Crain's Chicago Business

NOTABLES: Marketing execs stepped up their game in the last two years. PAGE 21

TIKTOK: Channel can be a mixed blessing for business. PAGE 3

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THE CHICAGO FIRE

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THE FIRE THAT DESTROYED CHICAGO 150 YEARS AGO IN OCTOBER 1871 PREPARED THE GROUND FOR THE CITY TO BECOME A LEADER IN ARCHITECTURAL INNOVATION — PAGE 13

The other front-line health care workers

Can the incumbent assessor maintain his outsider cred in his bid for a second term?

BY A.D. QUIG

Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi— the former money manager who scored an upset victory in 2018 as a crusading political outsider opposed by the Democratic establishment—will soon face voters again as an incumbent backed by formidable party figures.

ALYCE HENSON

Kaegi’s role reversal Fritz Kaegi

Support from such power brokers as Cook County Democratic Party Chair Toni Preckwinkle, state party leader U.S. Rep. Robin Kelly and U.S. Rep. Jesus “Chuy” Garcia, along with assorted county board members, Chicago aldermen and suburban mayors, will surely help Kaegi in the See KAEGI on Page 30

Pharmacists are burning out at short-staffed drugstores

BY STEPHANIE GOLDBERG Even before COVID-19 vaccines were available, pandemic stress became unbearable for pharmacist Maurice Shaw.

At the Springfield CVS where he worked, Shaw struggled to keep pace with surging demand for flu shots, answer constantly ringing phones, fill prescriptions and fetch front-end items such as milk and hair dye for drive-thru customers who were afraid to enter the store.

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By October, he could take no more.

“I thought, ‘There’s no way I can keep working here because this is just too much.’ And that was without COVID vaccines,” says Shaw, who now works at the University of Illinois at Chicago College of Pharmacy.

Often overlooked, pharmacists face much the same pressure as other health care professionals on the front lines of the See PHARMACIES on Page 8

YOUR VIEW

HISTORY

Now is the time to address economic inequity.

PAGE 10

Son of slain Black Panthers leader drives effort to landmark his home. PAGE 4

9/24/21 4:13 PM

2 SEPTEMBER 27, 2021 • CRAIN’S CHICAGO BUSINESS

On crime, a glimmer of hope—and politics

I

handle on things, Chicago’s ability to attract people and investment will vanish. In some ways, it already may have.

One obvious solution is to identify what is believed to be a fairly small number of people, perhaps 20,000 or a bit more, responsible for much of the gang and gun violence and surround them with help, from jobs and counseling to education and anger-management training.

“Typically, cities respond to increased gun viowith aggressive ONE GROUP’S STRATEGY IS SHOWING lence policing and more incarceration,” the REAL, EARLY SIGNS OF WORKING. University of Chicago Crime Lab summarized in one Arne Duncan tiptoeing toward a recent report. “However, an exclurace for mayor?—and you have the sively law enforcement response elements of a telling tale about our is costly to the very individuals, city’s future. families and communities already The backdrop, of course, is that bearing the brunt of gun violence Chicago’s long-violent past has itself.” Instead, the lab continues, an exploded of late. We can argue alternate strategy is to identify those about why and who’s to blame, at most risk, many from broken but unless the city—not just its homes and themselves victims of government, but the entirety of its violence at a young age, and show institutions and people—can get a suspect you’d have two reactions if I told you data suggests Chicago’s violence problem might well be turned around for what it would cost to send 20,000 young people to four-year college: Show me the data. And, where can I send a check?

That’s exactly the situation violence-prevention advocates now are in. Stir a little Chicago-style political intrigue into the mix—is former U.S. Education Secretary

them another way.

Ron Huberman, then Chicago Public Schools CEO, talked about such a data-driven approach more than a decade ago when he said he’d identified 10,000 young people most at risk of deadly violence.

CPS focused on other matters after Huberman left, but the idea got picked up by returning Chicagoan Duncan, himself a former Chicago schools chief. His new group, Chicago CRED, has steadily banged on foundations, City Hall and others to fund such a holistic approach.

Partnering with neighborhood groups, the CRED strategy is showing real, early signs of working.

For example, the U of C Crime Lab reports that one of those partners, READI Chicago, in a randomized controlled trial, cut the number of arrests for shooting and homicide among participants by 79% compared with a peer group.

“We have some very promising data here,” READI Chicago Executive Director Eddie Bocanegra, himself a former felon, told Crain’s

GREG HINZ ON POLITICS

editorial board. “We have to solve this now, so we don’t have the same conversation in 10 years.”

The problem is scaling up, says Duncan, with such programs now serving only a small part of the need. Mayor Lori Lightfoot finally is stepping it up with a proposal to use federal funds to boost anti-violence programs by $85 million next year to $135 million, Duncan concedes.

But what’s really needed, in his view, is a cool $2 billion—$400 million a year for five years.

That sounds like a lot. It is a lot.

But, as I suggested above, for 20,000 people, $2 billion amounts to about $100,000 per, roughly the price of a college education at a good school.

And it’s about what Lightfoot wants to spend on police next year.

Asks Bocanegra, “What’s been the

return on investment from the police?” Are murders or anything else down anywhere near 79%?

Adding political spice to this, Duncan’s policy chief, Susan Lee, a former top Lightfoot aide, says a recent increase in homicide clearance rates that the mayor brags about may be due not to better policing but to an increase in the share of homicides amid COVID that occur at home and thus are more easily solved. A whole barrel of spice comes from Duncan. Asked about the 2023 mayoral race, he replies, “I love policy and people. I don’t like politics. . . .I’m doing exactly what I want” at CRED. Hmmmm. No “no” there, is there? The fight to make Chicago safe never ends. Nor does the debate about who ought to be mayor.

This Springfield watchdog is on a short leash

T

his is a time of incredible transition for inspectors general in Illinois. Openings are coming up for the top government watchdog spots in the city of Chicago, at the Chicago Park District, in Cook County government and in the Illinois General Assembly.

But it’s only the next legislative inspector general who will take over the job with both hands and maybe a leg tied behind her or his back.

If the next legislative watchdog is to have any chance at success, Illinois lawmakers really must show they are serious about allowing their government branch to be investigated by fixing the flaws in its authority.

The legislative inspector general is the only IG in all of Illinois who does not have the power to issue subpoenas, and that’s just one of the flaws, notes outgoing Legislative Inspector General Carol Pope.

After 2.5 years of work and repeated attempts to persuade lawmakers to fix major flaws in the workings of the office, Pope, a retired appellate judge, announced she was stepping down by mid-December. She called the office “a paper tiger” after lawmakers refused to make key fixes as part of an ethics package this spring. For years, Pope and both her predecessors, Julie Porter and Tom Homer, have spoken up about problems in the way the office is structured.

Currently, the legislative inspector general first must ask permission to issue subpoenas from the Legislative Ethics Commission, a body made up of four Democrats and four Republicans. That commission

also must vote to publish reports of wrongdoing by lawmakers and it sometimes deadlocks, leaving all of us in the dark about misbehavior in our legislative branch.

But the most significant problem, in Pope’s view, is that the jurisdictions of the legislative inspector general and the legislative ethics commission are not identical. If the legislative inspector general were to find a violation of the Illinois Governmental Ethics Act occurred, she would have nowhere to take her findings to seek redress.

“It’s so fundamental and so in need of change. This is really what creates the paper tiger,” Pope said in an interview. Some lawmakers believe ethics violations that constitute misdemeanors should be turned over to local prosecutors, but Pope said, “C’mon, what local prosecutor is going to charge their local member of the General Assembly?”

And if the legislative inspector general wants to issue subpoenas, the officeholder is supposed to seek permission by notifying the eight ethics commissioners and their assistants, for a total of 24 people. “In the Capitol, when 24 people know something, it’s not secret anymore,” she said. “Trust me.”

The ethics package lawmakers just approved also requires a complaint be filed with the office before an investigation can occur. In other words, if you read about questionable conduct by legislative staff or a lawmaker in the media, the legislative IG cannot do a thing about it unless someone files paperwork.

Lawmakers did make one major

CORRECTIONS In the Sept. 6 Notable Rising Stars in Law section, the profile of Genevieve Charlton incorrectly summarized a case. The corrected profile can be seen at ChicagoBusiness.com/awards/genevieve-charlton.

In the Sept. 20 list of Chicago’s largest hospital systems, the entry for Rush University System for Health should have specified a 2020 net loss of $171.6 million; the year-over-year change was not meaningful.

P002_CCB_20210927.indd 2

improvement this year by allowing the legislative inspector general to open investigations without getting commission approval first. But the other problems with how the office operates only undermine its independence and effectiveness.

The application period for the job is about to close after having been extended once, Pope said. It’s hard to believe, but heartening, that people are applying for this role after all the publicity about how hamstrung it is. Years ago, legislative leaders let the position sit unoccupied for three years until a sexual harassment claim against a senator

MADELEINE DOUBEK ON GOVERNMENT

brought the vacancy to light.

Illinois needs a legislative inspector general who is fully empowered to do the job with a nonpoliticized legislative ethics commission, or other body, also fully empowered to sanction those found guilty of unethical or corrupt behavior. And all those rulings

BE

should be public. It’s long overdue.

“You want the public to have trust and confidence in their legislators,” Pope said.

Madeleine Doubek is executive director of Change Illinois, a nonpartisan nonprofit that advocates for ethical and efficient government.

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CRAIN’S CHICAGO BUSINESS • SEPTEMBER 27, 2021 3

Ready for heat price shock, Chicago?

Soaring natural gas prices will boost your tab, but that’s not the only factor

Cassie Krepel, owner of hair salon Little Broken Things, wonders how many of her new customers are here to stay.

THE TWO FACES OF TIKTOK Why the popular social media channel is confounding small-business owners TIKTOK VIDEOS can be like striking gold for a small-business owner. Or not. Some videos send waves of customers to a store, but others might not send any. The wide fluctuations have small businesses around Chicago grappling with how to manage a powerful but fickle advertising channel.

Should they add staff and resources to handle the business generated by a popular video, or sit tight and protect themselves against the downside of a flop?

“It’s so unpredictable,” says Yasmeen Alzate, co-owner of handmade apparel company Unico Threads. “You can have a great month where you

made enough to support yourself and your partner and your business and everything’s great, but let’s say next month there’s no orders and there’s no way for you to know what’s going to happen.”

As a result, Alzate isn’t sure of when to hire a new employee or invest in a new machine to increase production capacity. After a year of posting on TikTok, she knows that every 10,000 views she gets on a video can drive about one purchase. The last video she posted on TikTok that went viral garnered 260,000 views and drove more than 200 orders.

See TIKTOK on Page 34

JOHN R. BOEHM

BY STEVE DANIELS

BY ALLY MAROTTI

“TIKTOK COMES AND TIKTOK GOES. AND VERY QUICKLY ALL OF THAT EXCITEMENT FADES AWAY.” Tim Calkins, professor of marketing, Northwestern University

When it comes to the cost of staying warm, brace for a winter of discontent.

Natural gas prices are at their highest levels since the winter of 2008-09—double what they were last winter. Gas utilities in the area project that heating bills from November through March will be 35% to 50% higher than last season.

For the average Chicago household, assuming normal winter weather, the five-month heating bill will be around $938, or $188 a month on average, according to a Crain’s analysis, using data from Peoples Gas combined with gasprice futures. The projection jibes with what Peoples anticipates, a spokeswoman said.

That would be a 35% increase over last year’s average household gas bill over the official five-month heating season of $693, or $139 a month.

The increase is expected to be higher in the suburbs. Nicor Gas projects a five-month heating bill for the average household in its vast suburban territory of $674, or $135 a month. That’s up 48% from $455 last season.

These bills may come as a shock to residents, but this situation has been years in the making with no shortage of warnings. Peoples, which serves the city of Chicago, and Nicor both are charging far more than they used to for delivering the fuel to homes and businesses. That’s thanks to unprecedented infrastructure spending, which they recover from ratepayers and on which they profit. Historically low gas prices over the last several years—utilities don’t profit on commodity purchases See HEATING on Page 34

Commercial loans in Illinois have dropped 25% for Cincinnati-based Fifth Third since its 2019 buyout of Chicago’s MB Financial. Deposits have flatlined, too.

BY STEVE DANIELS It’s the age-old story in Chicago banking. One bank buys another and customers unhappy with the change seek out alternatives, undermining the rationale for the deal in the first place.

Executives of Chicago-based

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First Midwest, whose shareholders on Sept. 16 approved the bank’s pending $2 billion sale to Evansville, Ind.-based Old National, say they won’t fall prey to the same dynamic.

But results from recent bank deals in the market suggest it may be an uphill battle. Exhibit

A is Fifth Third. More than two years after its $3.6 billion buyout of Chicago’s MB Financial—a deal that Fifth Third said made Chicago its most important market in an 11-state footprint—the Cincinnati-based bank’s commercial loan balances in Illinois have fallen 25% from the end of

2019 to the second quarter of 2021, according to Securities & Exchange Commission filings.

In addition, Fifth Third was the only bank out of the top 13 in the six-county area to show a decline in local deposits in the year that ended June 30, according to Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. data. In the market overall, deposits rose 10%, See FIRST MIDWEST on Page 8

JOHN R. BOEHM

A cautionary tale for First Midwest Bank

9/24/21 4:23 PM

4 SEPTEMBER 27, 2021 • CRAIN’S CHICAGO BUSINESS

ON BUSINESS

O’Hare needs to satisfy customers

A

In short, the project would give O’Hare the 21st-century capabilities needed to compete with airports that regularly trounce it in customer satisfaction surveys.

Last year’s plunge in air traffic brought predictions that business travel won’t return to pre-pandemic levels, causing some to wonder if the project would, or should, go forward as planned.

But Chicago Department of Aviation Commissioner Jamie Rhee assured my colleagues Greg Hinz and John Pletz in July that O’Hare 21 remains on track for a scheduled completion date of 2028.

That’s good news. Stopping or scaling down the project now would be a mistake. In fact, the uncertainty surrounding postCOVID air travel demand only increases the urgency of improving the customer experience at O’Hare.

Competition intensifies when demand slackens, and customer satisfaction becomes a more important differentiating factor. If business people really do fly less often, they may become choosier about where they fly. Some may choose to avoid O’Hare whenever possible. After all, PEOPLE TEND TO AVOID UNPLEASANT people tend to avoid unpleasant experiences if they can.

EXPERIENCES IF THEY CAN. And while O’Hare still offers global connections likely that the return to summer unmatched by any airport in flying reminded a lot of travelers why they hated O’Hare before the the central U.S., it can’t assume those connections insulate it from pandemic. competition. Treating customDespite its status as the couners as if they have no choice but try’s midcontinent aviation hub, to do business with you breeds O’Hare consistently ranks near resentment and determination to the bottom for customer satisfind alternatives. Other airports faction. Travelers run a gantlet that covet O’Hare’s traffic offer of frustrations including flight the kind of customer experience delays, gate shortages, cramped travelers are looking for. Minconcourses, long walks between neapolis-St. Paul International connecting flights and a “people Airport, for example, ranked third mover” that doesn’t move. in the J.D. Power survey with a O’Hare recently finished a 16score of 815. year, $6 billion runway expansion Customer satisfaction is a aimed at reducing delays. A worthwhile project to be sure, but glaring vulnerability for O’Hare, a weakness that will only grow as just a first step in a badly needed airports elsewhere upgrade their transformation of O’Hare. facilities and travelers re-evaluThe essential next step is a ate their options. Chicago can’t planned $8.5 billion terminal afford vulnerability at O’Hare, the modernization project that city’s most important economic would address O’Hare’s shortengine. comings and position it for future O’Hare offers connections to growth. Unveiled three years ago, O’Hare 21 would double terminal most major destinations around the world, setting Chicago apart space, easing the crowding in in the competition for business concourses and expanding investment and jobs. A steady passenger capacity 25% to 100 stream of companies cite O’Hare million per year. An additional 22 as the reason they opened offices gates would reduce infuriating or moved their headquarters to tarmac delays while allowing Chicago. more airlines to offer service at But they expect those worldO’Hare. The project’s crowning class connections to come with a glory is a new Jeanne Gang-designed global terminal that would world-class customer experience.

O’Hare routinely falls short of bring international and domestic that bar. That’s why the terminal flights closer together, eliminatmodernization project is essening long, anxious slogs between tial to Chicago’s economic future. gates. nybody who questions the wisdom of spending billions to upgrade and expand O’Hare International Airport should read the latest airport satisfaction survey from J.D. Power.

O’Hare fell to dead last in the latest annual ranking of the 20 largest U.S. airports. That’s down from next-to-last in 2020 and third-from-last in 2019. Although O’Hare’s satisfaction score rose 14 points to 772, it fell further behind the average, which climbed 18 points to 798. O’Hare badly lags No. 1 Miami International Airport, which scored 828 on the survey.

The latest survey covers a strange period in air travel, spanning the depths of the COVID-induced collapse last year and a rebound this summer. J.D. Power analysts say satisfaction sagged later in the period, as travelers returning to airports faced increased crowds and found concessions and other amenities closed due to health precautions and staff shortages.

I’m sure those factors came into play at O’Hare. But it’s also

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Son of slain Black Panthers leader drives effort to landmark his home The two-flat where Fred Hampton grew up in west suburban Maywood is emblematic of two generations of Black experience in Chicago

BY DENNIS RODKIN Two generations of Black Chicagoans’ stories hang over the Maywood two-flat where slain Black Panther leader Fred Hampton grew up.

The first generation is the activist’s parents, Francis and Iberia Hampton, who like thousands of other Blacks followed the Great Migration up from the Southern U.S. to Chicago and found jobs. Second is their son, Fred Hampton, the Black activist killed by law enforcement in December 1969 in his East Garfield Park apartment.

“The contrast between those two is very graphic,” said Fred Hampton Jr., the third generation of the family to live in the property on 17th Street. “Both of those stories come together at this house,” which his grandparents bought in 1958.

On his late father’s birthday in August, Hampton Jr. launched a petition drive to support landmarking the home.

On Oct. 15, the 55th anniversary of the Black Panthers’ founding, Hampton Jr. plans to present the petition to Maywood officials as part of anniversary events scheduled for Black Panthers sites in Philadelphia, Maywood and Oakland, Calif.

‘RECOGNITION’

A petition is not required for Maywood’s landmarking process but is about “recognition,” Hampton Jr. said. It follows work by him and a group known as Black Panthers Cubs on the site that includes a community garden and pantry and an internet radio show called “Free Em All.” “The legacy of the Black Panthers is always under attack,” Hampton Jr. said, “but look what we’re doing here, the same as they were: feeding the people, educating the people, empowering the people.”

The effort by Hampton Jr., his mother, Akua Njeri, and others is a piece of the current movement to landmark and preserve the homes of Black historical figures in Chicago and the suburbs.

Eight homes associated with Black historical figures, including Emmett Till, Elijah Muhammad and Muddy Waters, are at some stage of being transformed into memorials to their former residents or owners.

Part of the motivation for enshrining these figures in their own homes, several in the movement have said over the past year, is to highlight Black history where it happened, not in institutional settings or boardrooms but in private homes. Njeri and Hampton Jr. both say that’s particularly true of the two-flat on 17th Street.

DENNIS RODKIN

JOE CAHILL

Fred Hampton Jr. in front of the Maywood two-flat that has been in his family since 1958.

The Hampton family moved in when Fred was 10.

The Hampton family’s story “is clearly a part of Maywood’s history,” said Tom Kus, the longtime chairman of the town’s historic preservation committee, and, “Their home tells a story.”

But Kus said landmarking the home cannot be initiated by the committee; as in many other municipalities, the process begins with the owners requesting landmark status and filing certain forms, most of which hasn’t been done yet for the Hampton two-flat.

Kus said that when Hampton Jr. and others launch that process, the committee will “certainly take care of it,” although he cannot guarantee landmark status ahead of the process. If Kus’ commission approves landmarking, it would forward the nomination to the City Council for approval. Landmarking does not come with any rights and privileges.

BLACK PANTHERS

In 1968 at 20 years old, Fred Hampton joined the Chicago branch of the Black Panther Party. The Panthers, a Black Power organization founded in 1966 in Oakland, Calif., promoted equal access to food and health care but also gained a reputation tinged with violence because of its embrace of citizens arming themselves for protection against police.

Fast rising as a leader of the movement, Hampton attracted the scrutiny of the FBI’s Counterintelligence Program, which collaborated with Cook County State’s Attorney’s Office and Chicago Police Department personnel on raiding Hampton’s apartment, 10 miles east

of the Maywood two-flat.

“We remember the pain, but we can also remember the delightful moments of Chairman Fred Hampton’s life,” said Njeri, who on Dec. 4, 1969, was in the room with Hampton when a tactical squad raided the East Garfield Park apartment and sprayed at least 90 bullets, to the Panthers’ single shot, killing Hampton and fellow Black Panther Mark Clark and critically wounding others.

While growing up in Maywood, Hampton protested a whites-only policy at a public pool (which was later renamed for him) and a whites-only contest for homecoming queen.

“This 13-, 14-year-old already had a legacy,” Njeri said.

Hampton also had attracted the FBI’s attention as a teenager. The phone line in the Hamptons’ two-flat was reportedly tapped by law enforcement before he joined the Black Panthers.

Stan McKinney, a Black Panther in the 1960s who now lives on the next block from the Hampton’s two-flat, said “a lot of activity came out of that home, Chairman Fred Hampton’s childhood home.”

The building, McKinney said, is a rare visible vestige of the Black Panthers’ efforts to fight poverty and racism in Chicago.

The apartment where Hampton was killed was long ago demolished, as were other West Side buildings where the Black Panthers operated free breakfast and legal aid programs.

McKinney said landmarking the home and elevating “the community’s awareness of what happened there is important, or the generations to come will never know they existed.”

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6 SEPTEMBER 27, 2021 • CRAIN’S CHICAGO BUSINESS

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For nearly $125M, failed condo project reborn as apartments An area developer has acquired Birchwood on Sterling, a 719-unit complex in Palatine that has a messy past

BY ALBY GALLUN An Oak Brook developer has paid more than $100 million for a Palatine housing complex with a complicated history that includes a condo bust, lawsuits and fraud convictions.

Albion Residential said it has acquired Birchwood on Sterling, a 719-unit property in the northwest suburb that has morphed from apartments to condominiums and back again. Albion plans to spend $23 million on a major renovation of the complex, which covers 52 acres near U.S. Route 14 and North Quentin Road, said Albion President Jason Koehn.

Suburban apartment sales are picking up again as rents and occupancies continue to rise and investors grow more confident about the post-COVID future. Albion, which has developed apartment buildings in Oak Park, Evanston and Highland Park, is high on Palatine in part because developers haven’t built much there recently, Koehn said. Birchwood doesn’t face much competition from new apartment projects.

“It’s just a good, solid, upscale suburb and there’s not a ton of new construction,” he said.

A person familiar with the sale said Albion paid more than $100 million for Birchwood, a figure Koehn declined to confirm. At that price, it would rank among the biggest suburban Chicago apartment sales in three years, according to Real Capital Analytics, a New Yorkbased research firm.

The property comes with baggage. In 2006, at the height of the condo boom, a group of developers paid $68.1 million for the complex, then called the Woods at Countryside. It had been a rental property since it opened in the 1970s.

The property’s new owners decided to convert it into condos, but the condo market crashed before they could sell all the units.

A messy several years followed, including legal battles between investors and criminal mortgage

fraud charges in 2015 that resulted in convictions for some people associated with the property.

Meanwhile, the apartment market took off, and developers started hunting for condo properties to “deconvert” into apartments.

With most condos in the Woods at Countryside’s already rented out, a deconversion seemed like the right move for the property. But getting all of its owners on board wasn’t so easy: In 2018, a group of investors sued to block a sale of the entire property for $49 million, arguing that it was worth as much as $70 million.

Cook County property records indicate that Albion acquired Birchwood from a venture led by investor Chase Chavin. In June 2018, the venture took out a $72.4 million mortgage on the complex secured by its units, county records show. Efforts to reach Chavin were unsuccessful.

Albion, led by former executives of Village Green, a Michigan developer, plans to renovate Birchwood’s apartments, adding washers and dryers to some, fix up its clubhouse and pool and invest in landscaping, Koehn said.

“It just needs some TLC from a community perspective,” he said.

Albion expects to generate a return on the investment by charging higher rents. The average apartment in the complex now rents for about $1,200 per month, or $1.35 per square foot, he said. Its current occupancy rate is in the low 90% range.

The company’s other properties, meanwhile, are performing well. Albion Evanston, a 268-unit building that opened in 2019, has been “spectacular,” Koehn said. Its 265-unit Albion Oak Park, which also opened in 2019, hit a soft patch during the pandemic but is now 97% occupied, according to Koehn.

Albion Highland Park, a 161unit project completed in April, is now 98.5% occupied, and the developer is getting ready to move on to second phase of the project across the street that will encompass 89 units, Koehn said.

9/24/21 2:04 PM

CRAIN’S CHICAGO BUSINESS • SEPTEMBER 27, 2021 7

Key McDonald’s vendor close to Fulton Market HQ deal Havi Group is nearing a deal to follow the fast-food giant from the west suburbs to the former meatpacking district and bring what could be hundreds of jobs downtown the COVID-19 pandemic. That urban migration fueled a downtown A west suburban supply chain leasing bonanza until the public management company that got health crisis gutted office demand, its start helping McDonald’s with with many companies rethinking deliveries to its Chicago-area lo- their workspace needs after adcations is following the Golden justing to life with remote workers.

Details of when Havi would move Arches to the Fulton Market District, bringing what will likely be downtown and how many jobs will be based in Fulton Market are unhundreds of jobs downtown.

Havi Group is in advanced talks to clear, and a company spokesman lease around 100,000 square feet in couldn’t be reached. Havi has the 11-story office building develop- about 500 employees locally, acer Sterling Bay broke ground on this cording to tech job search resource month at 345 N. Morgan St., accord- Built In Chicago.

Sterling Bay, which began work on the THE PENDING MOVE WOULD ADD 200,000-square-foot building last month TO AN IMPRESSIVE RUN OF RECENT after landing $100 milOFFICE LEASING IN FULTON MARKET. lion in construction financing, expects to ing to sources familiar with the ne- complete the building in the third gotiations. If the deal is completed, quarter of 2022. A Sterling Bay Havi is expected to move its head- spokeswoman declined to comquarters from 3500 Lacey Road in ment when asked about the Havi Downers Grove, where it leases negotiations.

Havi would join Naperabout 150,000 square feet today.

The pending move would add to ville-based Calamos Investments an impressive run of recent office and Northfield-based Medline as leasing in Fulton Market and con- prominent local suburban compatinue a trend of suburban compa- nies that have made new commitnies uprooting for downtown that ments to office space downtown defined the decade leading up to this year. That’s much-needed

BY DANNY ECKER

positive news for downtown office landlords, many of whom are having to get aggressive with perks and concessions to land tenants with demand still eroding and the vacancy rate in the central business district at a record high.

SUBURBAN HOPES

But downtown’s gain with Havi is a loss for the suburbs, where landlords are hoping the droves of millennials who have moved there from the city during the pandemic will ultimately lift demand for their buildings. Havi is slated to leave behind a well-located, recently renovated building in Downers Grove, the type of suburban office property that has been attracting big tenants more often than losing them over the past few years.

Havi’s lease at the 584,000-squarefoot building, known as Esplanade II, runs through April 2025, according to real estate information company CoStar Group. But the property’s leasing team this month began formally marketing Havi’s four floors in the building as available beginning in September 2022, according to CoStar. That suggests the company either executed an early termination option or bought

out its Downers Grove lease.

A spokeswoman for Denver-based KORE Investments, which owns the 13-story building, couldn’t be reached. A KORE venture paid nearly $129 million in late 2019 for the former Sara Lee headquarters building—which was 97% leased at the time—in what remains one of the priciest deals for a suburban office building over the past three years.

Havi’s pending move shows the magnetism developers hoped McDonald’s would create in Fulton Market when it moved its global headquarters to the neighborhood in 2018. Suburban companies that

work closely with the fast-food giant and are located near its former campus in Oak Brook may want proximity to the new McDonald’s headquarters, potentially drawing them to the flurry of newly built office buildings in Fulton Market.

Havi itself was created through a partnership with McDonald’s in 1974, when co-founders Ted Perlman and Bob Rocque struck a deal to handle supply deliveries for the chain’s Chicago locations, according to the Havi website. Havi, which got its name from the first two letters of the founders’ wives names— Harriette and Vivian—remains a key McDonald’s vendor today.

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8 SEPTEMBER 27, 2021 • CRAIN’S CHICAGO BUSINESS

PHARMACIES from Page 1 pandemic. They’ve been asked to take on more work, playing a vital role in administering COVID-19 tests and vaccines. As they interact with larger numbers of customers, their risk of infection increases.

Some have left retail pharmacies for other clinical settings or quit the profession entirely. Others say they’re not sure how much longer they can sustain the status quo.

“When we had the lockdowns, some people just never came back,” says Garth Reynolds, executive director of the Illinois Pharmacists Association. “Some pharmacies have been trying to replenish those openings since then.”

It’s a big problem for chains like CVS and Walgreens, which are desperate to staff up as flu season approaches and demand surges for COVID tests. Time is of the essence, with the U.S. approving widespread COVID booster shots and the likely expansion of vaccine eligibility to younger children in the coming months.

Deerfield-based Walgreens is looking to attract workers nationwide, offering a $1,250 sign-on bonus for pharmacy technicians hired through the end of October. It’s also awarding one-time bonuses to current pharmacists, as well as to technicians who are or become certified to administer flu and COVID shots.

CVS also recently announced a hiring binge. The Woonsocket, R.I.based chain is looking to fill 25,000 pharmacy and retail jobs nation-

wide, including 600 in Illinois.

“We recognize the tight retail labor market, which may result in some staffing issues,” a CVS representative says. To make sure its pharmacies have “appropriate resources in place,” CVS says it deploys teams to stores that are understaffed, assesses pharmacy hours and makes technology enhancements, among other changes.

A Walgreens representative says: “On the occasion a pharmacist is unable to meet his or her shift, our clinical and safety teams work closely with our field and store leadership to limit pharmacy disruption as quickly as possible. This may require temporary adjustments to the pharmacy operating hours, at which time customers and patients are guided to visit a nearby store location for their prescription needs.”

Neither chain explained how it’s addressing burnout among pharmacy workers.

INDEPENDENTS

The labor shortage is also hitting independent pharmacies. Nearly 90% reported difficulty hiring technicians, according to a May survey of 278 independent pharmacies by the National Community Pharmacists Association.

“Before the pandemic, we already had a lot of stresses on pharmacies,” Reynolds says. “And then we had this massive pandemic where we’ve asked health care providers at all levels to do more

than we’ve ever asked—times 10.

It does take a toll emotionally.”

Of the more than 2,000 pharmacists who responded to the American Pharmacists Association’s well-being index, 30% are at risk of “high distress,” meaning they’re more likely to experience burnout, make an error and want to leave their jobs, among other risk factors.

Oklahoma City pharmacist Bled Tanoe, who declines to name her employer, says she’s thinking about quitting and personally knows about 10 people who left pharmacy jobs in the last three months alone.

“We’re heading into flu season, and nobody wants to be there during that time,” Tanoe says.

“Typically summer is the slow season for us. However, this year we didn’t really have that. . . .People didn’t have time to rest and reset. They say, ‘I can’t keep up this momentum. I’ll end up losing my mind or making a mistake.’ ” Tanoe says she’s terrified of making an error, such as giving a patient the wrong shot or prescription, because she’s overworked and doesn’t have enough support.

There’s a lot at stake for retail chains that are heavily dependent on pharmacy sales, particularly as they reposition themselves as health care destinations with onsite physicians.

For Walgreens, where U.S. retail pharmacy sales account for three-quarters of the company’s $139 billion in revenue, any disruption to pharmacy operations

MAURICE SHAW VIA YOUTUBE

As COVID pressures rise, pharmacists burn out

Maurice Shaw provides burned-out retail pharmacists with comic relief through his RXComedy channel on YouTube. He says he gets several messages a week from workers near their breaking point. “would be catastrophic,” says Morningstar analyst Dylan Finley. “If they’re not properly staffed . . . they could lose customers to the pharmacy down the street, which could fill a prescription right away—or to Amazon.”

Some retail pharmacies already are contending with long wait times or, in some cases, reduced hours due to staff shortages. The inconvenience often leads disgruntled patients to take their frustrations out on workers.

“Usually when a patient comes to us at the pharmacy, they’ve had to wait at the hospital or the lab or multiple doctors’ offices,” Reynolds says. “And sometimes we get to be the unfortunate target of emotional release. . . .A lot of times people treat pharmacists in a way they would never treat a doctor.”

In addition to balancing a heavy

workload, one former Walgreens pharmacist says he was screamed at and threatened by customers for refusing to fill questionable prescriptions for drugs like ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine.

Shaw, who provides burned-out retail pharmacists with comic relief through his RXComedy YouTube channel, says he gets several messages a week from workers near their breaking point. And while none of his former colleagues have quit, he says many—if not most— are looking for opportunities elsewhere.

Shaw foresees more strain ahead as customers seeking booster shots and vaccinations for children under 12 years old flood pharmacies already overwhelmed by their current workload. “Once you put shots on top of that, it’s just literally impossible.”

A cautionary merger tale for First Midwest Bank and many of the largest banks showed increases substantially more than that.

Fifth Third executives paint a different picture. They’re pleased with how things are going in Chicago. In a slide accompanying a Sept.

15 presentation for investors, Fifth Third said middle-market business loan production in Chicago is up 50% this year compared with 2019.

None of that shows up in the numbers so far, though, and the slide allows that’s a “forward-looking statement.”

Fifth Third Chicago market President Mark Hoppe wasn’t available for an interview.

“Chairman and CEO Greg Carmichael and President Tim Spence have both publicly stated their high degree of satisfaction with the performance of the merged Chicago bank,” spokesman Larry Magnesen said in an email.

“We continue to attract and retain talent in the market, and we are growing our new customer base.”

He says 2019 loan data are “not comparable” to 2021 due to “line of business reporting changes and other factors.” The listings of various loan subcategories in Fifth Third’s filings in both years, however, are identical. Asked what the differences were, Magnesen says he’s “not able to share detail.”

Rivals don’t buy it. Two CEOs of local business banks privately

P008_CCB_20210927.indd 8

but independent of each other describe the fallout from the deal in the same terms: “It’s the gift that keeps on giving.”

The shrinkage in Chicago since the MB Financial deal is pronounced enough that on one key metric Fifth Third’s commercial business in Ohio already has surpassed Illinois. As of June 30, commercial loan exposure (meaning credit made available to borrowers, not all of which has been used) in Fifth Third’s home state exceeded $15 billion while Illinois was about $14 billion. At the end of 2019, Illinois’ loan exposure was about $14.8 billion while Ohio was at $13.5 billion.

On that basis, then, Illinois has shrunk 5% while Ohio has grown 13%.

One of the destinations for commercial clients leaving Fifth Third has been First National Bank of Ottawa, helmed by Dan Miller, former president of American Chartered Bank. Schaumburg-based ACB was acquired by MB Financial before the Fifth Third deal, and many of ACB’s former bankers left for the Ottawa, Ill., bank as Miller led a recapitalization of it in late 2018.

Loans at the Ottawa bank, which is in the process of being renamed American Commercial Bank & Trust (not coincidentally also ACB), have more than doubled since the end of 2019—to $816 million from $381 million. Miller, the

bank’s chairman, estimates about half that new business came from Fifth Third.

“Entrepreneurs like certainty,” he said in an interview. “They want their bank to be consistent through time. To the extent there’s uncertainty, doors open a crack, and we get a chance to meet people. That’s all we’re looking for.”

With a focus now on serving Chicago-area businesses, the bank has branched out from Ottawa and opened branches in Lisle, Schaumburg and just recently on Goose Island in Chicago.

OTHER LOSSES

Fifth Third isn’t the only bank showing deal-related signs of losing business. Chicago-based Byline Bank has lost deposit market share in both Evanston and Oak Park after acquiring leading community banks in both those affluent suburbs.

First Bank & Trust of Evanston had $655 million in Evanston deposits in mid-2017, about 25% of the market. Four years later its acquirer, Byline, had just $608 million, or 17%, according to FDIC data. In Oak Park and neighboring River Forest, Community Bank of Oak Park River Forest had $293 million in deposits, or nearly 16% of the market in mid-2018. Three years later its acquirer, Byline, had $288 million, or 11.4%, and had dropped to fourth largest bank by deposits from No. 2.

JOHN T. BOEHM

FIRST MIDWEST from Page 3

The First Midwest name will disappear after its “merger of equals” with Old National.

Byline attributes the declines to shedding higher-rate certificates of deposit in those markets to focus on savings and checking accounts.

“We are proud of our performance to date in both of these highly competitive markets, and confident that we have the right people and plans in place to continue to drive value in each community,” spokeswoman Erin O’Neill said in an email.

As for First Midwest, its type of sale isn’t the wholesale takeover that Fifth Third’s was of MB Financial. The sale is being billed as a “merger of equals” even though the corporate headquarters will remain in Evansville, Ind., and the First Midwest name will disappear.

First Midwest President and Chief Operating Officer Mark Sander

will continue in the same role for the new Old National. He will be charged with hanging onto First Midwest’s commercial customers, as well as hunting for new ones.

In an emailed statement, Sander said he can’t comment on Fifth Third and Byline’s experience.

Old National and First Midwest, he says, “both have extremely successful M&A track records, particularly as they relate to client and colleague retention, and we expect this partnership to be no different.”

The Chicago market will be even more important to Old National than it is to Fifth Third, which is larger and more diversified. The bet that Chicago banking history won’t repeat itself is that much bigger.

9/24/21 4:09 PM

NOMINATION PROGRAMS

to honor any deserving colleague 2021

MILITARY VETERAN EXECUTIVES NOMINATION DEADLINE EXTENDED: OCTOBER 1 PUBLICATION DATE: NOVEMBER 8

Highlighting accomplished military veteran executives in the Chicago area who are currently serving in a senior level role at his or her company and have made significant contributions to advancing the issues that affect veterans within the workplace.

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Top Chicago area accountants, consultants and attorneys, between 40-55 years of age, who are serving in a senior-level role at his or her company and have made significant contributions to advancing their fields.

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Nominate at ChicagoBusiness.com/NotableNoms

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10 SEPTEMBER 27, 2021 • CRAIN’S CHICAGO BUSINESS

EDITORIAL

Something biz leaders can do about crime

hicago business leaders are rightly worried about the surge of crime that’s rocked the city’s neighborhoods and recently spilled over onto the streets of downtown. Nearly every day—and certainly every weekend—brings word of carnage that shocks the people who live and work in this town and further damages our global reputation.

Fortunately, there’s more business leaders can do about it than wring their hands and complain.

Three organizations—Chicago CRED, READI Chicago and Communities Partnering 4 Peace— are working together to reduce gun violence, and preliminary data indicates they may have struck on a formula that works. What they need now, of course, is money. But they need even more than that: They seek partners in the business community who are willing to work with them to provide employment opportunities to people who are trying to turn their lives around.

In a conversation with Crain’s editors and reporters Sept. 23, leaders of these three groups explained that their goal now is to take an intervention program that’s shown promise in pockets of the city and scale it up. What does “scale” look like? Well, it’s believed that there are about 20,000 individuals in the city of Chicago responsible for the lion’s share of the gang and gun violence that’s rattled us all—a fairly amazing observation when you get right down to it. Twenty-thousand people. In a city of 2.7 million. And the people who specialize in violence prevention—from the police to the street-level activists responding to the crisis—pretty much know who they are.

The coalition of violence prevention experts who met with Crain’s argue their method of reaching these individuals has shown major results. Just as an example, preliminary research on the READI program from the University of Chicago Crime Lab shows participants at-risk for gun violence stay

reaching out to at-risk people in their coverage area—a fraction of those 20,000 known originators of potential mayhem—and immersively and comprehensively meeting their needs, be it counseling to learn coping skills, guidance to identify better ways to handle conflict, assistance to complete abandoned educations, or training that prepares them for a job. And that end goal— gainful employment—can put food on the table, provide a roof over their heads and offer an alternative to a life of crime.

The activists reckon it would cost $400 million a year over five years to reach the 20,000-plus people in the city who really need this sort of intervention. That’s a far cry from the $135 million in federal funds the Lightfoot administration has earmarked in next year’s budget to fund anti-violence programs. In fact, as Crain’s columnist Greg Hinz points out, that $400 million investment is roughly what the mayor wants to spend on police next year. Asks Eddie Bocanegra, executive director of READI Chicago, “What’s been the return on investment from the police?”

What Bocanegra and his counterparts need now is for the private sector to seize this opportunity to support programs that appear to be working and could actually provide a road map toward a less violent future for the city. None of them would complain if a business leader reading this now were to write a big check to support their cause. But, in the teach-a-man-to-fish spirit that’s more likely to lead to lasting change, CEOs must be looking now for ways to create job opportunities for successful graduates of programs like READI Chicago, Chicago CRED and Communities Partnering 4 Peace. Employers including F.H. Paschen, Blommer Chocolate and DLA Piper, just to name a few, have already gotten the message. But more are needed. An investment in even one of these at-risk men can yield benefits that go well beyond a company’s bottom line.

JOHN R. BOEHM

C

p U o o

engaged in the program and have 79% fewer arrests for shootings and homicides compared with a randomized control group with similar backgrounds who do not get services from READI. Similarly, a study for Chicago CRED conducted by the Northwestern Neighborhood & Network Initiative (N3) shows the number of fatal and nonfatal gunshot injuries across CRED participants in the Roseland neighborhood decreased 50% and arrests for violent crimes decreased 48% in the 18 months after joining the program. Similar N3 research on the Communities Partnering 4 Peace program finds participants have lower rates of victimization and violent arrests after 18 months in the program.

How do these organizations achieve results like this? By

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YOUR VIEW

Now is the time to address economic inequity

W

hile the pandemic today seems far from over, the questions it has raised around economic equity must be addressed now to set the city up for a brighter post-pandemic future.

The response to the pandemic—and how residents evaluate it—gives us an opportunity to examine how fairly Chicago distributes resources as well as the city’s direction. The Harris Poll and the MacArthur Foundation recently surveyed roughly 1,000 Chicagoans to better understand perceptions of pandemic-related resource allocation and local response.

While neighborhood-level response to the pandemic has largely been seen as successful, a majority of city residents (54%) believe their neighborhood has been negatively impacted. Our polling can be used as a benchmark for decision-makers as the city enters the next stage of recovery.

Pandemic stresses and veins of disquiet could signal problems down the road. More than 1 in 5 Chicago-area residents (21%), for example, sought emergency food supplies during the pandemic, a level of food insecurity which recently led Mayor Lori Lightfoot to appoint the city’s first food equity policy lead. Significant numbers of area residents also sought mortgage or utility assistance (15%) and loan forgiveness or payment pauses (15%).

Many Chicago residents cannot shake the sense that their communities are neglected. More than half (52%) said their neighborhoods are overlooked when government agencies, businesses and other groups make local investments. This sense of inferior treatment is reflected by the fact that Chica-

Kristen Mack is managing director of communications of the John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

William Johnson is John Palfrey is CEO of the Harris president of the Poll.

John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

goans believe getting financial help during the pandemic— unemployment benefits or mortgage assistance—took more effort here than other U.S. cities.

Another example: Chicago-area residents believe that the cost of living is rising faster in their communities than in others. And while nearly 4 in 5 Chicago-area residents believe city government ought to be responsible for providing resources to communities, only 47% say their neighborhood receives adequate support—and that figure is lower, 42%, among city residents.

A festering sense that others are getting a better deal can

corrode a sense of community. If all politics is local, as the aphorism holds, Chicago has the seeds of a crisis.

These problems remain in early stages, however, and our survey also illuminates three solutions local and state leaders can use to nip these problems in the bud.

First, leaders should meet Chicagoans where they are, understanding how concerns differ. While the issue most residents say impacts their neighborhoods is public safety (28%), those who live in Chicago are much more likely to cite it (50%) than suburbanites (16%). While city dwellers say safety is the top issue (31%), suburbanites say it’s the struggling economy (15%). One area where everyone agrees: 83% say high property taxes hurt the local economy.

Second, local leaders should understand and apply the right solutions. Across the entire region, residents want more job opportunities (34%); affordable housing (34%); well-maintained infrastructure (29%); entertainment options such as movie theaters (29%) and restaurants (28%); and public safety (27%) in their neighborhoods.

Third, Chicago’s leadership needs to improve its communication. When we asked about current programs, such as Invest South/West, Chicago Connected and My Chi My Future, fewer than half of residents (43%) had heard of any of them. These major social initiatives reach only a fraction of the area’s population, highlighting an opportunity for local leaders to build trust through civic engagement.

The pandemic has given Chicago a unique moment of self-examination. Now we must act on it.

C

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Write us: Crain’s welcomes responses from readers. Letters should be as brief as possible and may be edited. Send letters to Crain’s Chicago Business, 150 N. Michigan Ave., Chicago, IL 60601, or email us at letters@chicagobusiness.com. Please include your full name, the city from which you’re writing and a phone number for fact-checking purposes.

P010-P011_CCB_20210927.indd 10

Sound off: Send a column for the Opinion page to editor@ chicagobusiness.com. Please include a phone number for verification purposes, and limit submissions to 425 words or fewer.

9/24/21 3:47 PM

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CRAIN’S CHICAGO BUSINESS • SEPTEMBER 27, 2021 11

Crain Communications buys cannabis media firm Crain Communications, the Detroit-based media company that owns business publications throughout the U.S.—including Crain’s Chicago Business—is adding another media brand to its portfolio, this time one focused on the cannabis industry.

Crain announced Sept. 23 that it is acquiring Green Market Report, a digital media company that covers financial news in the cannabis sector. The deal is expected to close Sept. 30. Crain declined to disclose terms of the deal.

New York-based Green Market Report was founded in 2017 by Debra Borchardt, a financial journalist and former Wall Street executive, and Cynthia Salarizadeh, who has a background in public relations and cannabis law.

“They focus on the financial, business and economic side of the cannabis industry, so it’s a natural fit with our other business brands,” KC Crain, president and CEO of Crain, said in a statement.

Green Market Report, which attracts 150,000 page views per month, publishes daily news written mainly by a net-

work of freelance journalists. Borchardt, Green Market Report’s editor, is the only staffer joining Crain’s as a full-time employee and will continue to operate out of New York.

Crain’s portfolio now consists of 21 brands in the U.S., Europe and Asia, including Ad Age, Automotive News and Modern Healthcare, as well as regional business publications in Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit and New York. Crain last added a brand to its portfolio in 2019: GenomeWeb, also based in New York, reports on genomics business and scientific news.

Across its brands, Crain reaches 78 million readers globally and employs more than 650 people across 10 offices.

“Crain is one of the highest-quality business news organizations in the country,” Borchardt said in the statement.

“Their team, resources and respected journalism will make the perfect partner as Green Market Report continues into the future.”

Chief executive officer KC Crain Group publisher/executive editor Jim Kirk

Associate publisher Kate Van Etten *** Editor Ann Dwyer

...

Creative director Thomas J. Linden Assistant managing editor/ Joe Cahill columnist Assistant managing editor/digital Ann R. Weiler Assistant managing editor/ Cassandra West news features Deputy digital editor Todd J. Behme Digital design editor Jason McGregor Associate creative director Karen Freese Zane Copy chief Scott Williams Deputy digital editor/ Robert Garcia audience and social media Contributing editor Jan Parr Political columnist Greg Hinz Senior reporters Steve Daniels Alby Gallun John Pletz Reporters Elyssa Cherney Katherine Davis Danny Ecker Stephanie Goldberg Ally Marotti A.D. Quig Dennis Rodkin Steven R. Strahler Contributing photographer John R. Boehm Researcher Sophie H. Rodgers *** Managing director/ Jill Heise marketing and events Director of digital strategy Frank Sennett Director of custom media Sarah Chow *** Production manager David Adair Account executives Claudia Hippel Christine Rozmanich Bridget Sevcik Laura Warren Courtney Rush Amy Skarnulis People on the Move manager Debora Stein Project manager Joanna Metzger Digital designer Christine Balch Crain Communications Inc. Keith E. Crain Chairman KC Crain Chief executive officer Lexie Crain Armstrong Secretary Veebha Mehta

Mary Kay Crain Vice chairman Chris Crain Senior executive vice president Robert Recchia Chief financial officer Chief marketing officer

*** G.D. Crain Jr. Founder (1885-1973)

Mrs. G.D. Crain Jr. Chairman (1911-1996)

For subscription information and delivery concerns please email customerservice@chicagobusiness.com or call 877-812-1590 (in the U.S. and Canada) or 313-446-0450 (all other locations).

cation

P010-P011_CCB_20210927.indd 11

Joint Venture with Turner Construction Company for EQ Office

Willis Tower Transformation Chicago, Illinois

We see our work through the eyes of the people who will use them every day. Through their eyes, we see places of innovation, industry, technology, healing, research and entertainment.

The result? Powerful structures with impacts that reach far beyond these walls.

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9/24/21 3:32 PM

12 SEPTEMBER 27, 2021 • CRAIN’S CHICAGO BUSINESS

PEOPLE ON THE MOVE

Advertising Section To place your listing, visit www.chicagobusiness.com/peoplemoves or, for more information, contact Debora Stein at 917.226.5470 / dstein@crain.com

ACCOUNTING / CONSULTING

CONSTRUCTION

FINANCIAL SERVICES

HEALTH CARE

LAW

Cray, Kaiser Ltd., Oakbrook Terrace

McHugh Concrete Construction, Chicago

Associated Bank, Chicago

Sysmex America, Inc., Lincolnshire

Latham & Watkins LLP, Chicago

Ray Temple has joined Associated Bank as SVP and head of asset-based lending, commercial banking.

He will be collaborating with internal/external partners to originate and structure asset-based loans and will be responsible for driving the bank’s credit and growth strategy and goals.

Temple brings more than 25 years of experience to Associated. Previously, he was with Chemical Bank (TCF Bank) and has held various leadership roles over his 13 years at PNC.

Andy Hay Named CEO of Sysmex America: Chief Operating Officer Andy Hay will serve as Sysmex America’s new CEO upon Ralph Taylor’s retirement on September 30, 2021. Andy began his career with Sysmex 32 years ago when he joined the United Kingdom distributor of Sysmex hematology products and was a founding member of Sysmex United Kingdom. For the last 21 years, he has successfully led key areas of commercial operations including sales, marketing, R&D, training and operations for Sysmex America.

Matthew Hays has joined the Chicago office of Latham & Watkins as a partner in the Finance Department and member of the Structured Finance Practice. Hays represents asset managers, fintech companies, and financial institutions on a variety of complex structured finance transactions across a broad range of asset classes.

Hays has particular experience with warehouse facilities, asset sales, forward flow transactions, and public and private securitization transactions.

Cray, Kaiser Ltd., a public accounting firm with expertise in privately-held and family-owned businesses, has promoted Deanna Salo, CPA to Managing Principal. In her new role, Deanna will oversee the firm’s strategic vision, with an emphasis on team development and expanding services. She will continue to serve as an advisor to her clients and manage day-to-day operations with the other Principals.

A University of Arizona graduate, Deanna joined the firm in 1986 and was named Principal in 2001.

Sara Fletcher has been promoted to Risk Manager and General Counsel of McHugh Concrete Construction.

Formally Assistant General Counsel for McHugh’s general contracting side, Sara will now lead all legal, risk, and safety issues for McHugh Concrete Construction. Joining the company in 2015, Sara has spent the last 6 years focusing heavily on subcontractual relationships and contract management, while assisting with employment law and insurance claims.

LAW

FINANCIAL SERVICES BANKING / FINANCE Prairie Capital Advisors, Oakbrook Terrace Prairie Capital Advisors, Inc., a leading corporate advisory and investment banking firm, is pleased to announce it has hired Darrell Smith as Vice President. Mr. Smith will advise middle-market companies on employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs), corporate valuation, financial opinions and other investment banking advisory services.

BUSINESS ORGANIZATIONS OCA Ventures, Chicago Fahad Qureshi has been hired as controller of OCA Ventures. Qureshi leads all financial and accounting-related activities, including valuations, portfolio management and analysis, quarterly and annual reporting, as well as several operation-related activities, including maintaining limited partner relations and compliance. Prior to joining OCA Ventures, Qureshi was a Senior Associate at Baird, where he focused on business service and technology investment banking.

CONSTRUCTION SERVICES J.C. Anderson, Chicago J.C. Anderson, a leading Chicagoland General Contractor specializing in interiors, is pleased to announce that the firm has appointed Steve Boulukos to President/ COO. In his expanded role, Boulukos will lead company growth strategy and business development efforts while supporting client relationships.

New talent acquisition will also be a focus, along with continuous internal development. Continuing as COO, Boulukos will help ensure field and office operations exceed all client expectations.

Gresham Partners LLC, Chicago

BUSINESS ORGANIZATIONS

J.C. Anderson, Chicago

OCA Ventures, Chicago

J.C. Anderson, a leading Chicagoland General Contractor specializing in interiors, is pleased to announce that the firm has promoted both John Angelovich and Angelovich Joe Maguire to vice president. Angelovich brings 23 years of experience and will continue delivering precon and operational excellence for clients.

Leading a team focused on collaborative project management, Angelovich Maguire is a top client advocate, ensuring client satisfaction by exceeding expectations throughout the construction process.

Maguire brings 21 years of experience and will be focusing on company growth, innovation, diversification and talent development. Maguire will continue leading his team, nurturing client relationships and optimizing JCA’s role in the post-COVID era.

P012_CCB_20210927_v1.indd 1

Doug McClure has joined Associated Bank as SVP and team leader, commercial banking.

He is responsible for driving new client relationships. McClure McClure brings nearly 15 years of banking experience to Associated Bank.

Previously, he was director–team lead at BMO Harris Bank.

Daniel (Danny) Salazar has joined Associated Bank as SVP and relationship manager, Salazar commercial banking.

He is responsible for driving new client relationships in Illinois and the neighboring markets of Chicago.

Salazar brings more than 18 years of banking experience to Associated Bank. Previously, he was with First Midwest Bank for his entire career, most recently as a VP in their Middle Market Banking Group.

Both are based at 525 W. Monroe.

FINANCIAL SERVICES

CONSTRUCTION SERVICES

OCA Ventures is happy to announce the promotion of Kelley Quinn to Finance and Operations Manager and Rachel Mackey to HR and Operations Manager.

Quinn Quinn oversees HR functions related to finance, acts as a liaison for service providers within the finance function, and manages LP relations while also managing firm events and providing ad hoc support for projects, partners, and Mackey associates.

Mackey oversees the firm’s human resources function. She also manages the firm’s intern program, maintains the website and social media platforms, has been instrumental in updating OCA’s processes and procedures, and provides ad hoc support for multiple projects, partners, and associates.

Levin Schreder & Carey, Chicago

Associated Bank, Chicago

Gresham Partners LLC, announced that Nicole Perkins, J.D., has joined the firm as a Principal, Director of Client Experience & Development and a member of its Operating Committee. Ted Neild, Gresham’s CEO and CIO, commented: “Nicole is widely recognized as a dynamic leader and innovative thinker – we are delighted that she is now a member of the Gresham team.”

Nicole spent the past ten years at the PNC Financial Services Group as an EVP and the Managing Executive of Hawthorn, PNC Family Wealth.

To order frames or plaques of profiles contact Lauren Melesio at lmelesio@crain.com or 212-210-0707

LAW Benesch Law, Chicago Pilar Mendez has joined Benesch as an associate in the Benesch Healthcare+ Practice Group. Pilar’s goal is to provide personalized, efficient, and innovative support and the best possible clientdriven solutions. She assists with all aspects of health care litigation and transactional matters, including legal research, regulatory and compliance counsel, due diligence review, and drafting resolutions and agreements for healthcare clients acquiring new facilities or expanding their practices.

LAW Golan Christie Taglia, Chicago Brittany Bermudez joins GCT as an associate.

As an experienced employment law counselor and litigator, Brittany counsels clients on employee relations, leaves of absence, accommodations, hiring/termination decisions and workplace policies. Brittany defends clients at state and federal levels in litigation related to anti-discrimination and wage and hour statutes. She also has experience with complex civil litigation procedures and general liability matters, commercial disputes and class actions.

Levin Schreder & Carey welcomes associate Mollie E. Krupp to the firm. Mollie focuses her practice on estate and tax planning. Mollie received her J.D. from Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law (2019) and her B.A. from the University of Pittsburgh (2016).

LAW Riley Safer Holmes & Cancila LLP, Chicago RSHC welcomes new partner Abigail Peluso to our Chicago office.

Abbie joins us after eleven years with the U.S. Attorney’s Office for Illinois’ Northern District, where she served in both the Civil and Criminal Divisions, most recently as Deputy Chief in the General Crimes Section. She focuses on Government Enforcement, Investigations & White Collar Criminal Defense work, advising businesses and key executives facing an array of complex legal issues including fraud and corruption allegations.

REAL ESTATE Savills, Chicago LAW Goldberg Kohn, Chicago Laura Jakubowski has rejoined Goldberg Kohn to serve as the firm’s first dedicated knowledge management attorney.

Jakubowski will be responsible for leading Goldberg Kohn’s knowledge and data management strategy and providing legal, technical, market and practical expertise for the firm’s commercial finance and bankruptcy practices.

Previously a Goldberg Kohn associate, Jakubowski most recently was an assistant general counsel and vice president at JPMorgan Chase Bank.

Savills is pleased to share Marty Festenstein has joined the firm as Senior Managing Director and leader in the Workplace Practice Group focused on the legal sector. Marty brings over 25 years of experience, specializing in providing workplace solutions for major law firms. He joins from Nelson Worldwide, where he was vice president and chair of the legal workplace practice. Marty is a noted industry thought leader and dedicated community volunteer, most recently for Partners for Progress NFP.

9/21/21 5:09 PM

CRAIN’S CHICAGO BUSINESS • SEPTEMBER 27, 2021 13

BUILT IN CHICAGO: The city’s architectural ingenuity has been a transformative influence at home and abroad. PAGE 16 RETHINKING RECOVERY: A historian looks back on the city’s rebirth after the destruction of 1871. PAGE 18

THE CHICAGO FIRE

SAVING THE FUTURE: An architect offers solutions to twin crises confronting our built environment. PAGE 19

UP FROM

THE ASHES

CRAIN’S ILLUSTRATION/CHICAGO HISTORY MUSEUM PHOTO

THE FIRE THAT DESTROYED CHICAGO 150 YEARS AGO IN OCTOBER 1871 PREPARED THE GROUND FOR THE CITY TO BECOME A LEADER IN ARCHITECTURAL INNOVATION

MORE FORUM ONLINE AT CHICAGOBUSINESS.COM/CRAINSFORUM: See Crain’s in-depth stories, interactives and guest columns on the Chicago Fire and these previous topics: ◗ Education Loss

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◗ The Future of Capitalism

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14 SEPTEMBER 27, 2021 • CRAIN’S CHICAGO BUSINESS

Burned to the ground, Chicago reached for the sky in its rebuilding

BY DENNIS RODKIN

P013_P020_CCB_20210927.indd 14

Jen Masengarb, architecture historian and executive director of the American Institute of Architects Chicago chapter. tally sound parkland and open space.

EXPORTING EXPERTISE

In a sense, Chicago is rebuilding its primary architectural specialty, high-rise buildings, on foreign shores.

“We aren’t building the tallest buildings here anymore,” Masengarb says, “but we are designing many of them in the places they’re being built.”

Chicago architecture firms like Skidmore Owings & Merrill, Goettsch Partners and Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture are prolific high-rise builders in Asian markets, where the tallest buildings are being constructed. “The deep expertise is here,” Masengarb says.

Although tall buildings didn’t sprout directly out of 1871’s ashes, Tom Leslie draws a straight line between the fire and the path-breaking first tall building, Home Insurance.

Leslie, a professor of architecture at Iowa State University and author of the 2013 “Chicago Skyscrapers, 1871-1934,” says that following the 1871 fire, the New York-based insurer “was one of many insurance firms handling claims in Chicago, but they did a better job of getting money to the

THEN CATH

Adam Rubin, architecture historian and director of interpretation at the Chicago Architecture Center.

One of was St After t

JOHN R. BOEHM

The lens of history has a way of foreshortening things, sometimes making them appear to have less depth or distance than they really do. That’s true of Chicago’s historical lens, focused now on the 150th anniversary of the Great Fire of 1871.

The popular but foreshortened tale of Chicago in the aftermath of the fire has a great city rising almost immediately from the ashes, with architects and others arriving to help rebuild better, bigger and newer. That much is true, but there’s more time between devastation and Chicago’s emergence as a capital of architectural innovation than the tale includes.

One fact that some stories leave out is a second fire, in July 1874, that burned an area south of the present-day Loop that had not been scorched in 1871. That’s the fire that prompted an outright ban on wood buildings and requirements for larger water mains and new fire safety codes.

For another, those tales leave out rampant real estate speculation in fast-growing Chicago in the years after the fire, which resulted in pressure to build higher buildings “to make the land pay,” says Jen Masengarb, an architecture historian and executive director of the American Institute of Architects Chicago chapter.

The city’s—and the world’s— first skyscraper, the 10-story Home Insurance Building, “opens 14 years after the fire,” Masengarb says. “There’s a whole generation of post-fire buildings that came before it.”

Even so, “the fire of 1871 is what Chicago hangs its hat on,” says Adam Rubin, also an architecture historian, who is director of interpretation at the Chicago Architecture Center. That’s in part because it made headlines around the world and in part because it made a dramatic backdrop for the celebration of the city’s astonishing late 19th-century growth rate “when Chicago reintroduces itself to the world in 1893” at the World’s Columbian Exposition, Rubin explains.

But even if the timeline has been collapsed for good storytelling, Chicago’s rapid rise from a 2,100-acre field of ashes to a world capital of architectural innovation taught a lesson that stuck, Rubin says: “We can rebuild.”

In the 19th century, a river was rebuilt to reverse its natural flow; in the 20th century, tens of thousands of African American and European newcomers remade Chicago neighborhoods in their image; and in the 21st century, vast tracts of formerly industrial land on the Southeast Side are being reclaimed as environmen-

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CRAIN’S CHICAGO BUSINESS • SEPTEMBER 27, 2021 15

the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Among the countless owners of workers cottages over the decades since are Jurgis Rudkus, the Lithuanian immigrant at the center of Upton Sinclair’s novel “The Jungle,” which exposed the brutal working conditions in Chicago’s meatpacking industry.

Single-family home ownership is certainly no evil. Yet by embracing isolated houses over multifamily buildings right after the fire, Chicagoans “helped create our 20th century version of suburban sprawl,” Lewinnek says.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

PUSH TO THE SKY

THEN AND NOW: CHICAGO WATER TOWER

THEN AND NOW: ST. MICHAEL CATHOLIC CHURCH IN OLD TOWN

re of go er.

PAUL GOYETTE

JOHN R. BOEHM

CHICAGO HISTORICAL SOCIETY

One of the few surviving buildings from the fire was St. Michael Catholic Church in Old Town.

After the fire, only its walls remained.

P013_P020_CCB_20210927.indd 15

people who made claims.”

Post-fire claims bankrupted 68 insurance firms, according to the International Directory of Company Histories, but not Home Insurance. Its piece of the pie was small—$2.5 million in claims, or about one one-hundredth of the estimated $200 million in property damage—but handling them fast gave the Home Insurance brand a boost, Leslie says.

By the early 1880s, Chicago was such an important market for the firm “that they wanted to build an office here, and that’s how Chicago got the Home Insurance building,” Leslie says. Designed by Chicago architect and civil engineer William LeBaron Jenney, the building at LaSalle and Adams streets is considered the progenitor of skyscrapers because it was first to use an interior skeleton of iron and steel rather than exterior load-bearing walls to support its weight. (The building was demolished in 1931.)

As the Chicago Tribune’s former architecture critic, Blair Kamin, noted in 2019, when the Home Insurance building opened it wasn’t any taller than buildings that were already standing in New York. But those were built in the traditional method, piling stones higher and higher on load-bearing walls. Jen-

PAUL GOYETTE

GETTY IMAGES

JOHN R. BOEHM

The Great Chicago Fire destroyed much of the city in 1871, but a few buildings survived, including the Chicago Water Tower. See how the area surrounding the water tower looked in 1871 after the fire compared with what is there today.

ney’s work was an important departure that removed forever the height limitations that came with heavy outer walls.

Coupled with Jenney’s technical innovation, the artfulness of another Chicago architect, Louis Sullivan, cemented Chicago as the home of the skyscraper. Sullivan showed how ornamentation and an organization into base, shaft and top made tall buildings look modern, instead of like centuries-old buildings only taller.

THE FIRST HOUSING CRISIS

If the aftermath of the fire gradually led to Chicago emerging as an innovator in tall buildings, the immediate need in the days and weeks after Oct. 9, 1871, was for housing—and lots of it.

The fire created “Chicago’s first housing crisis,” says Elaine Lewinnek, American studies professor at California State University, Fullerton, and the author of the 2014 book, “Working Man’s Reward: Chicago’s Early Suburbs and the Roots of American Sprawl.”

Nearly one-third of Chicago’s 324,000 people were rendered homeless by the fire. The first solution, devised largely by politicians representing immigrant communities, Lewinnek tells

After some time—and the second fire—Chicagoans built the skyscraper-packed skyline that came to characterize the city. Success breeds success, and generations of architects kept Chicago on the leading edge of design. Among them were earlier architectural pioneers Daniel Burnham (Union Station), Louis Sullivan (Carson Pirie Scott department store), Frank Lloyd Wright (Robie House in Hyde Park) and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (860-880 Lake Shore Drive).

Later 20th-century firms such as Skidmore Owings & Merrill, Perkins & Will and Studio Gang each helped push Chicago’s skyline to the height of innovation, whether in design, such as Gang’s undulating, color-changing St. Regis tower that is new on the skyline, or in engineering, such as SOM’s “bundled tube” design that half a century ago made the Sears Tower (now Willis Tower) possible.

Yet, as Masengarb says, while Chicago remains a major depository of architectural innovation, its products often show up on other cities’ skylines these days.

Rubin sees that as a descendant of Chicago’s rebirth after the fires of 1871 and 1874. Commissions to build tall buildings around the world often come to firms that built Chicago’s skyline (and the firms that grew out of them, such as Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture, a spinoff from SOM), Rubin notes. The commissions come “particularly from markets that are really looking to establish themselves as major economic

Crain’s, was to build a series of barracks-style buildings to house large numbers fast.

“The native-born elites took over and decided that barracks encouraged promiscuity and idleness and vice, in their words,” Lewinnek says. “They called apartments ‘French apartments.’

They thought if you could see each other’s beds, you might jump into them.”

Thus in the winter following the fire, the Chicago Relief & Aid Society built 8,033 small houses outside the downtown area. A house was a new style of living for many Chicagoans. Lewinnek wrote that they “had been burned out of apartments, boardinghouses, brothels and hotels, but for the safety of their city, the Chicago Relief & Aid Society decided to rehouse these people in suburban cottages.”

Single-family homes existed in Chicago before October 1871, but “I think of the fire as the flash from a camera,” Lewinnek tells Crain’s. “It really exposed how Chicagoans wanted their city to develop, as a city of single-family homes, what they called ‘isolated’ houses.”

Isolated houses appealed to working-class people who had arrived in Chicago from places like Germa- WHILE CHICAGO REMAINS A MAJOR ny, where ownership of DEPOSITORY OF ARCHITECTURAL land was considered a virtue, so the pattern of INNOVATION, ITS PRODUCTS single-family homes with yards, however small, be- OFTEN SHOW UP ON OTHER CITIES’ came popular in Chicago SKYLINES THESE DAYS. neighborhoods, Lewinnek says. That made the city look distinctly different from older centers, the same way that Chiones like Baltimore and Philadelcago was trying to do a very long phia, dominated by row houses in time ago.” their 19th-century neighborhoods.

“When Chicago was creating Only a few of the original cotany number of buildings,” from tages remain standing. The noHome Insurance, the Rookery and tion of building small houses for the Monadnock through the Sears workers caught on, and ChicagoTower and on to Studio Gang’s ans remain fond of the little peakAqua and St. Regis towers, “those roofed “workers cottages” that rewere moments for us to create an main on blocks of McKinley Park, urban identity for us, in the way Pilsen, Ukrainian Village and oththat Dubai and others are doing er neighborhoods that boomed in now.”

9/23/21 4:06 PM

16 SEPTEMBER 27, 2021 • CRAIN’S CHICAGO BUSINESS

City’s building technology remains a major product

The Great Fire required Chicago, a crossroads of commerce, to resurrect itself.

Now it must address the climate crisis with the same energy and ingenuity.

BY CAROL ROSS BARNEY

This article was written by Crain’s staff based on an interview with Ross Barney.

By 1871, Chicago was a small and mighty city, ready to take off, but lacking serious infrastructure— from sewers to roads. Most of its buildings were wood framed, quickly constructed but not very robust.

So when the inevitable fire came, it was cataclysmic. But it created the requirement to rebuild. It wasn’t even an opportunity but a requirement. The city’s leaders had to do something to maintain this burgeoning economic machine.

From day one, Chicago was about trade, the transfer of goods.

It’s about the river meeting the lake.

It’s about being able to move things to this place easily where they can be assembled or butchered or sold.

Chicago has always been America’s most important crossroad.

One hundred and fifty years later, we are facing another requirement to rebuild. And again it’s not an opportunity. It’s a requirement.

We need to build sustainably.

We can’t keep living on our planet without thinking about how our life interacts with other systems. That’s the biggest piece of the story for me right now. People say we’re destroying the planet.

We’re not destroying the planet.

The planet is still going to be here after us. We’re destroying our ability to exist on the planet.

This realization that we have to be more careful about how we live on the planet is much bigger than the Chicago Fire. Otherwise as a species, we’re going to wear out and overrun our environment.

The rule of thumb is that buildings create 30% of the energy consump-

tion and carbon emission, by their operation and by the embodied energy that it takes to build them. So architecture is a really good place to start the rebuilding process.

Of course, this isn’t a crisis only for Chicago, but Chicago is getting ahead of it. Having worked a lot with former Mayor Rahm Emanuel, I know he was an active thinker on these issues, and they’re important to Mayor Lori Lightfoot and to her planning commissioner, Maurice Cox, who I’m working with now.

Chicago has always been a forward-looking place because the fire gave us this opportunity. The practical attitude toward solving problems is a big piece of us. We did outrageous things earlier—raising the city out of the swamp, sending the sewage down the Chicago River and canal system to St. Louis instead of dumping it into the lake we drink from. And that set the tone

that carries through to today.

EXPORTING INGENUITY

Look at Chicago architects. We are exporters of design ingenuity. Many cutting-edge buildings worldwide are designed here.

From sustainable, to high perfor-

mance and energy-efficient, to supertall buildings: Chicago architects are among the leaders.

This isn’t new, the world has relied for a long time on Chicago building technology, starting with balloon-frame high-rises and fireproof terra cotta in the

Supertall and sustainable: The future of skyscrapers buildings that are net positive energy, but we haven’t been able to build any yet. The Pearl River Tower in Guangzhou, China, got pretty close. It produces most of the power it uses. We haven’t built any of them we designed in China because they don’t have the infrastructure to accept the excess energy we could produce. If you produce excess energy, you need a grid for it to go into.

BY DENNIS RODKIN

CRAIN’S: If rebuilding after the 1871 and 1874 fires was the challenge for architects of the 1870s, what’s the major challenge today?

SMITH: We’re looking at sustainability—what’s now called resilien-

Is there support in Chicago for net positive energy buildings?

JOHN R. BOEHM

Chicago architect Adrian Smith has designed some of the world’s tallest buildings, including the 98-story Trump International Hotel & Tower in Chicago and Dubai’s Burj Khalifa, at 163 stories the tallest building in the world.

Smith’s work is not only supertall but often built with sustainability in mind, when possible. At Burj Khalifa, solar panels heat about 37,000 gallons of water a day for the building’s users, and condensation is harvested from the air conditioning system to provide an additional 15 million usable gallons of water each year.

A principal at Adrian Smith + Gordon Gill Architecture since 2006, he spent 26 years at Skidmore Owings & Merrill. His Chicago designs include Millennium Park. In 2009, AS + GG released the Chicago Central Area Decarbonization Plan, a road map for reducing the energy spent by Loop buildings and infrastructure.

Smith spoke to Crain’s about the need for new buildings to minimize their resource use, and how to get there. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

Adrian Smith cy. Ultimately, the need to build sustainably will effect everything that gets built.

Some of that takes us back to things we were doing before there was air conditioning. In the 1920s and 1930s, they were using shading devices—awnings and canopies— and opening windows for fresh air.

Now we can put a mechanical shading device inside the glass, between panes of glass. We did that at the Yard at Chicago Shakespeare Theater on Navy Pier. Daylight sensors cause the glass to tint in sunlight, which keeps the interior from heating up and demanding mechanical cooling.

In the Decarbonization Plan, we said to put more housing in those pre-1950s buildings in the Loop.

They have operable windows,

which work great for residential use.

What’s on the horizon for doing sustainable big buildings?

We want to get to net zero energy, but when you build something new there is always energy embodied in the construction: the fossil fuels used to create building materials, the heat you use to mold those materials. That means you are always starting at a number that is not zero.

So you’ll want to be able to generate power at the source to eat away at the carbon you’re using to build the building and the carbon you’re using in daily occupancy. You want to get to net positive energy.

How close are we to that goal?

We have designed a number of

In Chicago I don’t think there’s support to create large-scale buildings that are anywhere near carbon neutral or net positive, because it’s still kind of a big investment. The payback for a system that would generate energy at the source, at the building, is 18 to 20 years.

Developers are trying to make their buildings as economical as they can because they’re passing along the costs of operating and taxes to their tenants. So until tenants get wise about how much less they would paying over time to heat and cool and light their spaces, the developer has a hard time putting in systems that have high costs at the front.

So tenants should be saying they want more sustainable office buildings?

They are beginning to understand that. When they go around and evaluate different structures, sustainability is always on their

list. Whether they ultimately base their decision on sustainability yet, I’m not sure.

But soon, the fact that they’re paying more for the long-term operations of a building that is not sustainable versus one that is built highly sustainable and will have less operating costs, soon that will factor into the overall rent structure.

We have a building in Seoul, South Korea, called FKI, Federation of Korean Industries, that generates power from photovoltaics integrated into its facade on the south, east and west sides. It’s generating about 8% of the building’s overall power need.

Is Chicago behind the pack?

I don’t think Chicago architects are, because we’re building these things in other places. But I think Chicago developers are behind.

They’re not utilizing these systems—photovoltaics, geothermal heating and cooling—and it may be because the market is not demanding them. If the market were demanding these things, we’d have buildings in Chicago generating their own power. It would have to get through codes and government mandates and all these other things, but we’d have them. It’s easier for us to do this on foreign soil than it is in the United States.

Why? They’re building for the future.

They’re building landmarks at a time when these things are known.

JIM KIRK PUBLISHER • ANN DWYER EDITOR • CASSANDRA WEST FORUM EDITOR • THOMAS J. LINDEN CREATIVE DIRECTOR • JASON McGREGOR DIGITAL DESIGN DIRECTOR • KAREN FREESE ZANE ASSOCIATE CREATIVE DIRECTOR • SCOTT WILLIAMS COPY CHIEF

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late port mor build has a expo Fo by m

o surchi-

has hicarting rises the

Carol Ross Barney late 19th century. Chicago’s exports are greener now, taller and more innovative. Innovation in building technology and design has always been something we’ve exported.

For every challenge undertaken by my design studio, we start by

JOHN R. BOEHM

CRAIN’S CHICAGO BUSINESS • SEPTEMBER 27, 2021 17

thinking about how this project can serve to help rehabilitate our city and our planet.

The Chicago Riverwalk is an important example that shows how we think about Chicago can and must change.

In 2000 when we started that

project, I had some of the same prejudices that all Chicagoans had about the river at that point: It’s dirty and not a very desirable place to be. The history of the Chicago River was an open sewer, and it hadn’t been highly thought of for a while. But the other things that were happening in the city were really important to the success of the Riverwalk.

Going back to 1970, less than 10 species of fish could be found in the Chicago River. Today, you’ll find more than six times as many. That’s not because of the Riverwalk, although we think we helped the river downtown. It was the product of multiple actors from the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District to Friends of the River and more. The whole river environment has improved, making it a great space for people.

Another project that tells the story of sustainability is the McDonald’s flagship we designed in River North. It opened in 2018, with 1,000 solar panels on the roof, a floating interior garden and extensive outdoor landscaping on this one-block site where McDonald’s by right, could have built something much bigger, much taller.

McDonald’s chose to tell their environmental story with it. They wanted to do a responsible job

of building, because it is a really prominent site, both in their history and in Chicago’s.

When they hired us, they just said, “We want a building that really fits this place.” So together we designed a sustainable, environmentally sensitive quick-service restaurant that contributes green space to its neighborhood.

A lot of people don’t know that one of McDonald’s largest corporate goals is environmental stewardship. Based on their size alone, what McDonald’s chooses to do makes a difference.

The biggest project in our office right now is the two satellite concourses to be built at O’Hare International Airport. It’s a project in partnership with Skidmore Owings & Merrill.

The airport is very committed to sustainability, both on this project and on the larger O’Hare 21, where Studio Gang is leading a massive rebuild of Terminal 2 as the Global Terminal.

There is a way to make a green airport, and the steps may seem rather simple and incremental but are absolutely essential. Those steps involve the building enclosure, daylighting and the healthy and sustainable materials we select.

The airport and the Riverwalk are not enough. Smaller projects may

be even more important. For example, we are working with the city and private developer Evergreen/ Imagine to build a new mixed-use commercial and housing project in Auburn Gresham. This project offers opportunity to extend environmental equity to a historically disinvested neighborhood.

Philosophically, Chicago—its corporations like McDonald’s, its architects, its government officials, its concerned neighborhood communities—is ahead in terms of intent to work on these environmental issues. But we can’t afford to rest.

Here we are, 150 years after the Great Fire, facing another existential challenge for the life of our city and our planet. We can’t afford to fail. My hope is that today’s Chicagoans meet this new crisis with the same energy and ingenuity as they did after the Great Chicago Fire.

Carol Ross Barney is the founder of Ross Barney Architects, an architecture, landscape architecture and urban planning studio responsible for many of Chicago’s premiere public spaces, including the Riverwalk. The studio received the 2021 National Design Award for Architecture from the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum.

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P013_P020_CCB_20210927.indd 17

9/23/21 4:06 PM

18 SEPTEMBER 27, 2021 • CRAIN’S CHICAGO BUSINESS

OLD DIVISIONS

Great Fire’s recovery embedded inequalities into built environment I grant sentiment, often disguised n Greek and Egyptian ancient as concern about corruption mythology, the phoenix is among the city’s aldermen, was a large bird that symbolizes the real reason for the abrupt renewal and rebirth. As the story about-face. goes, the bird catches flames By most accounts, the CRAS from the sun and flies across the did an admirable job. However, sky with brilliant hues of red, Mason’s decision raises an imyellow and orange on its wings. portant question: What happens The fire eventually consumes when a city’s elite are charged the bird, yet the phoenix is not with managing its recovery from destroyed. Instead, the phoenix Julius L. Jones is a natural disaster? We know the resurrects from its own ashes, an assistant curabenefits of it, as monied men emerging stronger and more tor at the Chicago used their business interests vibrant than before.

History Museum In the aftermath of the Great and a Ph.D. candi- and connections to aid the city’s recovery: George Pullman and Chicago Fire of 1871, Chicago date in the departCharles G. Hammond used their became known as the Phoement of history at railroad and transportation nix City, having risen from its the University of businesses to transport donaashes to continue on as the Chicago. tions and goods to Chicago; fastest-growing city in the world T.M. Avery and T.W. Harvey used their and the quintessential American city, a fact lumberyards to supply the wood needed codified by Congress in selecting the city to to rebuild homes; and Murry Nelson and host the World’s Columbian Exposition in Marshall Field used their expertise in retail 1893. and wholesale enterprise to manage the The result of the determined effort of distribution of resources. But there were Chicagoans, the rebirth laid the foundation downsides. The CRAS applied its criteria of for the city we live in today, not only in helping only the “industrious and deservterms of the built environment, but also as ing poor,” denying 40% of applications for it relates to the inequalities that are deeply capital aid for those looking to restart their entrenched in the city. lost businesses or start new ones. The orWhile the fire was still burning on Oct. ganization also purchased one-way tickets 9, a group of city leaders and prominent for nearly 40,000 families (about 157,000 citizens gathered at the First Congregationindividuals) to leave Chicago. al Church in the West Division outside of As Chicago continued its recovery, the the fire’s path. There, the mayor, public ofinequalities that defined it would increase, ficials, aldermen and some private citizens not decrease. Rather than use the recovery established the General Relief Committee. from the fire to create a more equitable soTwo days later, however, Mayor Roswell ciety, those empowered to lead the efforts B. Mason turned the city’s relief efforts over made decisions that deepened inequality. to the Chicago Relief & Aid Society, a priWhen the CRAS distributed aid, it treated vate organization led by business leaders. working people with suspicion while going While Mason stated that he turned to the out of its way to assist more “refined” peoCRAS because of its track record of aiding ple. Dissatisfaction over how the recovery the poor, many believed that anti-immi-

was handled would lead to continued unrest and class divisions in the city that would explode during the Haymarket Affair in 1886 and the Pullman Strike in 1894.

These divisions would also define the built environment in the aftermath of the fire. With Chicago’s central business district in ruins, wealthy investors had the opportunity to rebuild. Technological ad-

vances, such as the steel frame in construction, and the desire to maximize space and profit led to the invention of the skyscraper. Now a common feature of urban life, in the last quarter of the 19th century, many saw the massive buildings as eyesores that cast long shadows over the city streets and caused pollution due to the enormous amounts of coal-powered energy they

requ In the a abov fortu grew skyli filed up to

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Flames that still flicker and destroy

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Lloyd Wright and their many hicago in 1871 was a extraordinarily talented colrather ramshackle affair, leagues would mostly build their without a great deal of enduring visions of an ascenarchitectural distinction. While dant new American architecture there was an immediate move to on the destruction of the more rebuild, there was little lamentaexpedient structures that sprung tion for the beauty or distinction up in the immediate wake of the of what was lost. Nor was there fire in the 1870s. a memorable quality to the new There is no question that the construction that followed in Edward Keegan is the fire’s wake, which tended a Chicago architect Great Chicago Fire was a catamore to the efficient than the and a contributing clysmic event in the young city’s history and one worthy of conartful. Very few structures reeditor to Architect tinuing remembrance. But while main from that initial rebuildMagazine. the city and its denizens never ing, as the vast majority of those cease to tout our architecture as a key civic structures were destroyed by developers asset, we still seem to revel in the wanton and architects building what we think of as destruction of our built histories. From the original Chicago school of architecture the utterly indefensible razing of Prentice in the 1880s, 1890s and 1900s.

Hospital in the last decade to the currently Louis Sullivan, Daniel Burnham, Frank

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planned sale of the James R. Thompson Center as primarily a building site rather than a preservation opportunity, Chicago’s zeal for demolition often outpaces our interest in a genuine and enduring architectural legacy.

It’s unfortunate that this seems to be the Great Fire’s greatest continuing role in our city—quietly and almost always unstated—justifying a continuing program of architectural destruction that outpaces any desire to build success upon success.

It enables our profit-driven shortsightedness and posits that progress and creativity require wholesale destruction to take place—a false choice that we make over and over again.

This happens at large and small scales across most neighborhoods in the city. Both the Lincoln Yards and Michael Reese sites

were cleared of virtually all their histories before developers and architects started their new schemes. Even Fulton Market, where a number of old structures help establish a sense of place and context for newer build-

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CRAIN’S CHICAGO BUSINESS • SEPTEMBER 27, 2021 19

NEW CHALLENGES

Climate and housing: Two crises demand attention

A

required, especially during winter.

In a sense, the skyscraper represents the ascendance of commerce and capital above all else. Despite any concerns, as the fortunes of Chicago and its investor class grew, so too did the buildings across the skyline. A new class of white-collar workers filed into these expansive buildings, moving up to higher floors as they climbed the

company ladder. For the working poor, they were left behind, and below, to look up as the city grew upward.

After the fire, city officials, real estate developers, large corporations and business leaders constructed a new city with the old divisions and inequities embedded into the built environment, a fate that we should not repeat in our current recovery moment.

ings, has recently seen some remarkable and irreplaceable silo structures erased to enable easier and far less compelling new construction. And building by building, we see many older residential structures throughout the

city demolished for bloated and far less interesting new homes.

We need to encourage better architecture and urbanism via means that are primarily additive and accretive, with the subtractive means of demolition used carefully and seldom. Let’s stop using wide-scale destruction as a road to “progress.” Those responsible for the physical design of this city need to embrace the rudimentary techniques of improvisational theater, asking “Yes, and . . .” at every step of development.

A new generation of preservationists is intent on saving structures beyond those most remarkable that we consider landmarks, an initiative that implores us to identify and embrace richer and more complex histories than just a handful of standout sites. This fertile endeavor suggests that we need to stop the continuing holocaust that has too often fueled our “greatest” architectural achievements.

It’s been 150 years since the fire. It’s well past time to stop Chicago’s seemingly perpetual lust for the destruction of our built environment.

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Using this logic, buildings s housing affordability can work in better harmony continues its uphill with their local contexts, inclimb against living stead of adding to the climate wages and aging housing stock, crisis. architecture has surfaced as In the Midwest, for examthe reimagined superhero to ple, a building can rely on the combat the housing crisis. strength of seasonal temperaFrom new development ture changes to absorb solar programs like Chicago’s Invest heat gain in the winter and South/West to the C40 Reinrelieve solar gain in the sumventing Cities competition, Jaime Torres mer, adjusting to climate like architecture has once again beCarmona is foundan oak tree shedding leaves come the protagonist to address er and principal of as it approaches winter and housing inequities and other Canopy / archiregaining them in the spring. neighborhood challenges, as it tecture + design, Similarly, if a project site lies was in the modernist era. a social-impact near high water tables, we can Buildings account for nearly architecture firm design substructures to allow 40% of all greenhouse gas emis- based in Chicago. for high waters to pass below sions globally, according to the The firm recently while a building sits on stilts U.S. Green Building Council. released a new like a boat dock. In this way, The impact of greenhouse publication, “Bewe can use design innovation gases is continuing to show tween the Leaves: to advance our housing stock clear signs on the environment. On Housing.” for the next decades to come.

From colossal hurricanes According to 2018 estimates pummeling the South and East by the Institute for Housing Studies to unyielding forest fires burning through at DePaul University, Chicago needs the West, our aging buildings and civil 119,000 units of affordable housing to infrastructure are being tested by climate meet demand. As we address housing change year to year with increased inteninequities through policy and action, the sity. As architects, we have arrived at an simple truth is that to reduce housing opportunity to readapt existing building costs, we must build more of it. Architects stock and generate new housing that is reare challenged with designing spaces sponsive to our rapidly changing climate.

While we seek to activate our city neigh- that can be not only affordable but also contextual to the environment in which borhoods with vibrant housing and other we live. amenities, we can also look at climate While the city continues to make strides response to help us address resiliency in buildings. Modernist pioneer Ludwig Mies in addressing the affordable housing gap in Chicago, we must prioritize sustainvan der Rohe suggested “less is more” when guiding aesthetics and functionality. able building of multifamily housing.

Margaret Garascia of Elevate Energy writes More than 50 years later, we can apply in our firm’s publication “On Housing”: that same phrase to imagine buildings “The added benefits of improved health designed for “less” carbon emissions, outcomes for low-income residents and embodied energy, and more regional greater investment in disadvantaged sourcing of materials and systems. neighborhoods further makes the case for At the turn of the 20th century, Chicago prioritizing the multi-family market for architect Louis Sullivan coined the term “form follows function” as a touchstone for energy efficiency.”

Can architecture rise again in our cities the steel-frame practicality of skyscrapers and be a catalyst for a more resilient, as Chicago rebounded after the Great Fire and became a global leader in design. Now, climate-driven future through housing?

As architects, we are ready for the new in the 21st century, the city’s growth and sequel to combat climate change and our practicality should be focused on addresshousing crisis in one sweep, with contining the affordable housing gap and climate ued support from housing advocates and crisis jointly. I challenge developers and policymakers to help us get there. Are you design professionals to consider a derivaready? tive phrase instead: Form follows context.

Oso Apartments in Albany Park is a Canopy / architecture + design project.

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20 SEPTEMBER 27, 2021 • CRAIN’S CHICAGO BUSINESS

FORGED BY FIRE

Chicago tackled building safety incrementally T he popular understanding goes something like this. On the evening of Oct. 8, 1871, Catherine O’Leary went out to the barn to milk her cow, the cow kicked over a lantern, and the city burned down. Indomitable Chicago rose from the ashes, bigger and better than ever because the destruction led directly to the city’s leadership of the skyscraper revolution and strict building codes.

Not exactly.

The O’Learys and their five children were in bed when the fire began. O’Leary had milked her cows—four of them, as well as a horse and a calf—hours earlier. (All but the calf perished, becoming the fire’s first victims.) We’ll never know for sure just how the conflagration started, but we do know that there were two dozen fires in the previous week alone, any of which could have set off the Great Chicago Fire. The Carl Smith is way the city had been professor emeritus built was the real of English, culprit.

American Exposed dry wood studies and history was everywhere. at Northwestern The vast majority of University and Chicago’s buildings the author of were little more than “Chicago’s boards nailed over Great Fire: The balloon frames. Many Destruction and were jammed closely Resurrection of an together. Even fancy Iconic American downtown comCity.” mercial structures covered with brick or stone were festooned with wooden signs and cornices and topped with wood or tar roofing. There were wooden fences and pine plank sidewalks even in the O’Learys’ humble Near West Side neighborhood, as well as dozens of lumber and coal yards in densely developed areas.

Fire officials repeatedly warned of these hazards, blaming private interests for disregarding the public good. Political leaders ignored calls for more firefighters and equipment, knowing that these required the unpopular measure of raising taxes. So they gambled that things would be fine.

They lost the bet. By the wee hours of Tuesday, Oct. 10, a stretch of Chicago about 4 miles long, encompassing a chunk of the West Side, the entire commercial downtown and virtually the entire North Side, lay in ruin. Almost a third of its 60,000 buildings were gone.

The rapid and total recovery was in its own way as remarkable as the fire. Chicago’s rapid growth paused barely a moment.

Ten days after the fire, a 41-by-82-foot lot at the corner of Dearborn and Randolph streets sold for $50,000, 25% above the purchase price a year earlier. As one real estate publication put it, soon the air was full of “the noise of hammer and trowel.” By the second anniversary of the fire, the new downtown (located in the same area as the current one) extended over some 45 blocks, about twice the size as before the fire. The destruction seemed to prove that Chicago was indestructible.

But bigger did not mean much taller, at least not right away.

Commercial buildings were either the same height or only a few floors higher than the ones they succeeded, and they were still supported by masonry walls. The first building that employed metal framing was William LeBaron Jenney’s 10-story (almost 140 feet) Home Insurance Building, on the northeast corner of LaSalle and Adams streets. But that wasn’t completed until 1885, almost 15 years after the fire.

Raised two more stories in the early 1890s, it was taken down in 1931.

This is not to say that the fire had no immediate effect on the city’s architecture, only that it did not immediately lead to the skyscraper revolution for which Chicago is justifiably renowned. Nor

is it to disparage post-fire commercial buildings. Most are gone, but Chicago is fortunate to have a few survivors, such as the four-story (plus a partially aboveground basement) Washington Block at the southwest corner of Wells and Washington streets.

Nor were the post-fire buildings uniformly better.

Individual investors were more inclined to erect buildings that were supposedly fireproof, but the city was slow in taking serious collective action to avoid another disaster. Attempts to ban wooden buildings angered those who demanded the right to build as they wished. More significant was the opposition of working people, who could not afford to rebuild their homes with expensive materials. As a result, the new restrictions were limited in scope and indifferently enforced.

A second serious fire struck on July 15, 1874, gutting what is now called the South Loop and menacing the rebuilt downtown.

“Every cool-headed observer of the conflagration must have felt that we have paid a light penalty for allowing our magnificent business-centre to be surrounded with wooden rookeries,” the Chicago Tribune angrily observed.

Perhaps so, but the 1874 fire did not prompt meaningful action by the city government. Reform required external pressure. The National Board of Fire Underwriters, based in New York, had already been threatening to instruct member com-

panies to stop writing fire insurance policies in Chicago. Now it promised to carry out the threat unless Chicago banned new buildings with wooden exteriors, required iron shutters on stores and warehouses, reorganized the fire department, upgraded the water system and removed lumberyards from built-up areas.

Other improvements followed, too often only after tragedy. For example, current fire exit doors and signs date to the Iroquois Theatre Fire of Dec. 30, 1903, which took the lives of over 600 people.

This was twice the number killed by the Great Fire, many because they couldn’t get out of the building.

To this day, calls for more effective measures quickly follow every serious fire. The steps to better safety are mainly commonsensical: reduction of flammable building materials; detailed rules regarding the installation of gas, electricity and the machines and appliances that use them; more sensitive and reliable alarms; more sophisticated fire extinguishers; wider streets outside buildings and broader halls and stairways within them; ample and well-marked exits that open outward and plentiful fire escapes; and fire evacuation plans and drills in schools and large buildings. And, on top of this, thorough regular inspections of buildings and responsible human behavior to prevent fires in the first place.

The only fire that causes no damage is the one that never starts.

THE CITY WAS SLOW IN TAKING SERIOUS COLLECTIVE ACTION TO AVOID ANOTHER DISASTER.

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CRAIN’S CHICAGO BUSINESS • SEPTEMBER 27, 2021 21

2021

EXECUTIVES IN MARKETING It would be apt to call the last two years the best of times and the worst of times for marketing professionals.

A stable economy means they’ve marketed their organizations’ or clients’ brands to new domestic and global markets and introduced new products and services.

At the same time, they’ve been challenged by the difficult job of respectfully and effectively connecting with a public energized—and divided—by the pandemic, demands for social justice and calls for racial and gender equity.

The 33 professionals profiled here

rose to the occasion by doing what they do best: Keeping their eyes on mission statements and goals. Proactively listening to consumers. Reinventing, recalibrating and sometimes upending strategies and tactics to address “the new normal” of the work environment.

Doubling if not tripling down on pro bono efforts. Harnessing the power of technology, including AI. If marketing in the 21st century means owning a wardrobe of hats, these executives wear them very well indeed.

By Judith Crown and Lisa Bertagnoli

GETTY IMAGES

METHODOLOGY: Honorees did not pay to be included. Their profiles were drawn from nomination materials submitted. This list is not comprehensive. It includes only executives for whom nominations were submitted and accepted after an editorial review. The honorees demonstrated that they used their skills to significantly advance their organization or their client’s.

JILL ALLREAD

SARAH BARNES

PATRICK BERGNER

CHRISTINA BOTTIS

CARL J. BRODARICK

CEO Public Communications

Vice president, marketing Spaulding Ridge

Chief marketing officer Coyote Logistics

Chief marketing officer Seasons Hospice & Palliative Care

Jill Allread leads a 50-person national, integrated agency that provides full-service communications, digital strategy, and content and executive training to a range of industries. A frequent trainer on crisis management, her experience includes 12 years in newsrooms of daily newspapers, including a stint as metropolitan editor for the Fort Wayne Journal-Gazette. The agency has been recognized by the National LGBT Chamber of Commerce and LGBT Business Enterprise. Allread is on the steering committee for a $20 million capital campaign to build a recreation center in Oak Park for underresourced families, youth and seniors. She also serves on the capital campaign committee for Howard Brown Health Center to raise $15 million for a new youth center for LGBTQ youth and a new clinic on Chicago’s South Side.

Sarah Barnes oversees marketing strategy and sales enablement at Spaulding Ridge, a management consultant specializing in IT strategy, cloud implementation and process improvement.

Her responsibilities include developing and executing marketing and PR plans and budgets, mentoring talent and building scalable systems to measure success. Since joining in early 2021, she’s instituted strategic marketing and sales enablement guidance; orchestrated Spaulding Ridge’s first conference, Elevate21, which featured 19 sessions with prominent speakers; coordinated the launch of new branding and a new website; and served on the DEI committee. Before joining Spaulding Ridge, Barnes was senior director of marketing at Nvisia and director of marketing at Campbell & Co. For 11 years, she was also adjunct faculty at the Loyola University Chicago Quinlan School of Business, teaching digital marketing and public relations.

Chief marketing officer Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Chicago

Christina Bottis is CMO at Coyote Logistics, a global third-party supply chain solutions provider. She oversees a team of 25 professionals that develops and executes the company’s marketing efforts, including its go-to-market, lead-generation and sales-enablement strategies. Recent achievements include producing Coyote’s first global digital summit for 7,000 shippers and carriers; launching the CoyoteGO digital freight e-commerce platform to enable carriers and shippers to manage supply chains digitally in the midst of the global pandemic; curating a COVID-19 content series to help customers navigate market volatility and demand shifts within their supply chains; and developing the “Green Means Give Thanks” campaign to recognize frontline workers and health care professionals. Marketing drove upward of 80% of inbound leads in 2020 and is on track to surpass that metric in 2021.

Carl J. Brodarick is responsible for marketing strategies at Seasons Hospice, an AccentCare company, managing initiatives to boost user acquisition, conversion, engagement, satisfaction, facility and renewal rates for the organization’s 50-plus Medicare-certified sites and 23 hospice inpatient centers.

Faced with COVID-19 implications and the industry’s largest merger, he reinvented key go-to-market approaches and helped fuel annualized growth of more than 10% a year. He was the executive sponsor of the organization’s DEI initiative, which is developing strategies and actions to overcome racial and socioeconomic barriers and bring awareness of hospice and palliative care to underserved communities nationwide. He also serves as a board member for Seasons Hospice Foundation.

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Patrick Bergner has specialized in real estate marketing for more than 20 years. As CMO at Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices Chicago, his team serves more than 1,400 real estate agents and their clients.

Recently, his department rebranded the entire company, launched company websites and opened new offices. Among his key campaigns are “Get Noticed” and “Chicago Strong,” which highlighted the resilience of communities during the pandemic. Before his work with the marketing team at BHHS Chicago, Bergner was an account representative for a print and online ad management software company. He serves on the board of BHHS Chicago’s nonprofit, the Kindness Foundation, which supports meaningful local initiatives in the communities it serves and enhances the quality of life for fellow citizens.

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22 SEPTEMBER 27, 2021 • CRAIN’S CHICAGO BUSINESS

CHRISTOPHER BROYLES

CHRISTOPHER CLEMMENSEN

Executive director, digital and creative marketing lead KPMG

Senior vice president of marketing Echo Global Logistics

Christopher Broyles leads Digital Marketing & Creative, the internal agency for KPMG U.S. marketing. His team is responsible for project management and web operations, digital channel activation, social media and analytics, creative production and content strategy as well as VR/AR development and other emerging media applications. He also serves as the marketing activation program manager for KPMG’s ongoing front-office transformation, which involves training, operations, coaching and communications for the change-management team.

When the pandemic hit, his digital team built KPMG U.S.’s COVID-response website to serve clients and stakeholders with new video capabilities and go-tomarket digital tools.

Christopher Clemmensen is responsible for digital and online marketing, advertising, search, lead generation, social media and public relations at Echo Global Logistics, a provider of transportation-management services.

He also leads the strategy and execution of company branding, product positioning, content development and market research. Recently he spearheaded the development and launch of a client loyalty program called “EchoShip Rewards,” which allows clients to earn and redeem points when they book freight shipments via Echo’s proprietary shipping platform. During his career, Clemmensen has guided marketing and sales operations through two successful acquisitions, including an early-stage IPO and a venture-backed $100 million health care IT company. He served for nine years on the corporate board of Lurie Children’s Hospital, raising more than $7 million.

EMILY DAILEY

LAUREL FLATT

Director of marketing First Hospitality

President, business leadership, West region Dentsu

Emily Dailey leads a marketing team that supports 52 hotels across the country and provides direct B2B marketing support for First Hospitality.

She manages marketing, budgeting, strategy and deployment for both organic and paid marketing through various digital and traditional channels.

Throughout the pandemic, she has directly handled all crisis communication and coordinated initiatives to shift marketing strategies and digitize the guest experience. She also launched a portfoliowide digital-selling tool that highlights 3D and 360-degree content for the hotels to improve conversions amid travel restrictions. The marketing team has taken over six new hotels in the past year, each of which has ramped up to more than 100% of their fair share of revenue within 90 days of opening; that’s twice as fast as the industry average.

Laurel Flatt oversees the Dentsu network’s most important client relationships in the Midwest and on the West Coast, a portfolio worth $70 million. She is responsible for a range of clients, including Clorox, P&G and FTX. Under her leadership, the firm is now also agency of record for Cracker Barrel, P&G brands and Qurate. Her efforts yielded an additional $20 million in annualized revenue for the West region, making it an engine of growth at a time that many advertising agencies have struggled. During the pandemic, Flatt took on the executive sponsorship of the Dentsu Enablement Business Resource Group. She also led the agency’s pro-bono efforts for Foster More, an organization focused on encouraging the fostering of children.

CHRISTINE FOLEY-PRIESTER System vice president, brand Advocate Aurora Health

Christine Foley-Priester is responsible for brand strategy and execution at Advocate Aurora Health, one of the largest not-for-profit health systems in the country.

She oversees insight-based, conversionfocused integrated marketing efforts, leading a team that spans the system’s brand partnerships, creative services, consumer insights, digital marketing, media planning, social media and consumer-relationship functions. During the pandemic, Foley-Priester oversaw award-winning multichannel campaigns that honored Advocate Aurora’s front-line staff and helped consumers recognize COVID-19 symptoms and access virtual and in-person care. She also developed culturally relevant messaging to engage communities of color, raise awareness around health disparities and encourage vaccination in highrisk communities.

Congratulations, Chris Broyles KPMG Executive Director, Digital & Creative, for being named as one of Crain’s 2021 Notable Executives in Marketing.

Thank you for the passion and creativity you bring to our marketing organization and firm in finding new ways to deliver digital marketing and innovative content.

Learn more about KPMG’s audit, tax, and advisory services at kpmg.com.

© 2021 KPMG LLP, a Delaware limited liability partnership and a member firm of the KPMG global organization of independent member firms affiliated with KPMG International Limited, a private English company limited by guarantee. All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A. The KPM name and logo are registered trademarks or trademarks of KPMG International.

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CONGRATULATIONS TO VERCHELE ROBERTS

Vice President, Brand Management at UScellular™ We applaud Verchele for being named a 2021 Notable Executive in Marketing

by Crain’s Chicago Business and recognized for her 27 years of leadership and expertise.

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24 SEPTEMBER 27, 2021 • CRAIN’S CHICAGO BUSINESS

ANITA FORTE-SCOTT

SACHIN GADHVI

KELLY JO GOLSON

CHRISSY JENSEN

MARK LEVIN

Marketing manager Integrated Building Industries

Chief marketing officer Sittercity

Anita Forte-Scott designs and deploys marketing and communication campaigns across Integrated Building Industries’ four companies, managing intricate marketing budgets each year that are unique to each of the companies.

Most recently, she created comprehensive marketing plans, compiled thorough competitive analysis reports and launched new websites for each of the companies. The websites’ analytics have never been higher, with a record number of site sessions and visitors, alongside 86% growth over previous years.

Since 2005, Forte-Scott has been an elected trustee of the Schaumburg Township District Library and has served as board president seven times. As a library trustee, she has worked toward building a new branch and many renovation projects, and in 2020 she led a refund of $1.5 million to library district taxpayers.

Sachin Gadhvi manages the entire marketing process, from research and planning to execution and analysis, for Sittercity, an online marketplace for hiring local in-home caregivers such as babysitters, senior care providers and housekeepers.

Within the past 18 months, Gadhvi spearheaded two product launches, the “virtual sitting” and free planning-assistant tools, which were created in response to the pandemic. These efforts have helped earn Sittercity triple-digit growth numbers that have exceeded pre-pandemic levels of performance. Before joining Sittercity in 2019, he served as vice president of growth marketing at Cars.com, CMO at Everything But The House, and vice president of marketing at Ticketmaster. He is a member of the American Marketing Association Chicago, the Chicago Interactive Marketing Association, and AllRetail Retail Executive Network.

Chief brand and consumer experience officer Advocate Aurora Health

Vice President, marketing and communications Zeller

Chief marketing and business development officer Marshall Gerstein & Borun

Kelly Jo Golson is responsible for brand, marketing and digital strategy as well as public affairs and internal communications at Advocate Aurora Health. Since 2018, she’s unveiled new Advocate Aurora branding and launched the LiveWell app, a digital ecosystem that lets individuals manage their health journey.

During COVID-19, she created the “Safe Care Promise,” a five-point statement to encourage patients to seek important care; she also created culturally relevant materials and partnerships with community groups to distribute masks and other resources. She championed Advocate Aurora’s partnership with Microsoft, helping it become one of the first health systems to implement artificial-intelligence-enabled technology that lets patients type in symptoms and be directed to the best mode of care. The system’s telemedicine program completed 1 million virtual visits in 2020.

Chrissy Jensen is responsible for corporate brand management and public communications at Zeller, a commercial real estate investment and development company.

She acts as the liaison between corporate and property management teams for brand management, and she helps oversee the company’s tenant-engagement and community-engagement programs. In 2020 Jensen developed procedures and standards for conveying information as Zeller digitized significant elements of its leasing tours. She trained engagement managers to produce in-house videos to depict safety measures, including cleaning protocols, air filtration systems, amenity usage and social distancing requirements. She also launched Zeller’s refreshed brand, a new corporate website and 14 property-specific websites. These initiatives helped Zeller become one of the mostviewed firms in its industry space on platforms like LinkedIn and Instagram.

Mark Levin is a member of the law firm’s executive leadership, working with a team to develop integrated marketing and business development plans, build the firm’s brand identity and position it as an IP thought leader. While others decreased their investments in these areas, Levin introduced enhanced client-service technologies and helped the firm nurture existing client relationships. Since starting at Marshall Gerstein, the firm has seen a 125% increase in RFPs. He is a member of Marshall Gerstein’s diversity and inclusion committee and has been instrumental in providing programming on racial inequality, discrimination and social justice. He also serves on the editorial board of the Legal Sales & Service Organization and is a member of the National Association for Law Placement.

C O N G R AT U L AT E S NATASHA PATLA, CHIEF MARKETING OFFICER

2021 CRAIN’S NOTABLE EXECUTIVES IN MARKETING @properties congratulates Chief Marketing Officer Natasha Patla for being named to Crain’s Chicago Business’ list of Notable Marketing Executives for the 2nd year in a row. Thank you, Natasha, for all you do to bring the @properties brand to life.

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Health care marketing during unprecedented times Kelly Jo Golson, a 29-year marketing veteran, is the chief brand and consumer experience officer at Advocate Aurora Health. She unveiled the system’s new brand and launched LiveWell, an app that enables users to manage their personalized health journey anytime and from anywhere. Before joining Advocate Health Care in 2007, Golson held leadership roles with Methodist Healthcare System, St. Luke’s Episcopal Healthcare and Memorial Hermann Healthcare, all in Houston. Golson founded Jay’s Hope, a nonprofit that gives grants to young adults battling cancer, in honor of her son, who died from bone cancer at age 24.

CRAIN’S: What was your biggest marketing and communication challenge during the pandemic?

GOLSON: Our purpose calls us to help people live well, which is hard to do when consumers who are fearful of COVID-19 exposure are reluctant to seek care they need. We recognize that the various messages can be confusing and scary. On one hand, we’re telling people the great importance of staying home and quarantining, but we’re also trying to educate them that it’s safe to

soft, we also created chatbots that direct consumers to the appropriate level of care based on their symptoms. This pre-pandemic work allowed us to become one of the first health systems in the country to develop an AI-enabled symptom checker specifically for COVID-19—a tool we also offered in Spanish. The opportunities created by AI technology will be endless. We’re particularly excited about early diagnosis and prevention opportunities across medical specialties including orthopedics, cardiology and pediatrics. come to the hospital or doctor’s office when they need care.

How does Advocate Aurora communicate with a public that holds a variety of views on vaccinations, masking and other safety measures without alienating anyone?

People have questions and fears, and most are genuinely trying to make the right decision for themselves and their families.

Our role is to listen, to make people feel heard and then to provide clear, accurate answers without condescension. We know there’s a lot of information

out there, and it can be tough to break through the noise. But we’ve remained steadfast in relying on our clinical expertise and facts to have an open and honest conversation with everyone.

How did you change your digital marketing strategy during the pandemic?

The pandemic accelerated our digital marketing strategy’s focus on artificial intelligence. We recognized its possibilities before the pandemic, when we introduced AI capabilities within chat functionality on our websites.

Through partnership with Micro-

What was learned about marketing and communicating to diverse groups or underserved groups?

The pandemic’s unacceptable toll on communities of color has served as a call to action to commit to better understand and promote health equity. We believe everyone should have a fair and just opportunity to be as healthy as possible, and we must eliminate inequity to fulfill our purpose of helping all people live well.

We’re strengthening our commitment to DEI at every level of the organization by taking action to create real change, including in the ways we communicate, to

ensure every person feels heard.

We constantly examine the needs of each community and make sure we tailor communication approaches to address those specific needs. We’ve developed culturally relevant messaging to connect with our communities.

We’ve also established protocols to make sure that our robust language services program is tapped to help with translation at every step of a patient encounter.

No one person or organization can do this alone. It’s so important to collaborate with key community partners who are aligned with our strategies.

What pandemic-related changes will “stick” going forward?

COVID-19 accelerated the adoption of telemedicine. Because we had already built our LiveWell platform before the pandemic hit, we were well positioned to deliver virtual care to consumers when lockdowns and quarantines created a strong demand. Our preparation allowed us to conduct nearly 1.2 million virtual visits last year. Prior to the pandemic, our goal had been to complete 25,000 visits in 2020. This virtual offering is a health care solution that isn’t going away.

CONGRATULATIONS TO

JIM STADLER Named one of Crain’s 2021 Notable Executives in Marketing

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26 SEPTEMBER 27, 2021 • CRAIN’S CHICAGO BUSINESS

JUDD MARCELLO

KELLY MEGEL

KATE MOHAN

ALICIA M. MOSLEY

BRAD MOST

E

Executive vice president and chief marketing officer Conexiom

Vice president, brand marketing, media and the Brand Creative Group Discover Financial Services

Director of marketing Brewer Sewing

Vice president, marketing, Keebler brand Ferrara

Marketing director Gilda’s Club Chicago

Se m B

Judd Marcello leads all facets of marketing for Conexiom, a provider of document automation solutions.

He oversees teams in North America, the U.K. and Germany that manage brand strategy, demand generation, product marketing, field marketing and customer marketing. He started at Conexiom the day that Chicago initiated stay-at-home orders, and he quickly initiated a complete overhaul of everything from teams and processes to methods and measurement.

In his first 15 months, he hired all new personnel (including the first European marketing hire), built a new tech stack, relaunched the brand, reset the marketing methods for demand generation and relaunched/repositioned the brand as well as the company’s website. Through the first six months of 2021, bookings from marketing-generated activities were up 152% to plan and 4.6 times higher than the previous year.

Kelly Megel leads the development of mass creative and media at Discover and also manages the Brand Creative Group, the company’s internal creative agency.

During the pandemic she helped build a program that offered financial support to businesses, including the “Eat It Forward” campaign, which gave $5 million to Black-owned restaurants. She spearheaded other innovative campaigns, such as one that provided free FICO credit scores to everyone with Discover Credit Scorecard, driving 5.1 million monthly users to access their information for free even if they’re not a customer. Other campaigns included “Freeze-it,” an industry-first feature that enables customers to prevent new purchases with an on/off switch, and free Social Security number alerts that help cardmembers monitor their identities on the dark web.

As director of marketing at the Aurora-based sewing supplies distributor, Kate Mohan is leading a brand refresh using e-commerce, print and digital sales tools and email marketing.

Mohan’s team is introducing updates such as ADA compliance on the Brewer website and requiring diversity training. Mohan designed and implemented a new marketing structure, shifting from basic sales support to a brand management team leading integrated marketing. Mohan established an email audience of 15,000, with average open rates exceeding 30% and click-throughs ranging from 2% to 5%. Shifting from a quarterly print catalog to a bimonthly digital catalog boosted sales. Mohan also oversees account activities with Amazon, Walmart, Zulily and other retailers. She joined Brewer Sewing last year; previously she was a brand strategist and marketing consultant.

Alicia M. Mosley is vice president of marketing for the Keebler brand, which was acquired by Ferrara in 2019. Since joining the company last year, Mosley has led the revamping of the vision and strategy for the brand, creating a multiyear growth plan across six subbrands. She built a marketing team and created opportunities for members’ professional growth. Before joining Ferrara, Mosley held marketing roles at Tyson Foods in brand management, innovation and corporate marketing. Most recently as shopper marketing director, she grew efficiencies by more than 40%. Earlier Mosley was director of product innovation and technical services at Lopez Foods, a McDonald’s supplier.

At Ferrara, she’s an adviser to the Black employee resource group. At Tyson, she chaired marketing committees for the women’s and multicultural business resource groups.

As marketing director at nonprofit Gilda’s Club, Brad Most communicates the brand that supports people with cancer and their families. It’s named after the late comedian Gilda Radner, an original “Saturday Night Live” cast member who died of ovarian cancer. Most drives member participation in program activities and supports the development team in fundraising to keep programming free. During the pandemic, he helped the organization adapt to online programming, and it served more than 2,400 people.

Another highlight: He secured a free recurring radio spot and free outdoor advertising highlighting Gilda’s Club and its role in the community. Over his 35-year career, Most has managed advertising for Dr Pepper, Norwegian Cruise Line, Miller Brewing and H&R Block. For 18 years he handled advertising for Blue Cross in five states.

Congratulations and Thank You Erin O’Neill

Director of Marketing Since 2015, Erin O’Neill has consistently helped us to focus on investing in our communities and empowering our customers to write their stories with Byline Bank.

We’re grateful for your hard work and proud of your recognition!

bylinebank.com

©2021 Byline Bank. Member FDIC.

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CRAIN’S CHICAGO BUSINESS • SEPTEMBER 27, 2021 27

ERIN O’NEILL

NATASHA PATLA

VERCHELE ROBERTS

SHAWNA ROSS

CORY ROTHSCHILD

Senior vice president, director of marketing Byline Bank

Chief marketing officer @properties

Vice president of brand management U.S. Cellular

Executive vice president, integrated strategy lead DentsuMB

Senior vice president and head of marketing Cresco Labs

As vice president of brand management, Verchele Roberts is updating the wireless brand.

The campaign kicked off a year ago, with the company’s first new logo in 20 years.

Roberts is leading a retail store redesign that makes use of local artwork to highlight a community-centered focus.

In April, U.S. Cellular launched a campaign, “America’s Locally Grown Wireless,” that underscores its community presence.

Shawna Ross oversees strategy for the agency’s clients, including WW (formerly Weight Watchers), Anthem Healthcare, Cracker Barrel, Hershey’s and Procter & Gamble.

Her guidance led to Cracker Barrel’s positioning as a brand that cares for people. And a campaign for Howard Brown Health helped LGBTQ+ people feel seen and understood. In partnership with Dentsu’s chief equity officer, she founded a creative council to offer insights and guidance on strategy and creative, with an aim to amplify underrepresented voices. The council plays an integral role in shaping the agency’s work. Before Dentsu’s recent reorganization and rebranding of the McGarryBowen agency to DentsuMB, Ross was chief strategy officer of Dentsu McGarryBowen in Chicago.

McGarryBowen was acquired

by Dentsu in 2008. Earlier, she was group planning director at McGarryBowen.

At Cresco Labs, Cory Rothschild is responsible for building and scaling the cannabis company’s wholesale brand portfolio. He also leads marketing for the Sunnyside retail chain, strengthening the brand in seven states and driving same-store sales growth. During his tenure, the brand businesses have grown from $17 million in the fourth quarter of 2018 to an expected $1 billion annualized run rate in the coming fourth quarter. Rothschild leads the brands’ social equity and restorative justice initiatives supporting people hurt by the national war on drugs.

That includes helping fund and lead clemency, compassionate release, expungement and reform efforts. A Cresco-produced documentary promotes the national fight to release the 40,000 Americans imprisoned for cannabis-related offenses.

Rothschild joined Cresco Labs in 2018 from PepsiCo, where he was brand director for Gatorade.

At Byline Bank, Erin O’Neill develops strategies and campaigns for the retail, small-business capital, commercial and product marketing teams. She and her team have supported three acquisitions and an IPO and have helped establish awareness following the 100-year-old community bank’s rebranding in 2015. Last year, O’Neill and her team helped direct investment in neighborhoods and communities

As chief marketing officer, Natasha Patla oversees brand development, broker marketing, event production and advertising.

Under Patla’s direction, @properties’ marketing department has more than doubled and expanded to include a full-service onsite print center, video production, digital marketing, event coordination and a franchise team. Patla played a key role in the September 2020 launch of the real estate company’s national

.

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served by the bank, amounting to $472,000 in grants, donations and sponsorships. That included the purchase of gift cards for local restaurants in Lakeview, Evanston and Oak Park. The team also helped support the bank’s PPP program. O’Neill joined Byline Bank in 2015 from JPMorgan Chase, where she was marketing manager in middle-market banking.

franchise brand, which has expanded her marketing programs across the country. The programs have led to new franchises in Detroit, La Crosse, Wis., Dallas and Indianapolis. During the pandemic, Patla led the development of digital marketing initiatives, including the redesign of the company’s proprietary email marketing tool.

Roberts joined the wireless company 2019 from Focus Brands, where she was chief marketing officer for Moe’s Southwest Grill.

Earlier, Roberts held marketing positions at United Services Automobile Association, InterContinental Hotels Group and Procter & Gamble. At IHG, Roberts implemented an integrated and centralized marketing program for the Holiday Inn brand family.

Celebrating the power of belief.

Congratulations Charley for making Crain’s 2021 Notable Executives spotlight.

We believe in the idea that anything is possible if you believe it. Charley once believed our marketing could be bigger, bolder and infused with more heart.

He made it happen.

He leads Guaranteed Rate’s premiere in-house creative marketing agency of writers, art directors, videographers, editors and producers—people who think big and care deeply. People who’ve produced the “Believe You Will” campaign and our first-ever “Random Acts of Kindness Week.”

We aim to be the #1 mortgage lender in the country—and with a best-in-class cross-functional team, we believe it’s possible.

Charley Wickman Chief Creative Officer G U A R A N T E E D R AT E

R AT E . C O M / C A R E E R S NMLS ID #2611 (Nationwide Mortgage Licensing System, www.nmlsconsumeraccess.org) • Guaranteed Rate, Inc. is an Equal Opportunity Employer that welcomes and encourages all applicants to apply regardless of age, race, sex, religion, color, national origin, disability, veteran status, sexual orientation, gender identity and/or expression, marital or parental status, ancestry, citizenship status, pregnancy or other reason prohibited by law. (20210915-642905)

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“

One of my favorite things about my job is being able to work alongside so many passionate and talented people. I’m excited to share the praise for all of the amazing work everyone on our creative team has produced under Charley’s leadership.” ~ Steve Moffat, Chief Marketing Officer, Guaranteed Rate

9/24/21 3:06 PM

28 SEPTEMBER 27, 2021 • CRAIN’S CHICAGO BUSINESS

JESSICA SCHAEFFER

ANUP SHAH

CHRISTINA SOLOMON

JIM STADLER

CAITLYN TERRELL

T

Vice president, marketing and communications LaSalle Network

Vice president, chief marketing officer, Juice+ Brands PepsiCo Beverages North America

Chief marketing and business development officer Freeborn & Peters

Chief marketing officer Jameson Sotheby’s International Realty

G th Ze

At the staffing organization, Jessica Schaeffer joins the C-suite in making decisions on LaSalle Network’s hiring, culture and sales and recruitment initiatives.

Last year, Schaeffer scrapped the marketing plan to provide information on how to lead through the pandemic. The marketing team created 250 original blogs and more than 600 pages of research-backed content that resulted in thousands of downloads. Schaeffer helped spearhead DEI initiatives and an initiative to hire veterans.

She also helped acquire new clients, which contributed to LaSalle rebounding from losing 50% of its business in April 2020 to hitting an all-time revenue high in the fourth quarter. LaSalle’s guidance on re-entry to the office was featured on CNBC and other media. Schaeffer is on the Chicago Society for Human Resource Management board.

Anup Shah leads strategic positioning and marketing communication for a $2.5 billion portfolio of 15 brands, including Tropicana, Naked Juice, Izze, Dole, KeVita and Frutly. Shah and his team set out to better understand how the pandemic shifted consumer attitudes toward juice. A proprietary study served as the foundation for the division’s 2021 strategy, spurring growth across the portfolio with the launch of Frutly, a hydrating juice water for teens and KeVita’s jump into prebiotic shots.

Under Shah’s leadership, year-to-date net revenue is up 5.5% from year-earlier levels.

He led his team through racial equality-focused town halls and diversity and inclusion initiatives, part of PepsiCo’s racial equality commitment.

Shah joined PepsiCo last year from Miller Coors Beverage, where he was global vice president for Miller brands.

At Freeborn & Peters, Christina Solomon leads a team charged with client development, strategic planning, market research, competitive intelligence and other functions.

Solomon helped navigate the law firm through the pandemic.

When issues of racial inequality emerged, Solomon worked with leaders and the firm’s director of recruiting and diversity to ensure the firm was communicating effectively and implementing policies toward building a more diverse and aware workforce. Solomon’s team published more content during March and April 2020 than in all of 2019. She helped bring in 480 new clients in 2020 and substantially grew the number of unique visitors to the firm’s website by more than 40,000, as well as to the firm’s social media channels.

Solomon is a licensed attorney and coaches firm lawyers in business development.

Executive vice president, chief marketing and communications officer First Midwest Bank

Caitlyn Terrell leads the marketing strategy and creative services teams that support the brokerage’s real estate agents. This year, Jameson Sotheby’s introduced marketing and technology initiatives, including a platform that advertises new listings to Jameson agents via text and email as soon as an agreement is signed. Agents can send sellers a report on how their property views are tracking on online portals. In August, the team introduced an online report on the Chicago-area real estate

A co d

Jim Stadler is leading development of a marketing and communications strategy for the merger with Indiana-based Old National Bancorp, which will double the bank’s size and footprint.

In the past 18 months, Stadler used software to drive more than 11,300 PPP applications.

He also helped increase local brand awareness through digital advertising on the Kennedy Expressway and joining with ESPN to sponsor a contest awarding an

advertising campaign to a local small business. He introduced the agile marketing model to support prospecting, onboarding and cross-sell growth initiatives. As of June, consumer loans originated online were at 78% of the 2021 goal.

market that can be shared on social media. Terrell also established a diversity and inclusion council to lead in recruiting, supporting and advancing more employees and agents of color. She joined Jameson Sotheby’s in 2017 from Berkshire Hathaway HomeServices KoenigRuboff Reality Group.

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THERESE VAN RYNE

CHARLEY WICKMAN

MARISA ZIMMERMAN

Global director of public relations, thought leadership and advocacy Zebra Technologies

Chief creative officer Guaranteed Rate

Vice president of marketing Camelot Illinois

Chief Creative Officer Charley Wickman founded and leads Guaranteed Rate’s 30-person internal creative agency, the Point. Wickman’s team developed the mortgage lender’s “Believe You Will” campaign, highlighted by a 60-second Super Bowl spot that was seen by more than 90 million viewers. The campaign has included U.S. figure skater Starr Andrews, UFC champion Dustin Poirier and NASCAR’s Ryan Newman. Wickman joined Guaranteed Rate in 2019. He is a former executive vice president

At Camelot, the private manager of the Illinois Lottery, Marisa Zimmerman manages relationships with outside agencies and the company’s in-house creative studio.

She manages a $30 million annual marketing budget.

Despite challenges raised by the pandemic, Zimmerman led her team to develop two campaigns remotely. The first was a brand campaign paying tribute to the state’s health care workers during the throes of the pandemic. The second was a holiday campaign featuring a lovable hamster Claude.

Zimmerman expanded use of flexible digital media during the pandemic, driving players to the iLottery platform, which helped boost revenue 98% year over year. Zimmerman joined Camelot Illinois in 2018 from dairy company Fonterra, where she was marketing director. Earlier, she worked at Kraft Foods, Tula Foods and YoCrunch.

At Zebra Technologies in Lincolnshire, Therese Van Ryne developed a program in which customers share stories of their success with Zebra products, which are posted on the website.

Last year the success stories webpage posted a 135% increase in visits over the prior year. Van Ryne’s team also manages a blog of industry posts and podcasts.

Last year, the blog had nearly 140,000 visitors, a 40% yearover-year increase. This year, Van Ryne published a children’s book, “Zippy’s Special Gift,” about a young zebra who learns to accept her stripes. The book encourages people to be proud of their unique qualities and accept others. Book proceeds are donated to a Zebra philanthropic partner. Van Ryne serves on the board of trustees for the village of Lake Barrington.

up.

and executive creative director at Leo Burnett, where he worked for 23 years. He’s best known for leading the Allstate Insurance account and its “Mayhem” campaign. He also led the Firestone, Marshalls and Delta Faucet accounts.

w THE MARKETING PROFESSION Quick facts: Advertising, promotions and marketing managers 2020 median pay: $141,490; $68.03 per hour Typical entry-level education: Bachelor’s degree Number of jobs, 2020: 316,800 Job outlook, 2020-30: +10% Employment change, 2020-30: +31,800 States with the highest employment levels in marketing managers, May 2020 Annual Hourly Employment mean wage mean wage California 42,140 $176,940 $85.07 Illinois 21,930 $140,270 $67.44 New York 21,740 $194,940 $93.72 Texas 18,060 $155,010 $74.53 Massachusetts 17,310 $153,130 $73.62 Metropolitan areas with the highest employment levels in marketing managers, May 2020 Annual Hourly Employment mean wage mean wage New York 28,360 $195,030 $93.77 Chicago 19,640 $142,870 $68.69 Boston 16,010 $154,960 $74.50 Los Angeles 14,880 $160,680 $77.25 San Francisco 11,350 $196,260 $94.36 Atlanta 7,970 $145,660 $70.03 Washington, D.C. 7,750 $175,860 $84.55 San Jose, Calif.

7,340 $211,210 $101.54 Dallas 7,080 $155,980 $74.99 Minneapolis 7,000 $154,180 $74.13 Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics

IS HONORED TO CONGRATULATE

CAITLYN TERRELL CHIEF MARKETING OFFICER

Congratulations to Caitlyn Terrell, Jameson Sotheby’s International Realty’s Chief Marketing Officer, on her distinction as one of Crain’s 2021 Notable Executives in Marketing. As a forerunner in the Chicago real estate marketing space, Caitlyn’s passion for innovation and unique perspective on real estate have helped shape Jameson Sotheby’s International Realty into the titan that it is today. We wish her a continued career of success as she pushes the boundaries of what real estate marketing can achieve.

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30 SEPTEMBER 27, 2021 • CRAIN’S CHICAGO BUSINESS

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Can Kaegi keep outsider cred in re-election race?

KAEGI from Page 1 2022 Democratic primary. But his newfound insider status and incumbency mean he’ll have to run on more than just a promise to change a corrupt and unfair property tax system, a message that worked well against his predecessor, archetypal political boss Joe Berrios.

This time Kaegi will have to run on his record—a new approach to property tax assessments that has provided some relief to homeowners while angering commercial property owners. He also must decide whether to flex some political muscle by going after members of the Cook County Board of Review, who have hindered his agenda.

Kari Steele, the president of the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Cook County, last week entered the primary race against Kaegi. A chemist by training, Steele is seen as a strong challenger by close political watchers. She’s a solid stump campaigner who has run successfully countywide before.

Other trends play in her favor.

Democratic voters are increasingly excited at the prospect of electing women of color. She has the backing of one of the most successful Black elected officials in Illinois: outgoing Secretary of State Jesse White.

She’s also rounding up support from powerful building trade unions—including the International Union of Operating Engineers Local 150. Unions say Kaegi’s assessments discourage investment in commercial real estate projects that create jobs for their members. Their support would bring Steele money to help get her message out and campaign workers to knock on doors and gin up support.

Still, she faces an uphill fight. Incumbents in technocratic offices like the assessor’s rarely lose unless they’re involved in a controversy like the one that helped Kaegi defeat Berrios, says political science professor Christopher Mooney of the University of Illinois Chicago.

ELECTION

Connect with Claudia Hippel at claudia.hippel@crain.com for more information.

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Kaegi was swept into office in 2018, fresh off a blockbuster Chicago Tribune series that focused in large part on assessments during Berrios’ tenure as Cook County assessor. According to the Tribune, assessments under Berrios unfairly benefited downtown building owners at the expense of homeowners and fueled a lucrative cottage industry for property tax attorneys. The series built on prior reporting on his practices of hiring family members and accepting donations from those attorneys.

Berrios defended his assessments as accurate.

Kaegi campaigned on promises to end nepotism, ban donations from property tax lawyers, and make assessments fair and accurate by raising commercial assessments. The first two promises were easy enough to keep: Kaegi had enough personal wealth to lend his campaign $2.3 million and joked his children were too young

ALYCE HENSON

CLASSIFIEDS

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Cook County Assessor Fritz Kaegi scored an upset victory in 2018 as a crusading political outsider. to hire anyway. Kaegi says he’s also delivering on the third campaign promise.

“We’re getting results,” he says.

“People can see that homeowners’ share of the burden has been reduced in areas that we’ve reassessed. The median residential tax bill’s only been up 1% this year in Cook County, same as last year.

That’s because we’re following through on closing the valuation gap on big commercial properties.”

In 2018, Kaegi could paint Berrios as a corrupt insider who oversaw a rigged process benefiting big business. Now he’s accountable for the office’s performance over the past three years and faces the complicated task of explaining to voters how his assessments affect their property tax bills.

Some voters may wonder why Kaegi’s assessment shift hasn’t significantly reduced their taxes. But the assessor doesn’t set property taxes. He merely sets the value of property for tax purposes, which determines each home or business property’s share of the tax levy established by local government agencies. A lower assessment doesn’t necessarily mean a homeowner’s bill will decline if tax levies are rising. And a 1% increase doesn’t feel like much relief in Cook County, where property taxes are among the highest in the nation.

Kaegi has been “long on promises but short on results,” Steele said in her announcement video, suggesting he’s an incompetent manager who bungled administration of the senior freeze program and has not cut bills for working families.

In an apparent appeal to commercial interests, Steele told Crain’s that she would promote “equity and fairness” but also “have an open door policy” for the business community to express their questions or concerns. “Of course, I will seek their support,” she said. Like Kaegi, she says she won’t take donations from real estate attorneys or appraisers.

The commercial real estate industry has lots of money and motivation to oust Kaegi. He’s sparred with business groups over his assessments, which have shifted more of the property tax burden to commercial properties countywide. The latest round, covering downtown properties north of the

Chicago River, hiked total nonresidential assessed value by 60%.

In an emailed statement, Building Owners & Managers Association Executive Director Farzin Parang blasted Kaegi for “his completely unsupported decision last year to shift assessments onto offices and other businesses in the middle of an economic crisis,” and for “baffling assessments that office buildings are worth twice what they were before the pandemic.”

Kaegi has attracted some support from other parts of the business community—recent donors include venture capitalist Bradley Tusk, Ariel Investments Chairman John Rogers and former Playboy Enterprises CEO Christie Hefner.

Kaegi told Crain’s he’s also willing to open up his own checkbook again. “I’m always ready to have more skin in the game if necessary.”

BOARD OF REVIEW

Steele also told Crain’s that she’d have a better relationship with the Board of Review. The review board is a second point of appeals for property owners. It has knocked down many of Kaegi’s commercial valuations. All three members are up for re-election in 2022, too.

So far only one challenger has emerged, 12th Ward Ald. George Cardenas.

Will Kaegi play politics and try to take down review board members? Not directly. “I’ve never endorsed in a Board of Review race, and I don’t plan to,” Kaegi says.

But he won’t hesitate to talk about how review board changes to his assessments are affecting tax bills.

“When there are cases that seem unusual, I’m going to call attention to them. I’m not personalizing it.”

It’s a prudent move for Kaegi, who doesn’t have the same operation as machine politicians of old, says Mooney. “That would be a big power move that I would expect to see done by someone like the old Mayor Daley. It would take a lot of effort. I don’t know that he’s up for it.”

Such a maneuver might make Kaegi look like a machine politician, too—a label he has already attached to Steele. In a fundraising email sent the same day as Steele’s announcement, Kaegi’s campaign called her candidacy a sign that “the machine wants its power back.”

9/24/21 4:11 PM

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Shariff: Typically, the number one question is “Where do we start?”

Most plans are aware of the shift toward HPNs but there are many different approaches. It’s natural for them to reach out to their vendorpartners and seek feedback.

Kunst: First and foremost, HPNs address affordability for the employer and member without sacrificing quality. They also lead to an improved care experience through coordinated, patientcentered care, and in most cases, improved benefit plan designs and lower cost-sharing for employees and their families.

Kunst: One of the hallmarks of HPNs is a patient-centered care coordination model. That’s one of the benefits of featuring a highquality provider in the network.

By incentivizing your employees to get care from a provider with a proven track record of delivering high-quality care, it makes it much easier for that provider to in turn coordinate your employees’ health care in a way that’s beneficial for your company and your employees.

Cooke: We hear two questions or concerns frequently—mainly centered around the network of providers. Employers want to know how broad the network of participating providers is and whether employees will be able to get the care they need.

Employers are concerned that their employees will be able to access the professionals they need, that they’re provided adequate choices and can connect with providers when they need to.

What are some of the benefits to using an HPN? Shariff: The primary benefits are better patient outcomes and lower

Cooke: Medical cost reduction is the number one benefit—a top-performing HPN can save an employer 10%-20% of their medical claim costs. Since participants are accessing care through high-quality, cost-effective providers, the savings get passed back in the form of lower insurance premiums.

What types of services are generally included—and not included?

Cooke: Most services are included with the HPN, except for pharmacy and drug expenses, and organ

care. That coordination not only strengthens the patient/physician relationship, but it makes it far more likely that members will receive the preventive services and screenings that are appropriate for them and that can help ward off more serious health issues. It also increases the likelihood that members will be referred to high-quality specialists if they need more advanced care.

This type of physician-directed, coordinated care within a single local health system helps ensure that employees’ health care needs are managed more efficiently and effectively, which in turn leads to better outcomes and lower overall costs.

Shariff: The most obvious example would be moving from an on-

For example, members enrolled in our Charter plan select an Advocate primary care physician who serves as their health care navigator and is responsible for coordinating their

Built to lower costs, not expectations

003F8450 09/21

P031_033_CCB_20210927.indd 32

Cooke: While it may be too soon

— IQBAL SHARIFF, BEST HOME HEALTHCARE NETWORK demand model to a planned model; in other words, working much more closely to anticipate clinician demand and to plan appropriately.

Another typical service extension would be a dedicated physician contact representative or similar liaison to help reduce delays and errors during the discharge process. These improvements and investments offer far greater optimization gains than their cost charges on paper, and they break down the barriers that can’t initially be automated out using software.

Kunst: Employee satisfaction—and hence, increased enrollment at open enrollment—is the best measure of success. Certainly, cost savings and trends are also critical inputs to measure as part of the overall benefits strategy.

Visit UHC.com

What effect has the COVID pandemic had on HPNs?

“WITH COVID PUSHING MANY STAFFING SYSTEMS TO THEIR LIMITS, HPNS HAVE EXTRA ‘CUSHION’ DUE TO THEIR METRICS-BASED APPROACH AND THEIR INHERENT OPENNESS TO CHANGE.”

How can the success of an HPN be measured?

Health plans designed to work for you and your budget.

There’s no limit to what care can do.

method considers what level of cost savings are achieved by utilizing the HPN when compared to other non HPN medical providers. This can be measured by tracking utilization, quality outcomes and overall costs.

The second way considers whether the overall health of the employees participating in the HPN improves over time. This entails capturing a baseline of employees’ health, then any progress through annual wellness exams. A broker or benefits administrator can assist in analyzing this data; for example, Tandem HR provides clients with this information through robust claim analytics reports.

Shariff: Obviously, there are financial measurements and cost savings that offer one view of success, and they’re very important.

However, there are more complex measurements such as the amount of time and internal expense when transitioning care, ability to transition care with fewer errors and fewer inefficiencies, and other measurements that go beyond pure cost savings. The benefits of an HPN really should go deep into many aspects of internal process performance.

Cooke: An HPN’s success can be measured in two ways. The first

to tell the total effect the pandemic, the HPNs that are bound to have better performance are those that embrace telehealth. The HPN is incented to provide cost-effective care, so when the shutdown occurred, employees relied on being able to communicate with their doctors via video.

Shariff: HPNs in general have been more resilient to the stress imposed by COVID, and the advantages go beyond financial.

HPNs are inherently designed to streamline the process models between care providers and their resource pools. With COVID pushing many staffing systems to their limits, HPNs have extra “cushion” due to their metricsbased approach and their inherent openness to change.

Kunst: COVID has increased interest in HPNs as employers were concerned about the health and wellbeing of their employees and were looking for opportunities to save premium dollars without shifting costs to employees through higher deductibles and co-insurance.

How do you see HPNs evolving in the future?

Kunst: It’s a journey. HPNs and value-based care will continue to evolve based on the needs of employers and their employees.

Collaboration between payers and providers will deepen with an aligned focus on improved member health and experience.

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Cooke: HPNs will continue to develop and improve on their riskbearing contracts with employers and insurance companies. The better the care they deliver, the more business they’ll obtain. The more business they obtain, the more successful they’ll be. It will be a winwin situation.

Shariff: The health plans that partner with home health providers first are at a clear advantage. One evolution that you’ll probably see is that, because HPNs are so data-centric, those early adopters— the health plans as well as their transitional-care partners—will have a “data advantage” over later adopters. As those data advantages grow on both sides of the relationship, you’ll see the early adopters moving more aggressively and with more innovation to extend the HPN model to other less traditional areas of their care systems. A great example of this is networks starting to work together preemptively, shedding their nonHPN relationships to secure their positions with other early HPN adopters. This could prove to be very disruptive to local staffing and resource pools like you see in transitional care providers.

How can an employer tell if an HPN is a good fit for their organization?

Shariff: It’s critical to look for an HPN that understands that it’s not like implementing a new accounting system or software platform; HPNs have a fundamentally different view on performance, process improvement and even risk/reward with their extended network service providers. They’re not a new

Kunst: Most employers offer employees a choice of network access and price points and provide incentives to choose HPNs. While most employers aren’t ready to eliminate traditional networks and move exclusively to HPNs, we anticipate that more employers will be open to that approach in the future, moving aggressively in that direction given the focus on quality and affordability, and getting the most value for the care of their employees.

What advice do you have for an employer considering an HPN? Shariff: Start now and expect to ask for inputs from a broad range of sources, including home health care and transitional providers. It’s this extended network service model that enables many of the HPN benefits, so it’s helpful to get a variety of opinions.

Cooke: Adopting an HPN is a big step. The cost-effectiveness of the plan must be balanced with the ability of broad-based PPOs to attract and retain employees.

Kunst: Every year employers wait to implement an HPN, they’re missing out on a meaningful opportunity to bring down their health care costs and improve the health and well-being of their workforce. Offering an HPN demonstrates that a company is committed to making sure its employees have access to quality, affordable, patient-focused health care. And it gives the employer peace of mind of knowing that its health benefits provider and the health system featured in the HPN share a commitment

“OFFERING AN HPN DEMONSTRATES THAT A COMPANY IS COMMITTED TO MAKING SURE ITS EMPLOYEES HAVE ACCESS TO QUALITY, AFFORDABLE, PATIENT-FOCUSED HEALTH CARE.” — TOM KUNST, UNITEDHEALTHCARE OF ILLINOIS flavor, they’re a cultural shift.

The HPNs you talk to should be able to discuss a vision that goes beyond pure cost savings and financial benefits—both for them, for you the employer and your organization.

Cooke: When considering an HPN for your organization, leverage your benefits experts to verify that your employees will have convenient access to the HPN’s providers. Also, it’s critical that the chosen HPN commits to providing you—the employer—with robust data to show their cost-effectiveness on an ongoing basis.

P031_033_CCB_20210927.indd 33

to providing high-value health care that lowers the total cost of care while improving employees’ health outcomes and patient experience. The cost-savings associated with this model of care can be significant. Companies and their employees can save as much as 15%-25% on premiums compared to a traditional PPO. Our experience over the last several years since introducing a couple HPNs here in Chicago has shown us that employers are increasingly gravitating towards these highquality, cost-effective health plan solutions and are happy with the results they’re seeing.

ABOUT THE PANELISTS DAVID COOKE is the director of national accounts in the brokerage division at the Tandem Family of Companies, which provides benefits, human resources and employee assistance program needs to thousands of worksite employees nationwide. A certified employee benefits specialist (CEBS) with more than 30 years of experience, he has worked with companies of all sizes in a variety of industries—including manufacturing, health care and technology—advising them about corporate benefits, M&A, union negotiations, associations and professional employer organizations. Previously, he worked for Mercer, Aon and Hub International.

TOM KUNST is the CEO of UnitedHealthcare of Illinois, which offers the full spectrum of health benefit programs for individuals, employers and Medicare beneficiaries statewide. In his current role, he leads the sales, network and product teams in Illinois and northwest Indiana. He began his career with UnitedHealthcare in 1994 and held a variety of roles in sales and account management with increasing responsibilities, most recently as vice president for the company’s Central region. He was named the CEO in Illinois in 2019.

IQBAL SHARIFF is the CEO of Best Home Healthcare Network, a comprehensive post-acute home health care agency that provides skilled nurses, physical/ occupational/speech therapists and medical social workers to patients throughout the Chicago area, while helping them feel valued and empowered. He founded the company in 2006, and wrote the company’s original motto, which it still follows today: “Patient Safety. First.”

High Performance Networks Demand The Best.

1300 South Wabash, Suite 200 Chicago, Illinois, 60605 312.461.1700 bhhcare.com

9/23/21 11:17 AM

34 SEPTEMBER 27, 2021 • CRAIN’S CHICAGO BUSINESS

Home-heat price shock: Average Chicago household will pay 35% more this year HEATING from Page 3 and pass those along to ratepayers at cost—have helped blunt the financial impact for ratepayers.

But rock-bottom commodity prices don’t stay that way forever.

Now the companies and regulators must gird for an affordability crisis, particularly in the city.

“So many people in the city are having trouble paying their bills as it is,” says David Kolata, executive director of the Citizens Utility Board, a consumer advocate. “This is a reckoning that was just waiting to happen. The infrastructure investments that were so out of control have been somewhat hidden.”

Naperville-based Nicor, which serves more than 2 million homes and businesses, in four years.

Peoples has taken a different tack, annually hiking a monthly surcharge free of immediate regulatory oversight to cover the costs of its expansive gas-system overhaul. That cost now is about $13 every month for the average Chicago household—more than 10% of their yearly bill.

SURCHARGE LIVES ON

Gov. J.B. Pritzker proposed ending the surcharge early (it’s scheduled to expire in 2023) in his wide-ranging energy bill, but the version he signed into law earlier this month didn’t the issue.

“SO MANY PEOPLE IN THE CITY ARE HAVING address Opposition from unions benefiting TROUBLE PAYING THEIR BILLS AS IT IS.” from the utility David Kolata, executive director, Citizens Utility Board work has kept the surcharge alive Nicor’s projection doesn’t in- despite criticism from consumer clude the impact of an addition- advocates and evidence that large al pending rate hike—the Illinois swaths of the Chicago population Commerce Commission must de- can’t afford their gas bills. cide on it by December—that the For the utilities, there’s no finanutility says will cost the average cial risk to an affordability crisis household more than $5 a month. because they don’t bear the costs For the winter, when usage is high- of unpaid bills. Those are passed er, that monthly impact will be along to ratepayers under state law. steeper than that.

One result is record-breakIt will be the third rate hike for ing earnings every year. Peo-

ples, which is owned by Milwaukee-based WEC Energy Group, posted $144.4 million in net income through June, up 13% from $128 million at the same point last year. This year’s six-month total is more than Peoples made in the entire year of 2018 and any year before that.

Exacerbating matters is that the utilities still are recovering what they paid for gas last February when prices spiked due to the weather emergency in Texas. Peoples’ gas charge for October is 73 cents per therm, more than triple what it was in October 2020. The average Chicago household will lay out $22 more for gas if October weather is normal.

Those extra charges for last February’s price shock will continue until January.

The obvious pain to come surely has policymakers scrambling to manage a far worse situation than they’ve seen in years, right? But there’s little evidence of that so far.

The ICC, which regulates utilities, later this fall will conduct its normal “winter preparedness” session with utilities. “As we prepare to enter the cooler months this year, the ICC will maintain open lines of communication with the utility companies to make sure we are up to date with their own in-

ternal and collective efforts to aid customers,” spokeswoman Britney Bouie says in an email.

Pressed on whether the ICC will do something more than the ordinary, she says the winter preparedness session “is more critical than before.”

Peoples says it has $6 million available for emergency bill support, half the $12 million that was set aside last year because of the pandemic. There could be more federal support as well, spokeswoman Danisha Hall says.

But she defends the need for the continued infrastructure spending, calling it “a crucial safety priority in light of findings that 80% of the pipes in Chicago’s system have less than 15 years of useful life remaining.”

As for Nicor, “We understand that the increasing market price for natural gas is higher than those historically, which is why we continue to offer multiple ways to support our customers now and into the future,” spokeswoman Jennifer Golz says in an email.

AID PARTNERSHIP

Nicor soon will unveil a new multiyear partnership with the Salvation Army to offer more aid to those struggling with their bills, she says.

WINTER WOES Natural gas prices for the coming winter are at their highest in 13 years.

GAS PRICES 2021-22 futures prices vs. 2020-21 actual prices. In dollars per million Btu.

November 2021 2020

$2.61

December 2021 2020

$2.59

January 2022 2021

$5.05

$5.17

$5.25 $2.71

February 2022 2021 March 2022 2021

$5.15 $5.35* $4.81 $2.62

* February 2021 gas price influenced by short-term spike due to Texas storm.

Note: Prices at Henry Hub distribution center, Louisiana Sources: Chicago Mercantile Exchange, U.S. Energy Information Administration

It’s September, and the weather only is starting to cool. The temperature on this issue likely will get hotter, especially if the winter turns out to be colder than normal.

Social media channel TikTok can be a boon to small business. It can also be a bane.

Those swells in business are nearly impossible for Alzate and her partner to handle on their own, but the inconsistency holds her back from expanding. Unico Threads did $14,000 in sales in July. In June, however, it brought in only $300.

Business owners must strike a balance on social media, says Tim Calkins, clinical professor of marketing at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. They must be thoughtful managing the demand, while working to maintain lasting relationships with the new customers.

“For a business owner, in a way, it can turn into a huge problem,” he says. “You bring in a lot of people, you disappoint them, and then everybody leaves. When it’s all done, all you have are the costs you incurred to try to serve this wave of people.”

Chinese technology company ByteDance launched TikTok in 2016. In the U.S., its popularity spread among Gen Z users first.

The pandemic fueled rapid adoption among all age groups, as people stuck at home and starved for entertainment downloaded the app in droves.

After losing revenue during pandemic closures in 2020, many small businesses turned to TikTok to find new customers. Some deem it vital to their marketing strategies: There are more than 100 million monthly active users in the U.S., according to TikTok, and they are hyperengaged.

“Brands, whether it’s a small brand or a large (consumer pack-

P034_CCB_20210927.indd 34

aged goods brand), they cannot ignore the user database that is continuing to grow both in size and age of users,” says Brian Camen, director of digital, social and community for Ferrara Candy.

The Chicago-based candy maker has seven brands on TikTok, including Sweetarts, Laffy Taffy and Nerds. One post from Ferrara’s Trolli brand got 4.2 million views.

Camen declined to disclose how TikTok videos correlate to sales but said Ferrara considers its TikTok accounts a success. The sales correlation is more evident in smaller companies without large marketing budgets.

MYSTERIES

Unlike with traditional television, radio or print advertising, or even other social media channels, there’s no telling how large an audience any TikTok video will reach. Some of the videos of Chicago-area restaurants that Michael Loumeau has posted on his popular account Best Date Food garnered more than 1 million views and created lines for days at some of the featured locales. But Loumeau says he warns restaurants that there’s no guarantee a video will drive sales.

“Just because one video has a million views, doesn’t mean another will,” he says.

TikTok says it provides resources for small businesses looking to launch accounts. Its virtual Small Biz Block Party series teaches owners how to maximize reach on the app and introduces them to analytics TikTok provides. A recent event hosted Loumeau and other Chicago businesses, like

UNICOTHREADS.COM

TIKTOK from Page 3

TikTok is unpredictable, says Yasmeen Alzate, co-owner of apparel company Unico Threads. “There’s no way for you to know what’s going to happen.”

JoJo’s Shake Bar, who shared their own tips.

TikTok’s algorithm sets it apart from other social media apps, as does its layout. The algorithm learns what users like to watch over time and feeds videos into their “For You” page. It levels the playing field for small businesses on the app, since their discoverability is not tied to the number of followers.

CULT FOLLOWING

Hair salon Little Broken Things launched a TikTok in March, posting videos of stylists doing clients’ hair or showcasing trendy cuts.

Owner Cassie Krepel says the salon now has a cult following

and draws customers from other states.

Krepel plans to extend operating hours, opening the salon at 8 a.m. instead of 12 p.m. The staff size has doubled, and Krepel expects revenue this year to be double what it was in 2020. The results are a dream for a small-business owner, and Krepel has seen the good it can do. But it has brought challenges. “It’s a lot of change really fast, and it’s also really scary,” she says.

Little Broken Things has instituted cancellation policies and focused on customer education, reiterating the costs and time involved in achieving a trendy vivid hair color. Krepel must make sure

her stylists aren’t working themselves to exhaustion in the hopes of capturing every potential client TikTok sends their way.

“At first you’re like, ‘I want everyone to come in. I don’t want to miss a customer,’ ” Krepel says.

“For just your own mental health, you can’t be doing that. It’s crazy.”

Krepel plans to step away from her stylist duties soon to focus entirely on managing the business through the growth. She still wonders how many of the new customers are here to stay. That’s a valid question for business owners to assess, says Calkins.

“TikTok comes and TikTok goes,” he says. “And very quickly all of that excitement fades away.”

9/24/21 4:08 PM

CRAIN’S CHICAGO BUSINESS • SEPTEMBER 27, 2021 35

Dueling kitchens in this $6 million Lincoln Park house They face one another: A handsome white indoor space and an outdoor cooking area set beneath a curving metal roof BY DENNIS RODKIN

THE HANDMADE SILK WALLCOVERINGS in the living room and staircase of Lily Hauf’s Lincoln Park home are emblematic, she says, of the approach she and her late husband took to fitting out their space.

“We wanted to be surrounded with the best of everything,” Hauf says. In 2012, the couple were moving back to this country from London as Mark Hauf went into semi-retirement from running a telephone and cable television firm.

Mark Hauf had relatives here, but with limited experience of Chicago, the Haufs picked Lincoln Park in part because its stately homes and walk-to restaurants reminded Lily of “the best parts of London, like Mayfair, where we lived for three years,” she says.

The Orchard Street house has an ornate carved limestone and brick facade and on the main floor, large, open formal rooms that lead to the faceoff between a well-outfitted Christopher Peacock kitchen indoors and an outdoor cooking space that can only be called a grilling pavilion, a metal-roofed structure that makes cooking outdoors an unusually sophisticated experience.

The house also has an elevator.

The Haufs divided their year between Chicago and Miami until Mark died in early 2020. Lily Hauf, now living primarily in Miami, listed the 8,800-square-foot house last week. It’s represented by Carrie McCormick of @properties and priced at just under $5.99 million.

MORE PHOTOS ONLINE:

ChicagoBusiness.com/residential-real-estate

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