. Today we’re going to talk about Social Security. As you likely know, Social Security provides a modest amount of money every month to retirees from a fund that collects payroll taxes on those who are still working. Here’s the fi...

Joey Graziano was an executive vice president for the NBA with global responsibilities when he began working with Pacers Sports & Entertainment on the 2024 NBA All-Star Weekend in Indianapolis. The way he tells it, Graziano soon became convinced that the Indiana Pacers, Indiana Fever and the city of Indianapolis on the whole presented enormous potential for growth. Six months ago, he left the NBA...

Scott Lingle grew up in Indianapolis with parents who were always looking for ways to bring in extra money and eliminate debt. Their entrepreneurial pursuits included flipping more than a dozen houses and rehabilitating a host of other products for resale. Scott Lingle knew early on that he wanted to be in sales. After a distinguished career in the insurance industry, he took a big entrepreneurial...

Based in Indianapolis, the Schahet family has been managing and developing hotels since the 1960s. The family firm Schahet Hotels currently has nine properties in its portfolio, mostly in central Indiana, with a 10th hotel under construction in Muncie and an 11th in the final planning stages. There’s still room in the lodging industry for mom-and-pop hoteliers—although in this case it was father a...

Indiana has been a national leader in historic preservation for decades. Hoosiers have a strong record for studying, cataloguing and saving homes, churches, farms, factories, covered bridges, monuments, courthouses, hotels, libraries and even entire commercial districts and neighborhoods deemed to have historic value. Since being founded in 1960, the nonprofit group Indiana Landmarks has promoted...

Podcast listeners might remember about three months ago when regular guest Pete the Planner predicted that President Donald Trump’s plans for tariffs could have a pronounced effect on some elements of Indiana’s economy. Trump wasted little time once his second term began last month, imposing or thratening to impose a barrage of tariffs on many of America’s trading partners—and in particular Canada...

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 fore...

Founded in central Indiana, Marsh Supermarkets Inc. at its peak operated well over 100 stores, with a critical mass in the nine-county Indianapolis metro area. In 2017—11 years after a private equity firm took ownership—just 63 stores remained. Marsh declared bankruptcy in May 2017. From those 63 stores, Marsh closed the majority and sold 26 to Kroger and Needlers. That left a lot of cavernous ret...

It’s time to unpack the latest developments in Mayor Joe Hogsett’s plan to establish a Major League Soccer team in downtown Indianapolis. Among other things, the team needs a stadium to play in. The city earmarked about 16 acres in the southeast quadrant of the Mile Square and held discussions with MLS officials. We were left with a cliffhanger: Can the city get state approval for the taxing distr...

The official release date of this episode is Jan. 20, which not coincidentally is Inauguration Day. President Trump will outline his vision for second term, but we already have a sense of what to expect in terms of economic policy. Four of the biggest themes are prioritizing tax cuts, decreasing regulation in several major industries, increasing tariffs on imported goods from trading partners Mexi...