Crain's Chicago Business, October 16, 2023 by crainschicago

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THEY’RE ALREADY ACCOMPLISHED. AND THEY AREN’T DONE YET. MEET THE CLASS OF 2023. PAGE 13

Sheriff’s office turns to old tactics to fight retail theft Beefed up by a state grant, officers say they’ve made a dent in the recent surge on the Mag Mile

By Leigh Giangreco

On a recent rainy Tuesday morning, the weather hasn’t dampened foot traffic on Michigan Avenue. Among the typical throng of shoppers, office workers and tourists hustling past the Wrigley Building stands another group that’s become a fixture of the downtown retail district: Cook County sheriff ’s police officers. The tan-uniformed officers are hoping visitors will take note of their presence, particularly if they’re planning on stealing from one of the stores that line

the Magnificent Mile. The sheriff ’s office has had a stronger presence downtown since civil unrest shook up the area in spring 2020. Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart reduced some of the suburban beats in order to bring officers into Chicago, resulting in a River North office that opened in January 2022 and a second location at One Chicago on Superior Street that opened in January. Last year, Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul granted the Cook County Sheriff ’s Office $276,000 to fight retail crime. That grant funding allowed Dart to pay officers

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overtime and beef up a retail theft task force earlier this year that patrols Michigan Avenue and the Gold Coast. That cash infusion is new, but Dart and his officers note they’re combating retail theft by using old-school tactics of walking the beat and talking to merchants. “We wanted to create high visibility,” said Lt. Michael Rivers, who watched as his fellow officers apprehended a shoplifter after the manager at the Walgreens in the Wrigley Building called them. “And not just high visibility, we wanted interactions with the businesses up and down Michigan and Oak Street.” The retail task force comes at a time when Chicago Police Department headcount is down,

with at least 1,700 vacancies, and struggling to combat ongoing thefts. They’re also buttressing private security at stores, which are meant to act as a deterrent but have little power to apprehend or even intimidate thieves. Around 38% of retailers use some form of private security, according to a sheriff ’s office survey of 189 retailers on North Michigan Avenue, Oak Street and Walton Street. The sheriff ’s beat watches over much of CPD’s 18th District, which stretches up to Fullerton Avenue in Lincoln Park on the north with the lake on its east and the river bordering its south and west. During the week of Sept. 25, the 18th District saw 18 robberies compared to nine

Mag Mile, Gold Coast thefts Number of thefts reported in CPD’s 18th District. 1,157

2019

1,049 1,101 602

653

2020

2021

2022

2023

Note: Figures are for the first 40 weeks of each year. Source: Chicago Police Department

in the same period last year and 37 thefts compared to 29. Robberies have steadily increased each year, climbing from 250 in See SHERIFF on Page 36

WALGREENS Who is new CEO Tim Wentworth, and can he save the ailing pharmacy giant?

CRAIN’S LIST We rank the area’s largest firms owned by people of color.

BOOTH INSIGHTS Family businesses are a dominant force in business activity and employment.

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ORPHE DIVOUNGUY ON THE ECONOMY

The housing stats that point to a Chicago turnaround

n the past year, rising interest rates have caused housing sales to decline across the country. This downturn was partially due to a decline in housing demand, as well as homeowners’ reluctance to relinquish exceptionally low mortgage rates. Last month, roughly 11% to 12% fewer Orphe existing homes added to the Divounguy were Chicago metro housing inventory, compared to a year ago. Chicago-area housing demand has proven more resilient. Homes that sold were on the market for just eight days in August compared to 13 days for most homes across the country. Consequently, the number of homes for sale has dwindled more than in other

comparable major markets. Chicago’s relatively lower housing costs have helped to make the city a more attractive place to live. Migration is a means for individuals to arbitrage the costs and benefits of residing in different locations. But public policy decisions matter. A city budget that abstains from raising taxes on residents is a positive first step. Zoning reforms that encourage more housing supply across Chicago could help curb the city’s population loss. Historically, new residential construction predicts fluctuations in economic activity. Despite a nationwide dip in builder confidence, the Chicago metro area’s new-construction and housing market activity have displayed remarkable resilience compared to other large markets. Relatively stronger housing demand meant Chicago-area home values increased more in the past year

than homes in other large metros. And the increase in housing wealth is a boon to homeowners supporting household finances and the local economy. For the seventh year in a row, Chicago was voted Best Big City in the U.S. The award is based on the votes of travelers who rightfully admire Chicago’s beautiful waterfront, the city’s theaters, museums, historic architecture, and rich dining and vibrant music scenes. However, if you talk to enough Chicago residents, you get a completely different picture. For the past few years, the majority have been bearish about the future of the city, primarily due to public safety concerns. And if you talk to housing professionals, the majority are also concerned about Chicago real estate, according to a survey conducted by The Real Estate Center at DePaul University and its partner, the Urban Land Institute

Chicago District Council. These concerns are not unfounded. Crime and higher property taxes despite failing schools negatively affect housing demand and job creation. Historically, the Chicago area has been a laggard in terms of economic growth. But Chicago seems to be on the cusp of a turnaround. Last month, the number of building permits in the Chicago metro area was up by roughly 11% from a year ago, and compared to just 7% across the country, according to estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau. (Building permits were down 2% in the Los Angeles metro area and down a stunning 18% in the New York metropolitan area.) Why? The Chicago-area housing market was the most affordable among the 10 largest metropolitan areas. That meant relatively stronger housing demand and the third-highest annual increase in

home values. According to Zillow data, the typical earner here with a 20% down payment would spend roughly 30% of their income on housing, compared with 83% in Los Angeles and 55% in New York. Even Texas metros like Dallas and Houston can no longer beat Chicago in housing affordability. Going forward, relatively stronger demand and plans to build more housing to support newcomers would bolster local economic growth. While a city budget that promises not to raise property taxes is a step in the right direction, moving faster on zoning and land use reforms to encourage more housing supply should be a top priority. Crain’s contributor Orphe Divounguy is a senior economist at Zillow Group and former chief economist at the Illinois Policy Institute. His views do not necessarily reflect those of his employers.

Johnson’s budget puts LaSalle Street plan into question By Justin Laurence

Mayor Brandon Johnson’s plan to close a $538 million budget deficit in part by declaring a record $434 million surplus from the city’s tax-increment financing districts puts in question whether he supports a holdover initiative to transform the LaSalle Street corridor by spending hundreds of millions to subsidize the revamp of five largely vacant buildings. Late in her term, former Mayor Lori Lightfoot announced that five development teams had been selected to move forward in the city’s LaSalle Street Reimagined initiative. The effort would provide public dollars to private developers willing to redevelop office space into residences in an effort to inject street life to the corridor, so long as at least 30% of the new units were set aside at affordable rates. In total, the five selected projects requested $307 million in TIF money from the LaSalle Central TIF district, with one project, from Chicago-based Riverside Investment & Development at 135 S. LaSalle St., requesting a $115 million subsidy to deliver 430 apartments and a mix of retail and event space. But Johnson has not committed to LaSalle Street Reimagined. When asked on Oct. 12 about whether the city should support it, Johnson was noncommittal, saying his administration would continue work on creating a “comprehensive central business district plan.” The administration is open to funding some of the LaSalle Street projects, according to a source in the administration, but will evaluate each proposal on its own merits without feeling compelled to fund each project Lightfoot selected.

The two City Council members who represent the corridor both told Crain’s that Johnson needs to make a decision soon, as they’ve heard “concern” from developers who are weighing whether it’s worth sinking additional costs, potentially in the millions, into hiring the architects and consultants necessary to plan the complicated conversions. The development teams have been told to continue working with the Department of Planning & Development but have grown wary that they may go through the process only to have the mayor yank his support for the hefty public subsidies needed for the conversions. “I’ve spoken with a couple of property owners on LaSalle Street who already laid out quite a lot of money putting together plans, renderings, specs and all this stuff that is really costly, and they’re not getting the straight answer right now from the (city) on whether or not this program is still real,” said Ald. Brendan Reilly, 42nd. In April and May, a TIF investment committee set up by Lightfoot approved allocating over $300 million in TIF dollars to fund the five projects, according to city records. Those investment committee decisions are not binding and don’t serve as contracts, but were meant to preclude the dollars from being included in the annual surplus. When tax-increment financing districts are created, they freeze the districts’ assessed value at that point in time and divert future property tax dollars above that value into a separate pot, which is then used to spur development in the district. Johnson’s budget proposal includes a $434 million TIF surplus, which would sweep unallocated money from the city’s TIF districts

and return it to the various taxing bodies that would have received it if the district was not in place. That move returns over half the money to Chicago Public Schools, and city officials estimate $101 million would flow to the city, which Johnson plans to use to close the budget deficit. Mayor Brandon Over a quarter Johnson of the $434 million surplus, $111 million, stems from the LaSalle Central TIF district, which also serves as the piggy bank

for the $307 million in subsidies requested by the five development teams. Taking the money from the TIF now does not explicitly rule out funding for the projects, because over $150 million in annual property taxes are expected to flow into the LaSalle Central TIF until it expires in 2030. The LaSalle Central TIF had a fund balance of $226.6 million at the end of 2022, the latest annual report available for the city’s TIF districts. But if Johnson intends to declare large surpluses in future years like he did for 2024, its likely he’ll have to dip into the district’s reserves again.

“The vision for this program was always to lean very heavily on TIF,” Reilly said. “That’s a major question for a lot of people, ‘Will there be any funding to support this initiative or not?’ ” Freshman Ald. Bill Conway, 34th, said “every city in America, if not the world, has to rethink their downtown area. From becoming a pure business district to a district where people can work and live and shop and eat and play.” His hope is that these initial projects would help “spur that development” and lead to a “ripple effect” to help repopulate and energize the Loop.

BIG ENOUGH TO SERVE YOU. SMALL ENOUGH TO KNOW YOU. DIFFERENT APPROACH, BETTER RESULTS

WIN NT RU ST.CO M/LOCAL

Corrections ◗ In Greg Hinz’s Oct. 9 column, Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce

CEO Jack Lavin’s last name was misspelled.

Banking products provided by Wintrust Financial Corp. banks.

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Walgreens outlines $1 billion cost-cutting plan Strategies include closing unprofitable stores or reducing store hours in locations that can accommodate it

BLOOMBERG

By Katherine Davis

Who is Tim Wentworth, and can he save an ailing Walgreens? The new CEO with health care experience will take over a pharmacy giant struggling to redirect its business I By Katherine Davis

s the incoming CEO of Walgreens Boots Alliance, Tim Wentworth will be tasked with improving the outlook and long-term viability of the retail pharmacy giant as it struggles to redirect its business and enter the competitive health care delivery market, all while answering to a restless executive chairman hungry for returns. At 63 years old, Wentworth is coming out of retirement to take the helm at Walgreens and join its board of directors, effective Oct. 23. He brings nearly three decades of health care industry experience, notably as CEO of pharmacy benefit manager Express Scripts, which merged with Cigna Healthcare in 2018. After that deal, Wentworth served as president of Express Scripts and Cigna Services, and later as president of health services at Cigna, before becoming CEO of Cigna’s Evernorth Health Services, a See WENTWORTH on Page 38

Tim Wentworth, 63, will become CEO effective Oct. 23. I BUSINESS WIRE

Just days after announcing a new chief executive, Walgreens Boots Alliance is kick-starting a $1 billion cost-cutting program that the pharmacy retail giant hopes will help it find efficiencies and grow revenue after several quarters of poor performance that’s dragged down the company’s stock price. The cost savings, expected to be realized in the second quarter of fiscal year 2024, include reducing nonessential spending, cutting back on contracted and project work, and optimizing its transportation network, Walgreens leaders told investors Oct. 12. Other cost-cutting strategies include closing unprofitable stores or reducing store hours in locations that can accommodate it. Walgreens is also lowering capital expenditures by about $600 million, said Ginger Graham, Walgreens’ lead independent board director, who has been serving as interim CEO since former Chief Executive Roz Brewer left in September. “We must support our customer-facing activities, scrutinize every penny of spend that does not directly benefit the customer and improve cash management,” Graham said on the earnings call. The new cost-cutting program greets incoming CEO Tim Wentworth, who begins Oct. 23. Graham said the board conducted an extensive search process to find Wentworth, reviewing “dozens” of candidates before nar-

rowing it down to a top few who underwent interviews about their philosophy and approach to managing Walgreens’ complex, global set of businesses. Graham said Wentworth was a “very striking” candidate. Wentworth appeared briefly on the earnings call to express enthusiasm for his new role. “I have worked with Walgreens as a customer, partner, competitor, investor and family member, and I understand the challenges ahead for us, as well as for the

“We must support our customer-facing activities, scrutinize every penny of spend that does not directly benefit the customer and improve cash management.” — Ginger Graham, lead independent board director and interim CEO health care industry,” Wentworth said. “I see the opportunity before us to build on our pharmacy strength and our trusted brand to evolve health care and the customer experience to deliver better outcomes at a lower cost.” Wentworth takes over at a time when Walgreens dramatically needs to improve segments across the company. Despite an increase in See WALGREENS on Page 38

Big brokerages may upend the century-old way we buy homes The 6% commission, an old custom born in Chicago, may fade out as big brokerages announce changes in the wake of a class-action lawsuit By Dennis Rodkin

A significant change may be dawning in the way Americans have bought houses for more than a century, a model whose hometown is Chicago. The change could lead to slightly lower home prices, as agents shrink the size of their commission from the traditional 6% structure that gives that portion of the sale price to the agent for the seller, who then splits it in half with the agent for the buyer.

On Oct. 6, two big national real estate companies announced terms of their multimillion-dollar settlements in class-action lawsuits filed in 2019 that claimed the residential real estate industry’s customary 6% structure throttles competition that might lower commissions. In separate announcements from Anywhere, the parent of Chicago-area brands Coldwell Banker and Sotheby’s International Realty, and Re/Max, the brokerages both said they will change their practices around

commissions. Key among the changes, as Re/ Max’s announcement put it, is that they’ll encourage agents “to be very clear that commissions are negotiable and not set by law or corporate policy.” They will set no minimum for commissions, and they’ll expect agents for both buyer and seller to be transparent with their clients about the commission structure. Both firms also announced See BROKERAGES on Page 36

A real estate agent shows a prospective homebuyer a house for sale in Peoria. I BLOOMBERG

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Northwestern’s Ryan Field rebuild suffers first major blow By Brandon Dupré

Northwestern’s stadium plans took a hit Oct. 11 as Evanston officials voted against a proposal to add concerts at the new stadium. The city’s Land Use Commission voted 7-2 not to recommend Northwestern University’s text amendment to add up to six concerts at the new Ryan Field, the first formal blow to the school’s plans to build an $800 million stadium. As expected, the commission unanimously recommended Northwestern’s second proposal, a planned development that would replace the outdated Ryan Field with a new, modern design. While Evanston’s City Council, which will next hear the matter, has final say over the school’s two stadium proposals, the commission’s vote against the concerts signals the uphill battle the school will face as it must now convince the council to greenlight its plan. For Northwestern, it maintains the concerts are a necessary component to financially support the stadium in perpetuity. If the concerts were to be struck down by the City Council, following the recommendation by the commission, the school said it would walk away from the project altogether. “This project cannot and will not

move forward without (the approval of concerts),” Dave Davis, Northwestern’s senior executive director of neighborhood and community relations, said at the beginning of the Oct. 11 meeting. But commissioners took issue with the school’s claims that the concerts were financially necessary. “I also find the argument that Northwestern is making, that they can’t sustain this without their $2 million to $3 million (from the concerts), somewhat laughable,” said Land Use Commission Chair Matt Rodgers. While the commissioners probed the school’s plans over traffic, the lack of parking and potential noise issues, the conversation would always return to the concerts, which stand as the school’s only hurdle in an otherwise supported stadium rebuild project. Northwestern tried dialing down the number of summer concerts to six from 10 in its proposal to win more people to its side, but that didn’t dissuade opponents. When asked why a school with a $14 billion endowment needs the money, school officials pivoted. “In our discussions with donors and other stakeholders, it’s not just about the money,” said Katie Dale, an attorney for DLA Piper repre-

senting Northwestern. “It’s about activating this more than seven days a year.” The fate over the future of the stadium will now move to the City Council, which will have the final say over the approval of the stadium. No date has yet been set on when the first meeting on the stadium proposals will take place. While the school shares a broad base of support for the stadium, nearby residents, who will be most affected by the proposed concerts, remain largely opposed, said Land Use Commissioner George Halik. “This is a neighborhood issue . . . if you talk to the neighbors and you read their comments, it’s probably running 5 to 1 against the project,” he said.

CASSANDRA WEST PHOTOS

Evanston officials rejected the school’s proposal to host concerts at a new stadium, which it insists are necessary for the project to move forward

Northwestern’s Ryan Field

Suburban office vacancy nears 30% as workspace cuts continue Inventory in the suburbs is dropping, but so is demand as big new sublease listings flood the market By Danny Ecker

More companies trying to get rid of workspace over the past three months pushed the suburban office vacancy rate to a record high for the 11th consecutive quarter. Fueled by big blocks of sublease space that hit the market, the share of available office space in the suburbs increased to 29.7% at the end of September from 28.9% midway through the year, according to real estate services firm Jones Lang LaSalle. The new vacancy rate is up from 27.3% a year ago and 22.1% when the COVID-19 pandemic began. The numbers reflect the ongoing anguish for suburban office landlords, which continue to see the remote work movement weaken demand for workspace. Companies shrinking their footprints have whittled building owners’ bottom lines, with no visible end to the space-shedding trend more than three years after the COVID-19 pandemic began. While a number of companies

have called employees back to the office more regularly in recent weeks, it may not make a big difference for many landlords. Higher interest rates and lower property values have already pushed big suburban office properties into foreclosure, with Schaumburg Towers, Continental Towers in Rolling Meadows and the Riverway office complex in Rosemont recently added to that distress. More owners have also sought to hand over their properties to their lenders rather than face a potential foreclosure process or reinvest in a property for which it sees a bleak future. During the third quarter, it was big new sublease listings that pushed supply and demand further out of balance. The amount of office space available for sublease in the suburbs rose by 22% over the past three months to 3.9 million square feet, according to JLL. Insurance giant Zurich North America led the way by formally trying to offload almost 363,000 square feet of its Schaumburg headquarters — close to half of its footprint there — while CDW recently began offering more than 200,000 square feet of its office space in Lincolnshire for sublease. In another pending loss for the suburbs, benefits administration company Alight said in July that it would be moving its headquar-

ters from a 200,000-square-foot office in Lincolnshire to a 16,000-square foot space atop BMO Tower in the West Loop. Many companies are still thinking through how much office space they’ll need and what it should look like as effects of the pandemic fade, which makes it difficult to predict when the downsizing trend will slow down, said JLL Managing Director Steven Spinell, who negotiates office leases on behalf of tenants in the suburbs. “We still have some time before that (space-cutting) trend runs its course,” Spinell said. Many landlords aren’t holding their breath for office demand to make a big comeback soon, but they’re cheering for a reduction in supply. They got good news on that front during the third quarter, as the 2.3 million-square-foot former Sears headquarters campus in Hoffman Estates was sold to a Dallas-based developer that’s expected to transform the sprawling property with a data center project. In Naperville, Oak Brook-based developer Franklin Partners in August began razing the former Alcatel-Lucent office building at 1960 Lucent Lane, taking that 516,000-square-foot building out of the market. JLL’s data will reflect that supply reduction next quarter, according to a spokes-

man for the brokerage. JLL’s tally of total suburban office inventory now stands at 96 million square feet, the lowest mark since the end of 2010. Some office landlords also continue to experience less pain than others. Newer office properties and those that have seen substantial upgrades in recent years are outperforming the rest of the market as companies seek out workspace that will encourage employees to show up rather than work remotely.

“We still have some time before that (space-cutting) trend runs its course.” — JLL Managing Director Steven Spinell Net absorption, which measures the change in the amount of leased and occupied space compared with prior period, rose by more than 61,000 square feet during the third quarter among top-tier, or Class A, office buildings, JLL data shows. The same metric among Class B properties fell by roughly 5,000 square feet. “The flight to quality is definitely the overarching trend in the market right now,” Spinell said. The biggest deals boosting ab-

sorption during the third quarter were Ace Hardware’s move-in to 250,000 square feet at the former McDonald’s headquarters campus in Oak Brook and AIT Worldwide Logistics’ relocation to 2 Pierce Place in Itasca from a nearby industrial building it owns. The third quarter also brought a sale of a suburban office building, a rare deal amid rampant distress and higher interest rates keeping many investors on the sidelines. A venture of Chicago investor Gene Staples last month paid $29 million for the 11-story International Tower office building near O’Hare International Airport, according to Cook County property records. That price showed the loss of value for the 302,089-square-foot property, which last changed hands in 2014, when Chicago-based investor Golub bought it for more than $40 million. Helping close the sale last month: An entity affiliated with Sandy, Utah-based Bridge Investment Group — which had provided a loan to Golub in 2019 and took control of the property last year — provided a new mortgage to the Staples venture. That move, or so-called seller financing, has been a common offer for office properties over the past year to help eliminate the hurdle of buyers hunting for a new loan.

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International travel is leading O’Hare’s recovery The rebound in overseas flying hints at what could be lasting changes in air travel, in Chicago and elsewhere A Cathay Pacific jet departed O’Hare International Airport recently for Hong Kong, resuming nonstop flights for the first time in three years and getting a splashy sendoff from two airport firetrucks. International travel is now leading O’Hare International Airport’s recovery from the pandemic, marking a turnaround from the early days when domestic travel was the primary driver. It also hints at what could be lasting changes in air travel, in Chicago and elsewhere. The number of passengers on international flights at O’Hare in July increased 22% from a year earlier, while overall travel increased 9%, according to airport data. The volume of international passengers was 91% of the level in July 2019, before COVID-19 restrictions, such as lengthy quarantines, all but shut down overseas travel. A year earlier, international volumes were just 74% of prepandemic levels. The rebound is encouraging for O’Hare and a city that relies heavily on tourism. It’s also a reminder that corporate travel, upon which the airport and Chicago also depend, hasn’t fully returned. Domestic passengers inched up to 85% of pre-pandemic levels from 80% a year earlier. Overall, the airport was at 86% of pre-

O’Hare’s international traffic takes off

The number of international and domestic passengers traveling through O’Hare in July, compared with 2022 and 2019 levels. 2022 vs. 2019

2023 vs. 2019

Domestic 80% 85% International 74% 91% Total 79% 86%

BLOOMBERG

By John Pletz

Source: Chicago Department of Aviation

COVID passenger totals in July. It illustrates a recovery that has been lurching along in fits and starts. “The U.S. was ahead of rest of the world in having a strong domestic market coming out of the pandemic,” says John Grant of OAG, a travel-research firm. “Then international travel came back. Most international markets are up to or ahead of where they were in 2019.” International travel has surged, fueled by pent-up demand to visit friends and relatives and the desire to make up for missed vacation opportunities. The percent-

age of seats filled on airplanes, known as the load factor, is at record levels. O’Hare is among the top U.S. airports for international travel, in part because of the large number of domestic connecting flights operated by its two largest carriers, United and American. It doesn’t, however, have the same level of international traffic in terms of the raw number of passengers as coastal hubs, such as New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport. International travelers account for about 1 in 5 passengers at O’Hare, but they tend to spend

more at the airport and outside it, on hotels, restaurants and shopping. They also fuel the need for domestic connecting flights. The passengers on Cathay Pacific’s nonstop to Hong Kong were involved with more than 100 domestic connecting flights, says Chris van den Hooven, the airline’s senior vice president for the Americas. International travel holds the key to long-term growth for the industry. “We expect a disproportionate part of our growth in the second half of this decade to come from global long-haul flying as the U.S. domestic market is

mature,” Andrew Nocella, United’s chief commercial officer, said recently after the airline ordered 50 more Boeing 787s for delivery by 2030. At the moment, domestic travel is in flux, at O’Hare and elsewhere. Airlines such as United and American are dealing with pilot shortages, which disproportionately impact regional-jet carriers. O’Hare relies more on regional service than any major airport in the country. And corporate travel hasn’t fully recovered, presenting another headwind for getting domestic service at O’Hare back to pre-pandemic levels.

By Danny Ecker

The owner of Old Orchard mall has lined up two more deals to fill space in the Lord & Taylor department store that closed five years ago at the Skokie property, another step in its plan to breathe new life into the shopping center following the COVID-19 pandemic. Unibail-Rodamco-Westfield announced Oct. 10 that home furnishings company Arhaus and fashion brand Zara will open locations next year in the 115,000-square-foot former Lord & Taylor space, one of two vacant big-box anchors at the property. Arhaus signed on for 24,000 square feet, while Zara will relocate into a 40,000-square-foot store, a move and expansion from the roughly 23,000-square-foot space it occupies at the mall today. The retailers add to a new shopping mix in the former Lord & Taylor space that includes Puttshack, a tech-infused mini-golf company that will open a 30,000-square-foot location in the building next year. The deals are part of URW’s larger plan to bring new uses and developments to the north suburban mall, which, like many major shopping centers, needs to revive

empty department store spaces that were once magnets for foot traffic. The centerpiece of the Paris-based mall owner’s proposal is to demolish a vacant former Bloomingdale’s store on the northern edge of the property and build a 300-unit apartment complex in its place, along with a public park and up to 200,000 square feet of medical office space. After Lord & Taylor closed its store in 2018, URW temporarily filled a portion of it with a virtualreality gaming operator. But Arhaus, Zara and Puttshack are helping round out a long-term plan to reconfigure the space with a newly designed facade, among other features. “We want to continue to innovate, expand and push the boundaries of what a lifestyle destination can be,” Westfield Old Orchard Senior General Manager Serge Khalimsky said in a statement. “Whether that innovation comes from bringing in new retailers and experiences for our shoppers, enhancing the design of the existing mall, or incorporating a mixeduse development that aligns with our sustainable vision, we’re excited to continue to transform and elevate the center. This is only the

REZTARK DESIGN STUDIO

Old Orchard mall adding more stores to Lord & Taylor space

A rendering of the Arhaus and Zara stores planned for former Lord & Taylor space at Old Orchard mall.

beginning.” Work on URW’s larger plan for the residential and other new developments at the mall is expected to begin its next year and “will open in phases starting in 2026,” the statement said. Like it did to many malls, the pandemic dealt a major blow to business at Old Orchard, where overall sales dropped by 36% from 2019 to 2022, according to a report prepared last year for the village of Skokie. The property is still one of

the better-performing malls in the area, with a lineup of tenants including Apple, Tiffany and Crate & Barrel, among others. The mall is the largest source of sales tax revenue for Skokie, a big reason why the Skokie Village Board last year approved a redevelopment agreement that would include an extra 1% sales tax on transactions at the mall to help fund $84 million of improvements there. “The transformational redevel-

opment now underway at Westfield Old Orchard will enhance experiences for Skokie residents and visitors, supporting the center as an economic engine for our community,” Skokie Mayor George Van Dusen said in the statement. Boston Heights, Ohio-based Arhaus has locations in several Chicago suburbs as well as a location in the city in the Lincoln Park neighborhood. Spanish retail clothing chain Zara opened its first store at Old Orchard in 2008.

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By Danny Ecker

The real estate firm that foreclosed on the former Scott Foresman campus in Glenview last year has put it back up for sale after local planning officials rejected a plan to turn the vacant campus into rental housing. Chicago-based R2 has hired brokerage CBRE to seek a buyer for the 19.4-acre property at 1900 E. Lake Ave. in the northern suburb, according to a flyer. The listing comes just more than two months after Chicago-based developer Core Spaces withdrew a proposal to redevelop the site with 140 single-family homes for rent. Core Spaces pulled its plan after a unanimous vote against the project from the Glenview New Development Commission, an advisory body that deemed it too dense for the site. Now R2 is hunting for someone else to take control of the property, marketing it as a redevelopment opportunity with a wide range of possible uses. A buyer might be able to win community support for a lessdense residential project — 60 to 70 for-sale homes, the flyer suggests — or a conversion of the property into educational, health care, life sciences, self-storage or other uses. Its most recent tenant, Savvas Learning, moved out in 2020. The offering will test investors’ appetite for a redevelopment proj-

ect in a suburban community that has proven it has strong opinions about the future of the site. It’s also a tricky time to be selling almost any kind of commercial property, with higher interest rates and a tight lending environment making it difficult to finance ambitious projects. CBRE is playing up the Lake Avenue property as a rare opportunity to control a large redevelopment site in the heart of one of the area’s most affluent suburbs. A buyer that wants to maintain the existing four buildings on the site could also be eligible for tax incentives tied to reuse of historic buildings, the flyer said. Designed by architects Perkins & Will and completed in 1966, the midcentury modern-style complex was listed on the 2021 Most Endangered Buildings list of historic preservation advocacy group Landmarks Illinois. The campus’ original tenant, Scott Foresman, was the publisher of the “Dick and Jane” children’s book series. A joint venture of R2 and Wheaton-based T2 Capital Management acquired a $16.7 million mortgage on the property early last year and took possession of the site in a foreclosure sale. The previous owner, an affiliate of Oak Brook-based Inland Group, stopped making loan payments when Savvas moved out, prompt-

CBRE

Scott Foresman campus in Glenview for sale again

The former Scott Foresman campus at 1900 E. Lake Ave. in Glenview

ing a foreclosure lawsuit against it. Core Spaces had aimed to transform the site with single-family homes that were available for rent rather than for sale, a concept that has been gaining momentum nationwide but has not proven itself in the Chicago area. Homeowners near the site, however, voiced staunch opposition to any rental housing. Some raised concerns that homeowners would have to subsidize schoolaged children that would live in the new development, since new students would attend Glenview public schools and drive up property taxes.

Rush medical center unveils organ donor care center The new center aims to make lifesaving organ donation and transplantation safer and more efficient

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intensive care and surgical units for deceased organ donors that aim to make life-saving organ donation and transplantation safer and more efficient. The center will include six intensive care bays, two operating rooms and a family lounge. Gift of Hope says deceased donors in its donation service area — Illinois and northwest Indiana — will be transferred from hospitals across the region to Rush’s new donation center. Doing so will allow hospitals to free up their intensive care unit beds, operating rooms, equipment and staff, and send donors and their families to a facility that specializes in organ recovery and transplantation. Right now, many hospitals recover and transplant organs at their own institutions. Gift of Hope, one of 56 organ-

“It’s rare to find an infill site near downtown Glenview of this size. It’s really the only one,” Garrison said in the statement. Village officials suggested at a meeting in June they could be open to a project on the site with 65 units. Core Spaces said at the time that anything less than 108 units wouldn’t make financial sense. A village of Glenview spokesman did not respond to a request for comment on the listing. CBRE’s Tom Svoboda, Marcello Campanini and Tony Gange are marketing the former Scott Foresman campus on behalf of R2.

Shape His Future. And Yours.

By Katherine Davis

Rush University System for Health will soon open an organ donor care center at its flagship medical center with the help of a nonprofit that specializes in organ recovery. The center, which Rush says will be Illinois’ first hospital-based organ donor care center, will be operated in partnership with the Gift of Hope Organ & Tissue Donor Network, an Itasca-based nonprofit that coordinates organ and tissue donation. The organization serves more than 500 donors annually and has recovered about 30,000 organs since its founding in 1986. The donor care center, to be housed at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago’s West Side medical district, is scheduled to open in July 2024, Rush announced today. Gift of Hope also this year opened a community development hub in the South Side neighborhood of Chatham. The new center at Rush will operate 24 hours a day and provide

R2 CEO Matt Garrison said in a statement that his firm is mulling its own plan to redevelop the site with a “lower density single-family home project,” but that it has put it up for sale “to see what uses are out there, whether it’s medical, educational, industrial or any interesting new ideas.” R2 isn’t known as a single-family home developer. The firm is best known for its commercial work downtown, particularly on and near Goose Island, where it recently redeveloped the former Morton Salt warehouse on Elston Avenue into a music venue known as the Salt Shed.

procurement organizations that make up the nationwide organ donation system, says it works with 180 hospitals in Illinois and northwest Indiana and serves about 12 million people in its service area. More than 7 million Illinois residents are registered organ donors in the state’s program, according to Rush and Gift of Hope. “Rush is proud to work with Gift of Hope in serving our region’s families, hospitals and patients through the Gift of Hope Organ Donor Care Center at Rush — building on our long-standing work together and our priority on increasing organ and tissue donation and advancing equitable access to transplantation regionally and nationally,” Dr. Omar Lateef, Rush’s president and CEO, said in a statement.

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CRAIN'S LIST LARGEST BUSINESSES OWNED BY PEOPLE OF COLOR Ranked by 2022 revenue. Crain’s estimates are in gray. 2022 REVENUE (MILLIONS); % CHANGE FROM 2021

FULL-TIME LOCAL EMPLOYEES AS OF 12/31/2022; WORLDWIDE

TOTAL % OWNED BY PEOPLE OF COLOR; GROUP(S) OF OWNERSHIP MAJORITY OWNER(S)

$2,200.0 e 14.4% e

348 e 13,260 e

100% Asian

Steve W. Wang Chairman, CEO

Manufacturer and distributor of automotive and consumer products

LLC 2 NR ITSAVVY 313 S. Rohlwing Road, Addison 60101

$420.0 1 21.0%

117 305

60% Asian; Black/African American

Ronald Blaylock Chairman Munu Gandhi CEO

Integrated IT products and technology solutions provider

MARKETING NETWORK INC. 3 NR CARDENAS 1459 W. Hubbard St., Chicago 60642

$390.0 471.9%

39 57

79% Hispanic/Latino

Henry Cardenas CEO

Producer and promoter of concerts and soccer matches; experiential brand marketer

2022 RANK

COMPANY

MAT HOLDINGS INC. 6700 Wildlife Way, Long Grove 60047 847-821-9630; MATHoldingsInc.com

630-396-6300; ITsavvy.com

312-492-6424; CMNEvents.com

TYPE OF BUSINESS

BALDWIN RICHARDSON FOODS CO. 777 Oakmont Lane, Westmont 60559 630-607-1780; BRFoods.com

$385.0 24.2%

28 426

100% Eric G. Johnson Black/African American CEO

Manufacturer of sauces, syrups and condiments

SUTTON AUTO TEAM 21315 Central Ave., Matteson 60443 708-720-8000; SuttonAutoTeam.com

$381.4 13.0%

98 270

100% Nathaniel K. Sutton Black/African American CEO

Automotive dealerships

6 13 ATLAS 1 N. Franklin St., Chicago 60606

$300.3 e 100.2% e

100 3 375 3

100% Rick Hammell Black/African American CEO

HR technology firm and employer of record for businesses' international expansion

PATEL BROTHERS 8110 N. St. Louis Ave., Skokie 60076 847-675-4455; PatelBros.com

$300.0 e 11.1% e

175 e 930 e

100% Asian

Patel family

Retailer of Indian foods

VISTEX INC. 2300 Barrington Road, Hoffman Estates 60169 847-490-0420; Vistex.com

$289.0 7.1%

420 2,061

88% Asian

Sanjay Shah CEO

Enterprise software and services provider

SAYERS TECHNOLOGY 825 Corporate Woods Parkway, Vernon Hills 60061 800-323-5357; Sayers.com

$220.0 e 10.0% e

125 e 215 e

51% Asian

Hemanth Parasuram Chairman

Information technology products and services provider

ARBOR LODGING 566 W. Lake St., Chicago 60661 312-854-0540; ArborLodging.com

$188.0 45.7%

109 1,168

100% Asian

Vamsi Bonthala Sheenal Patel Co-CEOs

Chicago-based hotel investment and management company

PHARMACEUTICALS 11 12 NEXUS 400 Knightsbridge Parkway, Lincolnshire 60069

$162.1 -1.9%

97 191

100% Asian

Mariam S. Darsot Chairman

Pharmaceutical manufacturer

WINDOW + WALL LLC 12 14 REFLECTION 2525 N. Elston Ave., Chicago 60647

$158.3 38.6%

42 225

100% Hispanic/Latino

Rodrigo d'Escoto President

Design, supply and install facades for high-rise buildings

CAPITAL LLC 13 11 LOOP 111 W. Jackson Blvd., Chicago 60604

$150.0 1 -14.3%

110 300

80% James Reynolds Black/African American Chairman, CEO

Investment banking, brokerage and advisory firm

PROMOTIONS 14 15 OVERTURE 800 S. Northpoint Blvd., Waukegan 60085

$121.1 6.2%

175 200

70% Mike Meekins Black/African American CEO, Westbridge Capital

Branded merchandise, promotional products

GALERA PRODUCE 15 19 LA 2404 S. Wolcott Ave., Chicago 60608

$120.0 21.2%

85 100

100% Hispanic/Latino

INVESTMENTS LLC 16 17 ARIEL 200 E. Randolph St., Chicago 60601

$117.6 1 14.6%

77 122

77% John W. Rogers Jr. Black/African American 4 Chairman, co-CEO Mellody Hobson President, co-CEO

Global value-based asset management firm

CONSTRUCTION 17 16 BOWA 7050 S. Stony Island Ave., Chicago 60649

$103.0 e -5.6% e

85 e 125 e

100% Nosa Ehimwenman Black/African American President, CEO

General contractor and construction management firm

& SONS CONSTRUCTION CO. INC. 18 18 POWERS 2636 W. 15th Ave., Gary 46404

$99.9 e 0.0% e

42 e 75 e

100% Mamon Powers Jr. Black/African American Chairman, CEO Claude Powers President, COO

General contracting, construction management, design-build and owner's rep firm

FACILITY SOLUTIONS INC. 19 23 DIVERSE 12838 S. Cicero Ave., Alsip 60803

$85.0 45.3%

1,400 1,800

100% Mark Wright Black/African American President, CEO

Janitorial and facility services

PRESENCE 20 21 SDI 200 E. Randolph St., Chicago 60601

$82.8 1 13.9%

241 327

52% Asian

WILL GROUP 21 22 THE 4647 W. Polk St., Chicago 60644

$75.0 10.3%

90 108

100% Stephen L. Davis Black/African American Chairman

Shared services

RODERICK 22 25 ARDMORE 1500 W. Carroll Ave., Chicago 60607

$73.5 31.1%

193 255

100% Rashod R. Johnson Black/African American President, CEO

Infrastructure engineering solutions firm

ENGINEERING AND 23 26 MILHOUSE CONSTRUCTION INC.

$70.6 31.5%

274 324

85% Wilbur C. Milhouse III Black/African American Chairman, CEO

Interdisciplinary engineering/construction firm

$58.2 e 26.4%

97 e 538 e

100% Desmond A. Roberts Black/African American President

Auto dealerships

$56.5 1 201.1%

85 85

51% Hispanic/Latino

312-392-0145; AtlasHXM.com

847-996-3790; NexusPharma.net

773-772-5343; ReflectionWindow.com

312-913-4900; LoopCapital.com

888-456-9564; OverturePromotions.com

773-446-6161; LaGaleraProduce.com

312-726-0140; ArielInvestments.com

312-238-9899; BowaConstruction.com

219-949-3100; PowersAndSons.com

773-582-1022; DiverseFacilitySolutions.com

312-580-7500; SDIPresence.com

630-462-0230; TheWillGroup.com

312-795-1400; ArdmoreRoderick.com

333 S. Wabash Ave., Chicago 60604 312-987-0061; MilhouseInc.com

ADVANTAGE DEALER GROUP 9510 W. Joliet Road, Hodgkins 60525 708-352-2400; HodgkinsChevrolet.com

EA LLC 25 44 AGENCY 311 W. Walton St., Chicago 60610 312-879-0186; AgencyEA.com

Jose F. Vega Francisco Vega Jr. Jose D. Vega Partners

David A. Gupta Executive chairman

Lucy Stratton CEO

Wholesale produce distributor

IT services firm

Brand experience agency

Research by Sophie Rodgers (sophie.rodgers@crain.com). | Companies on this list must be at least 51% owned by people of color and be headquartered in Cook, Kane, Lake (Ill.), DuPage, Will, McHenry or Lake (Ind.) counties. NOTES: e. Crain's estimate. 1. Company estimate. 2. Formerly Elements Global Services. 3. From Built In Chicago. 4. 3.8% Asian; 0.6% Hispanic/Latino.

Want 65 businesses with 2022 revenue of at least $1 million? Become a Data Member: ChicagoBusiness.com/Data-Lists 8 | CRAIN’S CHICAGO BUSINESS | OCTOBER 16, 2023

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CHICAGO BOOTH INSIGHTS

Don’t overlook the power of the family business which has long been predicting the death rites of family business. (Logan Roy did us no favors, either.) Family firms are overlooked in the broader business context, despite being a dominant force for global employment, business activity and the GDP. Despite the negative perception, family businesses have outperformed their non-family counterparts. In 2020, research conducted by Credit Suisse found that “family-owned companies have outperformed non-family-owned peers on average by 370 basis points per year since 2006.” Not only do family firms outperform, they are also more stable. According to the Harvard Business Review, “results show that during good economic times, family-run companies don’t earn as much money as companies with a more dispersed ownership structure. But when the economy slumps, family firms far outshine their peers.” This stability contributes to higher average long-term financial performance. This May, I took my dad to the ultimate celebration of business: the Berkshire Hathaway annual conference. The experience offered insights both professional and personal. A highlight was a 2003 video

Jamie Shah is an entrepreneur-inresidence at the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship & Innovation and an assistant adjunct professor at Chicago Booth. She is managing director of her family’s business, Wood Dale-based Chem-Impex, and former chief operating officer of The Spice House. GETTY IMAGES

rowing up, business was always a topic of conversation in our family. A meal out with the Shahs typically involved a back-of-the-envelope analysis to get from restaurant capacity to restaurant revenue. We learned this primarily from my dad, who truly found joy in learning about all of the ways a living could be made. As an immigrant and a self-made businessman, my dad would often say in awe, “There are just so many ways to make money in America!” His enthusiasm was infectious, and it instilled in us a deep appreciation for business and the myriad opportunities that lay before us. Over the years, this passion for business expanded far beyond dinner conversations — especially now, since my father is also my boss. Together with my twin sister, our mom and 30 other extremely talented people, we run a life sciences business called Chem-Impex. Working side by side, I’ve had the privilege to witness firsthand his dedication, resilience and the values he brings to our business. The power of family business and just how fortunate I am to be a steward of one never ceases to amaze me. However, this sentiment is not what is reflected in popular culture,

of Warren Buffett on his decision to continue running Berkshire Hathaway. “I get to paint my own painting,” he said. “I do not have people saying, ‘Why don’t you use a little more red paint, or blue paint? Why don’t you paint a seascape instead of a landscape?’ I get to do my own thing. It’s a form of creativity. It’s exactly like somebody feels as a professional golfer or as a painter. They’re not doing it for the money, primarily. They’re doing it because they like doing something well and that happens to be down the route

of their talents.” It was a powerful metaphor that spoke of passion, creativity and autonomy in business. This sentiment felt familiar. It echoed the principles I’ve seen my father uphold in his own business journey. He’s always valued independence, building with a mindset of optimizing for freedom. While the weight of running a family business can be daunting, Buffett’s words served as a reminder of the beauty in that challenge. It made me reflect on my family’s

Advice for small businesses and entrepreneurs in partnership with the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

journey, the setbacks we’ve faced and the legacy we’re building. Never has our family’s business been just a means to an end; it is a canvas for creativity and expression, one that we get to create together. It is because of our family ownership structure that we are able to focus on maximizing our own personal values by creating value for our customers.

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S EDITORIAL

Johnson’s budget plan shows he’s listening to biz — at least for now Given the campaign rhetoric that drove Mayor Brandon Johnson into office earlier this year, Chicago business leaders already stung by his administration’s new real estate transfer tax and the passage of a new minimum wage for tipped workers anticipated his first budget could very well be larded up with a variety of new taxes — everything from a wealth tax to a head tax. So when it finally came time for the new mayor to unveil his actual spending plan on Oct. 11, an almost audible sigh of relief echoed through Chicago’s C-suites. That’s because Johnson’s $16.6 billion 2024 budget proposal follows through on his campaign pledge not to raise property taxes — but it also holds off on any of the significant tax hike ideas that had set the business community on edge after his election. The mayor faced a $538 million budget gap heading into this budget season, and he’s bridged that divide mainly by calling for eliminating city vacancies, refinancing debt and tapping into the reserves of the city’s tax-increment financing districts. And rather than slash spending on police, as some business leaders had feared he would, the mayor’s budget proposal keeps spending on the Chicago Police Department basically flat at about $2 billion. Sporting $187 million more in revenue than projected as recently as last month, Johnson’s budget also bets on a sunny outlook for tourism and entertainment — expectations that aren’t unfounded given recent trends in the hospitality and travel industries. Chicago hotels reached about 7 million room nights through August, the most recent data available from Choose Chicago, the city’s marketing arm

Mayor Brandon Johnson I JOHN R. BOEHM

— and that’s up 13% from a year earlier and a 90% recovery compared to 2019. Hotel revenue and taxes during that period rose about 15% to eclipse pre-pandemic levels. Meanwhile, traveler numbers at Chicago airports continue to climb. Domestic passenger counts at O’Hare International Airport inched up to 85% of pre-pandemic levels in July, up from 80% a year earlier. And the rebound in international travel has been even stronger, with the volume of international passengers this past July hitting 91% of the level seen in July 2019 before COVID and lengthy quarantines all but shut down overseas travel.

“A lot of economic data has come in since that time that gives us a lot of confidence in those particular key taxes,” Annette Guzman, the city’s budget director, told Bloomberg News after the mayor released the spending plan. “There’s a lot of stuff that’s going to be happening next year, so we have a lot of large events coming.” Chicago will once again welcome NASCAR’s street race as well as the Lollapalooza music festival. McCormick Place, meanwhile, will bustle with an auto show in February, the Democratic National Convention in August and a massive manufacturing trade show in September.

Johnson opted not to pursue a higher hotel tax, a decision that will help the city’s convention and hospitality industries to build on their recent momentum. And talk of a tax on jet fuel — an idea that might not have cleared legal muster anyway — also seems to have gone by the wayside at City Hall, at least for now. All that travel and hospitality activity puts a strong tailwind behind the mayor as he looks to get his budget passed through the City Council. But of course, there are other challenges ahead even if council members bless the spending plan as-is. The mayor is aiming to reopen mental health clinics, reduce crime and create job opportunities for disadvantaged communities — all while operating under a looming $35 million pension burden. There’s also the rising cost of the migrant influx to consider: The mayor’s spending forecast trimmed the amount earmarked for migrants to roughly $150 million from a previous projection of $200 million as the administration counts on expanded work permits as well as additional federal and state aid. So that’s a potential stumbling block that could trip up Team Johnson unless the Illinois congressional delegation and Gov. J.B. Pritzker ride to the rescue. Going forward, it remains to be seen whether the mayor’s forecasts are accurate — and balancing the following year’s budget will no doubt be more challenging without making some tough choices between raising revenue and cutting costs. Until then, however, Johnson should be commended for listening to constituents who worried that a slew of fresh taxes would upend the city’s still-nascent recovery and drive future investment away from Chicago.

PERSONAL VIEW

Regulators need to keep the pressure on Peoples Gas I

f it seems like overnight temperatures have been unseasonably cold in Chicago recently, they’re no match for the chilling development that occurred in the dark hours last week at the Illinois Commerce Commission. Just before midnight Oct. 6, an ICC administrative law judge issued a recommendation, known as a “proposed order,” that, if adopted, would jolt Peoples Gas customers with a record-setting $350 million rate hike at a time when the utility’s parent company has amassed six straight years of record profits and a crisis of soaring heating bills has reached epidemic

proportions in Chicago. Whether this ominous threat, which emerged in the dead of night, ever sees the light of day is a decision now entrusted to five ICC commissioners, who have an opportunity to reject the business-as-usual climate that has led to the unaffordable conditions afflicting Peoples Gas customers today. Fortunately, there have been encouraging signs that a culture of increased accountability, stricter scrutiny and tighter checks on Peoples’ profit-mongering may be budding at the ICC. Following Gov. J.B. Pritzker’s appointment of several new ICC

regulators, Crain’s reported in July that the “commission has become noticeably more aggressive in challenging utility spending and policies.” With the threat of a massive Peoples Gas rate hike looming — the $350 million increase recommended by the ICC’s administrative law judge would shatter the previous state record for a gas utility by a staggering $110 million, or 46% — this is no time for regulators to step off the gas. After all, the proposed order released last week would accelerate a cycle of rising heating costs that has been driving Chicago families into destitution. Nearly 1 in 5

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, 130 E. Randolph St., Suite 3200, 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.

Peoples customers are in debt to the utility, largely because the fixed monthly charges on their average bill — meaning the costs they start with every month before they ever use a trace of gas — have skyrocketed to nearly $50 a month. Even worse, the resulting financial squeeze is perpetuating chronic racial inequalities in Chicago, since Black and Brown communities have been plagued by the highest burden of debt, according to ICC records. These woeful hardships can be attributed largely to Peoples’ unchecked spending See PEOPLES on Page 11

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.

10 | CRAIN’S CHICAGO BUSINESS | OCTOBER 16, 2023

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PERSONAL VIEW

Stop blaming Mayor Johnson for the asylum-seeker crisis Criticism of Mayor Brandon Johnson’s handling of the asylum seekers arriving in Chicago is patently unfair. The city’s response is being described as haphazard and inadequate. The mayor just inherited more than 14,000 new residents with little more than the clothes on their backs. People are fleeing death like Eastern European Jews from pogroms and the Irish from the Potato Famine. The expected cost to taxpayers is $225 million, resulting in a total budget deficit of $538 million in 2024. Contracting out services to private companies and nonprofits can be a way to save money in government, but in a crisis, it can result in waste, as it is hard to keep the books on the run. It is wrong for the media and other political leaders to pile on the mayor and his staff. He did not ask for this; it was a mean-spirited stunt attributable primarily to the governors of Texas and Florida. And if you want, you can interpret

mean-spiritedness as racism. I believe Mayor Johnson and his staff are doing their level best to deal with a difficult humanitarian crisis. But it should not be his or the city’s burden alone. When there is a natural disaster in any part of the state, there is a predetermined emergency management plan. There are clear lines of authority, policies and procedures in place that prioritize lifesaving and restoring vital infrastructure. In most instances the federal, state and local governments are involved on a coordinated basis. Chicago and Illinois have a

choice to make: Do we use this as an opportunity for political criticism and finger-pointing while people suffer, or do we rise to the occasion, taking on this burden collectively and effectively as if we were dealing with a natural or man-made disaster? To first step should be a metropolitan-wide — if not statewide — effort to find safe and sanitary shelters, with the ultimate intent of transitioning asylum seekers to jobs, housing, health care and education. This shared burden would be an investment in fostering a new wave of productive immi-

profit organizations. It stands to reason that dispersing asylum seekers to multiple communities will have less of a logistical and financial impact on any given community than it is now having on Chicago. There will still be a cost, but I have an answer to that. Send the bill to Texas and Florida.

grants to Chicago. Please recall that Chicago grew and prospered over decades because of multiple waves of immigrants locating here. The logical leadership in this effort should be a consortium of state and local emergency management agencies that can make placements of families where language is not a barrier, coupled with the shelters and services I mention above. It must be an all-hands-ondeck effort including the state, cities and counties, schools, health care providers, park districts, chambers of commerce and non-

Michael D. Belsky is a former mayor of Highland Park and former executive director at the Center for Municipal Finance at the University of Chicago’s Harris School of Public Policy.

PEOPLES From Page 10

on a controversial pipe-replacement program that has been called out by independent auditors as a conduit for financial waste and mismanagement. The projected cost of the program has ballooned from $2 billion to $11 billion as Peoples exploited a practice that allowed it to charge consumers upfront for its spending binge on pipe replacement. That left regulators with the task of combing through the records years after the fact to determine whether those investments were prudent. And based on auditor findings that the program is dramatically behind schedule and has not demonstrably achieved its goal of preventing gas leaks in the system, there is every reason to believe that funds Peoples wants to pour into this initiative, accounting for more than half of its record rate-hike request, are gratuitous. And yet the proposed order now pending before regulators not only permits spending on this boondoggle to continue uninhibited, but it even rejected a request from consumer advocates to make Peoples do nothing more than document and justify how it plans to allocate that money. In other words, ICC regulators are being asked to approve a recommendation that would entitle Peoples to raise rates and dodge accountability for it. That’s a formula for business as usual. ICC commissioners should take this opportunity to signal that the buck will literally stop with them, rather than getting passed along to the bulging profits of Peoples Gas.

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Sarah Moskowitz is executive director of the Citizens Utility Board. OCTOBER 16, 2023 | CRAIN’S CHICAGO BUSINESS | 11

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LE AD E R S H I P GR E ATE R CH I CAGO

power cross-sector

As Leadership Greater Chicago celebrates the 40th anniversary of our founding, we proudly introduce the 2023 Class of LGC Fellows. Developing civic leaders has never been more critical, and their responsibilities have never been more complex. LGC provides the space, knowledge and network to drive bold, transformative change. Through our Signature Fellows Program, we build and strengthen the pipeline of civic leaders who are inspired and willing to powerfully lead the future of our region.

Now accepting applications. Apply or sponsor at lgcchicago.org 1 Maria K. Alexakis CIBC Bank USA

10 Tameeka Christian, Ph.D. 19 Nicolas Guzman Faegre Drinker Biddle & Reath LLP J.B. & M.K. Pritzker Family Foundation

2 Jessica Andujar-Redman Fifth Third Bank, National Association

11 Kyle Clauss Skills for Chicagoland’s Future

3 Jeannice W. Appenteng United States Attorney’s Office, Northern District of Illinois

12 Timothy Daly The Joyce Foundation

4 Jeffery Beckham, Jr. Chicago Scholars 5 Nicole Bell City of Chicago 6 Alison Bodor The Options Clearing Corporation 7 Timnetra Burruss Cook County Board of Review 8 Liz Butler Taft 9 Rosa I. Carrillo The Chicago Community Trust

tab doc.indd 1

13 Cassandra N. Di Prizio Boston Consulting Group 14 Ahmadou “Mo” Dramé Illinois Justice Project 15 Christopher Egger Quatrro Business Support Services 16 Brandon Fair United Airlines 17 Juatise Gathings Discover Financial Services 18 Bria L. Gillum John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

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20 Kelly Hallberg, Ph.D. University of Chicago Inclusive Economy Lab 21 Mark Harris Discovery Partners Institute– University of Illinois System 22 Ivan Hidalgo Beam Suntory 23 Adrienne Irmer Illinois Institute of Technology 24 Jaclyn Jackson National Equity Fund 25 Eric B. Johnson Open Books 26 Uzma A. Kazmi PNC Bank 27 Amy Laboy Greater Chicago Food Depository

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28 Haven Leeming Builders Initiative

37 Dr. Raju Prasad CRISPR Therapeutics

46 Swathi Staley YMCA of Metropolitan Chicago

29 Shannon Lightner-Gometz Illinois Department of Public Health

38 Ana Prokic-Kostic CBRE, Inc.

47 Erin Steva Chicago State University

30 Angie Lobo Indo-American Center

39 Eréndira Rendón The Resurrection Project

48 Sahr Sweiss Greeley and Hansen LLC

31 Mike Menzer Allstate Insurance Company

40 Sarah Garza Resnick Personal PAC

49 Noemie D. Tilghman Deloitte Consulting LLP

32 Jason T. Mercer Cleveland Avenue

41 Quincy E. Roseborough Metropolitan Family Services

50 Nilofer Umar Sidley Austin LLP

33 Michael Miranda BMO Wealth Management–U.S.

42 Clarita Santos Health Care Service Corporation

34 Jose M. Muñoz La Casa Norte

43 Adrian Segura Conic Group

51 Renee E. Walker Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago

35 Carla Vara Murphy Northern Trust Corporation

44 Alvia Siddiqi, MD, FAAFP Advocate Health

36 Elin Park Jenner & Block LLP

45 Kimberley Smith University of Chicago Crime & Education Labs

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52 Sara Wasserteil Cara Collective 53 Lizzy Whitehorn Office of Governor JB Pritzker, State of Illinois

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Introducing Crain’s 40 Under 40 class of 2023 For 34 years, Crain’s Chicago Business has tipped you off to the city’s up-and-coming leaders, and this year is no exception. Our newest class is full of founders, inventors, investigators and strategists. They’re CEOs, presidents, partners and creators. And they’re just getting started. Know a rising star we need to meet? Nominations are now open for Crain’s 40 Under 40 class of 2024: ChicagoBusiness.com/40snoms.

Adrienne Alexander, 37 Director of intergovernmental affairs, AFSCME Council 31

“It’s really exciting to be at a point where we’re thinking about how to invest in the public system again and how to think about new, different ways of delivering public services and mental health services.”

GEOFFREY BLACK

nion membership runs in Adrienne Alexander’s blood. Her grandfather moved to Michigan during the Great Migration to work in a General Motors plant. Her grandmother served as a union steward in a hospital, and her other grandfather joined the ranks of the U.S. Postal Service. Those jobs, and their associated pensions, paved a path toward the middle class for a Black family, Alexander said. “It was very clear to me the difference that it made for their lives,” she said. “They were able to send many of their kids to college and, in one generation, because of that union, it completely changed the family trajectory.” It’s no surprise, then, that Alexander’s own career at the American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees has focused on pension fight after pension fight in Illinois since she joined the public employee union in 2010. As a lobbyist for AFSCME, Alexander herds elected officials at the city, state and county levels in Illinois. While she describes their work on pensions as a team effort, she emerged as the point person for a Chicago City Council ordinance passed this spring — referred to by supporters as a “labor peace agreement” — requiring labor deals for human services workers. Roberta Lynch, executive director of AFSCME Council 31, attributes Alexander’s latest victory to her ability to forge connections with a broad spectrum of council members, from Democratic Socialists to more conservative Democrats. “AFSCME isn’t a partisan organization, and Adrienne isn’t a partisan person. She’s all about working to improve the lives of our members and strengthen the vital public services they provide,” says Lynch. “I think elected officials, both in the City Council and the state Legislature, recognize and appreciate that.” In May, Mayor Brandon Johnson also appointed Alexander to his Health & Human Services transition subcommittee, which laid out the policy priorities for his new administration. On the campaign, Johnson promised to restore 14 public mental health clinics in Chicago. “It’s really exciting to be at a point where we’re thinking about how to invest in the public system again and how to think about new, different ways of delivering public services and mental health services,” Alexander says. — Leigh Giangreco

OCTOBER 16, 2023 | CRAIN’S CHICAGO BUSINESS | 13

Dave Baldwin, 35 President of business operations, Chicago Fire Football Club

tanding 6 feet, 5 inches tall, wearing a suit and mixing it up with fans while eating tacos in the Soldier Field parking lot before a Chicago Fire FC game, Dave Baldwin intentionally makes himself easy to spot. “I think a big piece of our success has been selling face-to-face and getting to know people,” says Baldwin, who is wrapping up his first season as the Major League Soccer club’s president. “A large portion of the ticketing industry takes place over the phone. When was the last time you bought something significant over a phone?” With the help of some advanced sales analytics, the in-person strategy has proven effective for Baldwin during a 15-year run in professional sports, marked by ticket sales turnarounds at struggling franchises. Prior to joining the Fire, he helped the Miami Dolphins leverage a stadium renovation to vault from one of the lowest ticket sales totals to among the top of the NFL. In 2021,

Baldwin joined the Washington Command- going to succeed.” That confidence in Baldwin has paid off ers as the team was coming off four straight losing seasons, then led them to No. 2 in the so far, with the Fire reporting its revenue is NFL in new club seats sold and third in new up 80% year over year this season. The Grosse Pointe, Mich., native made his first annual suites sold. That track record got the attention of Chi- big move by convincing Mansueto to cover cago billionaire and Fire owner Joe Mansueto, who has charged Baldwin with bolstering the business side of a club that has missed the playoffs in nine of the past 10 sea- — Joe Mansueto, owner, Chicago Fire sons and has consistently been among the bottom of the 29-team league in parking costs for season-ticket holders beginning next season at Soldier Field. paid attendance. Baldwin is now in position to be an influ“He’s driven these turnarounds at not just one club, but many clubs,” Mansueto ential voice in the future of the lakefront stasays, noting similar work Baldwin did with dium if the Chicago Bears opt to leave, as the Phoenix Suns and the Detroit Tigers well as a key figure shaping how the Fire’s and Red Wings earlier in his career. “Be- controversial soccer complex under conyond that, he’s just a natural leader. . . .He struction on the Near West Side builds ties engenders a lot of confidence among the to the surrounding community. — Danny Ecker management team that (he’s) a guy that’s

“He’s driven these turnarounds at not just one club, but many clubs.”

Krysta Bavlsik, 39 Chief operating officer and chief financial officer, Remedy Medical Properties maintaining control of the buildings. Bavlsik stands out as a female C-suite executive in a commercial real estate industry dominated by men, a dynamic she notices and is trying to change, at least on the margins. “I bring a different perspective than all the bros,” says Bavlsik, who grew up in a blue-collar family in Garfield Ridge, a few blocks from Midway Airport. “I think a lot of our success has been based on having different perspectives in the room.” —Danny Ecker

PHOTOS BY GEOFFREY BLACK

s an up-and-coming research manager at commercial real estate brokerage MBRE in 2011, Krysta Bavlsik had proven her data analytics mastery so well that the firm’s head of leasing enlisted her for a special assignment: helping him win the company’s fantasy football league. Bavlsik created a basic algorithm using players’ projected performance to guide fantasy draft selections, a tool that may be commonplace on mobile apps today but was not easy to find at the time. The leasing chief ultimately won the league. “She’s a whiz on running numbers,” says Andy Davidson, a veteran broker who represents companies in their office searches and a competitor in the fantasy league, which has since banned such outside help. More than a decade later, Bavlsik’s analytical prowess is paying off on a much bigger scale. She and longtime MBRE colleague Peter Westmeyer split off the health care arm of the company in 2020 to form Remedy Medical Properties, which today is the largest private owner of health care real estate in the country. The firm has grown its nationwide portfolio since then by nearly 50% to around 30 million square feet across 700 properties, while its headcount has doubled to around 300 employees, two-thirds of whom are based in Chicago. The University of Chicago alumna — who took economist Steven Levitt’s class that was largely based on his bestseller “Freakonomics,” before it was published — cut her teeth in commercial real estate as an analyst for LaSalle Investment Management prior to joining MBRE. She put Remedy on stable ground during the COVID-19 pandemic by recapitalizing $2.6 billion worth of its properties, deals in which she found new capital partners to replace existing ones while

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Rachel Belano, 35 Director of supply chain operations, Ulta Beauty

hen Rachel Belano started at Ulta Beauty in 2014, it was milestone after milestone for the Bolingbrookbased company. And she can pinpoint the celebrations. Ulta’s 700th store opened the same year she started. There were treats in the Romeoville distribution center when the beauty products retailer opened its 800th store in 2015. Those days, e-commerce was in its early stages, and most people didn’t know what a supply chain was. Nine years later, Ulta has nearly doubled its store count and become dependent on online sales to fuel growth. Powering it all is Ulta’s robust distribution network. That’s where Belano comes in. As Ulta grew, Belano worked her way up to become director of the company’s supply chain operations. It’s a big job, and one could argue her role has never been more vital to the company than it is now. Her team manages the distribution center processes that are responsible for getting products to Ulta’s nearly 1,400 stores and to its customers, a job that’s become increasingly complex in recent years. Though 75% of loyalty members only bought items in-store during the second quarter, there is an array of other ways customers can get their products. Ulta now lets people buy products online and pick them up in store, offers same-day delivery and can ship directly from a retail location. In the second quarter, Ulta’s stores fulfilled

tion centers with automation, and building new ones, to help facilitate all the online ordering and meet the need for speedy deliveries. The company has seven distribution centers now, including one that opened earlier this year in South Carolina. “(Belano) has been an instrumental part in the growth of our distribution centers and their evolution,” said Erik Lopez, senior vice president of supply chain planning and operations. He hired Belano and is her boss now. “She’s a major asset.” Belano grew up in Skokie, with parents who immigrated from the Philippines in the 1980s. She decided as a child to get her MBA — probably before she was old enough to understand what that meant, she admits. But it was a good decision. She fell in love with supply chain, and she started her career at Target before moving to Ulta. It’s been a wild ride, with all the firsts, Belano says. A highlight for her: She led outbound transportation — which means getting products out of the distribution center to the store — when Ulta opened its first location in Hawaii. It was the first time the company did ocean transport, and she visited ports in Honolulu and Maui to sort it all out. “These things only happen once for the first time,” she says. “It’s been pretty cool.” — Ally Marotti

“(Belano) has been an instrumental part in the growth of our distribution centers and their evolution. She’s a major asset.” — Erik Lopez, senior vice president at Ulta Beauty 39% of its digital orders. That all requires smooth shipments from the distribution centers. “We’ve had so much growth as an organization, and the supply chain has really had to follow suit with that, but also lead the way,” Belano says. Ulta is also retrofitting existing distribu-

Corey Black, 39 Director of retail real estate, Cushman & Wakefield

orey Black used to sell trade show booths for a living. Now, he’s selling something that’s not exactly in high demand: retail space on North Michigan Avenue. The broker for Cushman & Wakefield is part of a team marketing retail space at the former John Hancock Center and other storefronts on the struggling Magnificent Mile, which has seen its retail vacancy rate approach 30% in recent months. Though it’s close geographically, the Mag Mile is a long way from the Austin neighborhood, where Black grew up with his parents and sister in a “teeny-tiny” apartment. His mom was an accounts payable clerk, while his dad worked in a warehouse before landing a job as a CTA bus driver. At Cushman, the DePaul University alum works both sides of the market, for landlords and tenants, including Vans, Coach, FedEx and Guidepost Montessori, and doesn’t just focus on the Mag Mile.

“He’s very relatable,” says Cushman & Wakefield Executive Managing Director Greg Kirsch. “He has this ability to be very natural — it’s never forced.” But the shopping strip occupies a lot of time and energy these days. Unlike at his previous job, Black isn’t selling as much as he’s trying to find ways to bring landlords and tenants together. It’s a tough balancing act. Tenants want screaming deals on rent. Landlords don’t want to capitulate, at least not yet. “We don’t want to reset the market, but we also want to do a deal,” says Black, who’s raising his two sons in Bronzeville with his wife, Alex, an assistant state’s attorney. It’s not easy, but Black, who switched to real estate a decade ago, hasn’t lost his broker’s optimism. “Next couple of years, we’re going to see a big improvement on that street,” he says. “Tourists are coming back.” — Alby Gallun

“Next couple of years, we’re going to see a big improvement on (the Mag Mile). Tourists are coming back.”

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One ing the the oth cen with “M city of-i yea how and imp Th Geo loca flue “I ricu

Rich Bloomfield, Zack Day and Greg Williams, all 39 Bloomfield (from left): Co-founder and CEO Day: Co-founder and director of brewing operations Williams: Co-founder and sales director Funkytown Brewery

fter college, when Funkytown Brewery’s three co-founders had a little bit more money to spend on beverages, they made a quick observation: They were the only Black people bringing craft beer to birthdays, barbecues and other get-togethers. But they weren’t the only ones intrigued by the stuff. “Black people, women, Hispanic people, they were always really curious as to why we’re into beer. They’d tell us why they didn’t like beer,” says Rich Bloomfield. “With that, we saw there’s a lane here for us. We’re getting feedback on what kind of beer style they like. We were seeing there are specific preferences to grab what would be considered that entry-level beer drinker.” Bloomfield and co-founders Zack Day and Greg Williams — who first met during their Oak Park school days — started brewing beer in Day’s parents’ garage. They focused on beer that was flavorful but low on bitterness so as not to turn away the IPAaverse. Thus, Funkytown Brewery was born in 2017. The company formed the following year, and its first beers hit the market in 2021. Funkytown has made pale ale, Irish red ale, oatmeal stout and more. Brews have included its flagship, a pale ale called HipHops and R&Brew Volume One, and an American amber ale called Woo-Wap-DaBam. The brewery strives to be inclusive, representing Black and Brown people, Day says. “We’re just trying to bring new and upcoming beer drinkers into a culture that hasn’t been marketed toward them or hasn’t spoken to them,” says Day. Of course, the birth-of-a-brewer-in-agarage story is not new, particularly in Chicago. But with Funkytown, there’s one major dif-

ference: Just four of Illinois’ 302 craft breweries are Black-owned, and that includes Funkytown. The national statistics aren’t much better. In 2021, just 0.4% of the 9,210 U.S. craft breweries were Black-owned, according to data from the Colorado-based Brewers Association. “That right there gave us the ammunition,” Williams says. “We knew once we start sustaining and keep it moving, we’ll be the trailblazers here in Chicago.” These days the growth is coming quickly at Funkytown, as is the recognition. Revenue for 2022 was $262,000; this year, it did $200,000 in the first two quarters. Though the company is not yet turning a profit, its profile is growing: It counts Guaranteed Rate Field, Wrigley Field and Buffalo Wild Wings among its accounts. And among its accolades: This summer, Funkytown was named the 2023 winner of the Samuel Adams Brewing the American Dream’s Brewing & Business Experienceship, bringing with it a larger audience and more customers. Funkytown, which operates out of Logan Square craft brewery incubator Pilot Project, to which it was admitted in 2021, now sells its beverages in more than 900 locations in Chicago, Milwaukee and northwest Indiana. The brewery plans to open a taproom in fall 2024, the co-founders say. But first, they need to quit their day jobs. Williams is a program manager at Wesco Distribution, and Day is a counselor at Reilly Elementary School in the Avondale neighborhood. Bloomfield quit his job at a University of Chicago-affiliated nonprofit in August. “The amount of excitement these guys can galvanize?” says Dan Abel, co-founder of Pilot Project. “They’re incredible marketers, and of course great brewers, too. But that combo is what makes brands skyrocket.” — Ally Marotti

Kemena Brooks, 37 Director of development in Chicago, The Community Builders wanted to know how I could play a part in changing things so more families can have access to all the things I had.” As the director of development at The Community Builders in Chicago, Brooks has spent the past five years doing just that. She was a leader in the development of 508 Pershing at Oakwood Shores, which brought 53 affordable rental units and retail space to Bronzeville, “a growing neighborhood that is dying for additional retail,” as she puts it. In January, the Pritzker Traubert Foundation’s $10 million Chicago Prize went to another of Brooks’ projects, the proposed Sankofa Wellness Village that would bring health care, fitness and arts programming to long-disinvested West Garfield Park. “In a neighborhood that for many years had the lowest life expectancy in the city of Chicago, we have an opportunity to make an impact on many levels,” Brooks says. “That project is truly my why.”

Allison Porter-Bell, whose work for an affordable-housing lender has often put her together with Brooks, says in Brooks she sees “a level of gratitude for the experiences you had, and enough empathy to want to work in a realm that can help everyone be afforded better experiences.” It comes not only from those family vacations, Porter-Bell suggests, but from Brooks’ years playing basketball, including four years on a full-ride scholarship at the University of North Carolina Greensboro. “It’s sportsmanship,” Porter-Bell says. Until recently, Brooks and her wife, Ashleigh Brooks, have been big fans of the city’s breweries, sampling as many as they could, and of the Chicago Sky women’s basketball team. But those extracurriculars are on hold at the moment, as their first child was born in August. “We’re joyful and we’re adjusting,” she told Crain’s five days into life as a parent. — Dennis Rodkin

PHOTOS BY GEOFFREY BLACK

hen she was 16, Kemena Brooks went with her parents and brother on a family vacation to Los Angeles. One day, they did the touristy thing, walking along Hollywood Boulevard, looking at the stars in the sidewalks emblazoned with the names of great performers. But on another day, they went to Watts, a longtime center of the Black population, marked with poverty. “My dad always said we haven’t seen a city until we see how they treat their lowestof-income people,” Brooks says now, 21 years after that L.A. trip. “We needed to see how their neighborhood impacted them and understand how my neighborhood impacted me.” The Brooks family lived in Prince George’s County, a Washington, D.C.-area locale that is among the nation’s most affluent majority-Black places. “I had access to good schools, extracurriculars, grocery stores,” Brooks says. “I

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Damarr Brown, 32

Charles Calloway Jr., 39

Partner, Chapman & Cutler

Chef de cuisine, Virtue

breaking the mold on what fine dining can be and who it can be for. “It’s been interesting exploring that,” says Brown, “and people being excited about the things coming out of the kitchen that literally I saw my grandmother doing when I was growing up.” Since helping to launch Virtue, Brown has opened other restaurants with Williams, including Top This Mac N’ Cheese, a South Side spot in which he is a partner. Williams — himself a Beard Award winner — says Brown embraces a vision and maintains the standard of values that Virtue operates under. “There’s an idea of what the chef looks like, and the celebrity chef is — has been for many years — a white male,” Williams says. “He gets to reprogram that narrative through his work, through his identity.” — Ally Marotti

rom a young age, Charles Calloway Jr. would help his mother with the finances of the family business, displaying a knack for money and numbers. But despite his early talents, and a degree in finance, he wanted to distance himself from business. “When I got to law school, my biggest worry was I didn’t want to just solely do finance anymore,” he said. He interned for a judge and then moved to New Orleans to work on the Innocence Project, representing inmates with wrongful conviction cases at the Louisiana State Penitentiary. But before long, he had an itch to get back into business, to really pursue the things that “made me tick.” Chicago’s Chapman & Cutler, a law firm that specializes in finance, was the perfect fit, where Calloway could combine his talents in law with his background in finance. Now, as a partner and member of the firm’s Finance Department, he will document and close some 50 transactions a year totaling in the ballpark of $10 billion to $15 billion, a staggering volume and testament to his competitive drive, which he said has always pushed him throughout his career. Calloway has also represented buyers in a number of high-profile stadium financing deals, including TD Garden in Boston, Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium, Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia and the newly constructed Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas. “He’s been a trailblazing Black attorney in a space that’s hard to break into,” says Andrea Zopp, a managing partner at Chicagobased venture-capital firm Cleveland Avenue, and “he’s been involved at the community level from the get-go.” Calloway was recently named the diversity outreach partner at Chapman, where he works on familiarizing children throughout Chicago on finance law, creating pipelines for kids who show interest in law at a young age. “You can’t just create an internship program in college,” he says. “You need to build mentorship programs beginning in middle schools on up, and that’s what we did, working in Chicago schools and in underserved communities.” He is on the board of trustees of the American College of Investment Counsel and on the board of the Black Ensemble Theater. He is a 2022 Fellow of the Leadership Greater Chicago Signature Fellows Program. — Brandon Dupré

“Virtue is the first time I cooked professional food I grew up eating. It’s also the first time I cooked food for a large group of people that looked like me, other than those church dinners.”

PHOTOS BY GEOFFREY BLACK

amarr Brown remembers the first time he saw a chef who looked like him. He was in a River North alley, knocking on the back door of the now-shuttered MK. Then 18, he was nearing graduation from the Cooking Hospitality Institute of Chicago and was looking for a job. There he found chef Erick Williams, a Black man, with MK’s logo on his chef’s coat and his name underneath. “That was the first time I had seen that in person,” Brown says. It made his dreams tangible. “I had seen all these older white guys with the tall hats and the white chef’s coats.” Brown grew up in Harvey watching Emeril Lagasse on TV, as well as other cooking shows. He was raised by three women — his mother, his aunt and his grandmother — who encouraged his kitchen interests as soon as they noticed them. His mom gave him cooking challenges, a la “Chopped,” and had him help with church dinners. He grew up eating Southern food his grandma made. His back-door job hunting paid off : Brown spent seven years at MK, eventually becoming sous chef. In 2017, he went to work at Roister, a Fulton Market outpost of The Alinea Group. He was sous chef there, as well, and it was competitive. Good thing Brown hates losing. He quickly started getting his dishes on the menu, earning the respect of his coworkers. Brown stayed at Roister until late 2018, when he left to help Williams open Virtue, a Hyde Park restaurant serving Southern food. He joined as the chef de cuisine, the title he maintains today. Virtue — a South Side restaurant with Black employees serving Black food to Black customers while Black music plays as the soundtrack — has drawn nationwide attention for the work being done there, and so has Brown. In June, he won a James Beard Award for Emerging Chef, and he was previously voted “fan favorite” on Bravo’s “Top Chef.” “Virtue is the first time I cooked professional food I grew up eating,” says Brown. “It’s also the first time I cooked food for a large group of people that looked like me, other than those church dinners.” The restaurant serves as a kind of advocacy for

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Chapman congratulates our partner

Charles C. Calloway, Jr.

and all of this year’s Crain’s 40 Under 40 honorees. We are proud of Charles’s dedication, leadership, and contributions to our firm and the private placement and commercial lending clients he serves, and his commitment to diversity and service to the community as a nonprofit board leader. Charles serves as the Chair of the Audit, Finance and Investment Committee of the Board of Directors of the Chicago Humanities Festival and serves on the Board of Directors of the Black Ensemble Theater. In 2021, he was selected by Crain’s Chicago Business as a Notable Nonprofit Board Leader. Charles is a 2022 Fellow of the Leadership Greater Chicago (LGC) Signature Fellows Program and a 2021 Fellow of the Chicago Urban League’s IMPACT Leadership Development Program, and he serves on the Dean’s Advisory Council of The George Washington University Law School. He is also a member of the Board of Trustees of the American College of Investment Counsel. At Chapman, Charles serves as the Diversity Outreach Partner, cultivating relationships and strategic partnerships with clients and communities. He serves on the scholarship committee for the Chapman and Cutler LLP Maynard H. Jackson Jr. Diversity Scholarship, has served on the firm’s Employment Committee, Strategic Planning Committee, and Diversity Task Force, and is a founding member of the firm’s Black Attorneys Business Resource Group. Congratulations, Charles, on this well-deserved honor!

Chapman and Cutler LLP • chapman.com • Attorney Advertising Material. Charlotte • Chicago • New York • Salt Lake City • San Francisco • Washington, DC

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Shawn Clark, 38

Pre

CEO, CRG

Daniel Campbell, 35 Partner, McDermott Will & Emery

aniel Campbell grew up on a small family farm in Missouri. It was the grueling labor, toiling under the summer sun for long hours, that pushed him to seek out higher education and a profession in law. “If you’ve shoveled horse manure on 100-degree days in Missouri, you might think that higher education is an option for you,” he says. The farm work was tough, but it’s where he gets his work ethic. Campbell made it through the University of Missouri mainly on vocal scholarships — which he refers to as his “scholarship hack” — and made extra cash by working at fast-food chain Jack in the Box through college and into his first year of law school at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. It’s that combination of legal whiz and blue-collar work ethic that Campbell blends so well in his work. “I’ve actually had to learn more about how to talk to corporate America than to talk to most of America,” he says. “And my working-class background really helps in the courtrooms when speaking to juries.” You wouldn’t be able to guess his age by looking at his résumé. At 35, his Big Law record stacks up with the best in the industry. Campbell is “the best young partner I’ve ever worked with,” says former McDermott chair Jeff Stone. Campbell, who practices in commercial litigation, has argued before the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and has first- or second-chaired several bench and jury trials. He’s familiar with cross-examining major executives in federal court and conducting direct examinations of witnesses and experts. He also advises clients on compliance with the Illinois Biometric Information Privacy Act. For Stone, Campbell reminds him of a young Dan Webb. “He’s got that gene that says ‘Give me the ball and let me run with it,’” Stone says. “He works like a dog, and he has great people skills.” — Brandon Dupré

hawn Clark’s job running the investment arm of construction giant Clayco might look like a product of succession planning. His dad, Bob Clark, is the founder and executive chairman of the $5.2 billion design-build conglomerate. But it was far from a sure thing. When Shawn Clark approached Clayco executives in 2015 about ramping up its development division to build industrial properties that would serve modern warehouse users, his boss — his father — offered encouragement, but not the financing needed to jump-start it. “I had to learn it and teach it back to him,” says the younger Clark, who took out a $1 million line of credit against his life insurance policy to invest in one of his first deals with the new entity, rebranded as CRG. Eight years later, he has turned that investment arm into a major player in industrial real estate, a blazing hot commercial property sector as companies have clamored for warehouse space to store and distribute goods purchased online. CRG has opened eight regional offices around the country, deployed close to $2 billion of equity into industrial and other developments and built more than $6 billion worth of projects, including a 1 million-square-foot warehouse in Country Club Hills recently leased to Solo Cup. Clark, who was named CEO of CRG in

May, has expanded the company’s focus to apartments, such as the A.M. 1980 project it developed in Logan Square, with the goal of growing that multifamily business to rival its industrial portfolio. Despite the shadow of his father, “Shawn has been his own guy” in leading CRG’s growth, says Lori Healey, former Chicago planning commissioner and McCormick Place CEO, who ran Clayco’s Chicago office for a year before leaving to oversee construction of the Obama Presidential Center. “If you picked up CRG and put it outside of Clayco, it would still be incredibly successful.” A St. Louis native, Clark studied construction science and management at Clemson University and launched a homebuilding company in Colorado, then moved to Chicago after his mother, Ellen, died in 2010 of a rare genetic disease known as RVCL. Clark now spends roughly 10 hours a week on a charity that has raised $8.6 million since its 2016 launch to help find a cure for the disease. — Danny Ecker

Despite the shadow of his father, “Shawn has been his own guy. If you picked up CRG and put it outside of Clayco, it would still be incredibly successful.” — Lori Healey, former city planning commissioner and McCormick Place CEO

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Joshua Davis, 34 President, The Will Group

hen Joshua Davis reported for his first day of work at his family’s lighting and electrical supply company, his mentor warned him he wouldn’t get a pass because he was the owner’s son. “People will view you based on your work ethic,” he told Davis. Davis has been running hard since that day in 2013. He’s led acquisitions in engineering and distribution to expand the company’s product line and geographic footprint. When The Will Group needed more capacity for manufacturing, Davis scouted city sites and homed in on a vacant lot in North Lawndale’s K-Town district, a historic but downtrodden neighborhood. A 60,000-square-foot plant opened in 2021, and the company is building a 75,000-square-foot addition. It’s an anticipated $21 million investment, with about $4 million in grants. The company has grown to about $100 million in annual revenue, with a workforce of 160.

Joshua’s father, Stephen L. Davis, started the company in 1986 as a manufacturer’s representative, supplying the city of Chicago with General Electric streetlights. He expanded to serve other public agencies such as the Illinois Tollway and the Illinois Department of Transportation, not only with lights, but with poles and infrastructure. The company also manufactures fare boxes for Chicago Transit Authority buses. Davis expects to assume the CEO position later this year, while his dad remains chairman. “I wanted to be just like my dad,” he says. “Dad would say, ‘You need to be better.’ ” The younger Davis is like v.2 of his dad, says friend A.J. Patton, a Chicago developer (and a member of Crain’s 40 Under 40 class of 2022). The first generation focuses on building something sustainable, while the second generation benefits from a first-rate

education and an established business platform, Patton says, adding, “If the world is going to change, it’s with people like Josh who make the most of their privileges and do good with that.” Davis absorbed his father’s interest in aviation and followed him to the board of the DuPage Airport Authority. He started flying after graduating from the University of Tennessee in 2011. “I was terrified, but I figured if my little brother can do this, I’ve got to learn how,” he says. Now he takes friends and family on Chicago skyline tours. And from the air, he can survey the progress of a company project: The Will Group supplied the city with LED lighting. “I spent a lot of time flying over Chicago,” he says, “watching us go from the traditional orange glow to LED white.” — Judith Crown

Dr. Chelsea Dorsey, 39 Associate dean for medical student academic advising and advancement, University of Chicago Pritzker School of Medicine; vice chair, department of surgery; ambulatory medical director for cardiac, vascular and thoracic surgery, UChicago Medicine surgery department has become a model to other departments at the University of Chicago and among peer institutions around the nation, he says. Nevertheless, says Dorsey, “it’s challenging to be this young in this environment, especially in surgery, where largely older white men run the leadership. It’s interesting in 2023 to feel like you have to be a pioneer, but that is what it is.” That perspective informs her work with medical students as associate dean for medical student academic advising and advancement. Dorsey says she’s been able to use the “soft skills” she’s learned to help those students who are struggling, whether barriers are as basic as study skills or as complex as dealing with loss or major health issues in a student’s family. To that end, she’s bringing external learning consulting in-house for more one-on-one interaction with students. Dorsey is also building a program for at-risk students to get into the medical school environment early, with more upfront support to overcome the barriers they face. Dorsey says bringing new people of diverse backgrounds into surgery — “not known for the most nurturing environment” — is a role she takes seriously. Over the last six years, she’s helped expand the ranks of Black students going into the field. As far as what her future holds, Dorsey sees herself in the role of dean at a major medical school in the coming years and hopes to continue inspiring med students of diverse backgrounds for decades to come. —Jon Asplund

PHOTOS BY GEOFFREY BLACK

s the youngest vice chair in UChicago Medicine’s department of surgery, and one of very few Black women in the ranks of associate dean at the University of Chicago’s Pritzker School of Medicine, Dr. Chelsea Dorsey feels she’s at the right place at the right time. Dorsey, whose grandparents lived on the South Side of Chicago, grew up in the suburbs of Pittsburgh and in Highland Park. After studying biochemistry and psychology at Rice University in Houston, she began looking at medical schools — and when she got onto the University of Chicago’s Hyde Park campus, “a switch just went off for me. I knew this is the place I should be.” At the university’s Pritzker School of Medicine, she discovered her interests in both vascular surgery and interacting with leadership. Dorsey’s current boss, Dr. Jeffrey Matthews, remembers her affinity for leadership from her days in med school. She had gone into private practice, and when a position at UChicago Medicine opened up in 2016, “we instantly thought of her,” says the surgery department chair. “She was doing well, involved in medical school education, and really differentiated herself.” Dorsey already had a bright future ahead of her, Matthews says, when the pandemic changed her trajectory. “COVID-19 and the general unrest in the wake of the George Floyd murder really made the challenge of disparities in health care apparent,” he says. With Dorsey in a leadership role, the surgery department had “energy, ideas and the background of a Black woman who is at the front lines of medicine.” “She’s extraordinary,” Matthews says. “She helped us build a structural, not superficial, sense of belonging and equity and inclusion.” The equity and diversity structure in the

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Kristina Edwards, 35

Director of investor relations, United Airlines

ristina Edwards wanted to take her finance degree to work on Wall Street, but her love of travel drew her back to her hometown for a job at Chicago-based United Airlines. She eventually found a way to satisfy both interests as the airline’s day-to-day contact for Wall Street analysts and investors. But the timing wasn’t great: She started the job in June 2020, about three months into COVID-19 lockdowns, when United’s stock was down by two-thirds and revenue had dropped roughly 90%. Management was scrambling to raise money and worrying over furloughing or laying off more than one-third of its workers. “You don’t have investors clamoring to buy travel stocks when no one can travel,” says Edwards, who had joined the investor relations team three years earlier. “It went from people calling me to no one wanting to really

even speak to me. It was quite humbling.” It didn’t get much easier. A year later, while the pandemic was still going strong, United announced plans to make its biggest-ever purchase of new aircraft: an order for 270 planes estimated to cost tens of billions at a time when the airline was on track to lose more than $1 billion. “We had nowhere to go but up, and it might as well be on the offensive rather than defensive,” she says. United CEO Scott Kirby has an outsize presence in the industry, well known on Wall Street for his airline acumen, blunt talk, command of numbers and personal relationships that stretch back years. Edwards embraced it, earning the trust of her boss and analysts. Kirby calls her “a valued partner and trusted adviser to me personally.” When she helped TD Cowen aviation ana-

Brandon Ellis, 33 Director of finance, Big Ten Network

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lyst Helane Becker line up Kirby for a podcast about climate change, it didn’t go unnoticed. “Having that one-on-one access in a relaxed atmosphere where we can just chat about what Scott is thinking about is important,” Becker says. “It helps (TD Cowen) frame the way investors should think about what’s important to the airline.” The daughter of Mexican immigrants, Edwards grew up in Bridgeport and joined United after graduating from the University of Illinois in 2010. She got her start in revenue management, figuring out how much United should charge for seats based on anticipated demand, one of the keys to success for an airline — and the most important training for her current role. “What investors care about is the demand environment,” Edwards says. — John Pletz

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fter joining Big Ten Network in May 2020 and helping manage its finances through a pandemic-shortened football season — all while becoming a father for the first time — Brandon Ellis could have used a little stability in the business. Instead, he’s gotten almost constant change. Ellis led the Chicago-based network’s longterm financial planning as the conference struck a record-setting $7 billion media rights agreement the Big Ten Conference inked last year with Fox, CBS and NBC. He oversaw the financial impact to BTN as former Big Ten Commissioner Kevin Warren streamlined the conference’s sponsorship sales team with the network’s sales efforts before leaving to become president and CEO of the Chicago Bears. Now Ellis is navigating another complex challenge:

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budgeting for BTN’s West Coast operation as the conference prepares to add USC, UCLA, the University of Oregon and the University of Washington next summer. “The television business is one that can be high-energy and dynamic, and the great thing about Brandon is that he is completely level-headed in the face of whatever may come up,” says BTN President Francois McGillicuddy. “It’s a real asset for us.” The suburban Philadelphia native, who was a three-year starting defensive back for Lafayette College in Easton, Pa., followed a collegiate-themed path to BTN. He worked at the NCAA and in administration for Northwestern University’s athletic department before he began signing off on tens of millions of dollars in annual budgets for the network, which is a joint venture of the conference and Fox Sports. Ellis relishes digging into the financial side of broadcasting around 500 live sporting events a year, even if it has forced him to focus on things like camera positioning and broadcaster narratives when he’s trying to watch a game for fun. “The only time I really watch a game and enjoy it as a fan is the (Philadelphia) Eagles,” he says. “At that moment, my fandom kicks in. I’m not watching for replay angles, I’m yelling at the TV.” — Danny Ecker

PHOTOS BY GEOFFREY BLACK

“The only time I really watch a game and enjoy it as a fan is the (Philadelphia) Eagles. At that moment, my fandom kicks in. I’m not watching for replay angles, I’m yelling at the TV.”

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Aaron Galeener, 38 Chief administrative officer, health plan services, Cook County Health

insurers like Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Illinois and Aetna, Galeener has grown it into the county’s largest Medicaid health plan, according to state data. Reporting directly to Cook County Health CEO Israel Rocha Jr., Galeener now manages a 300-person team and a $3 billion annual budget. His career focus zeroed in on health insurance while he was working for Arizona’s Joint Legislative Budget Committee right after grad school. It was around the time that President Barack Obama introduced the Affordable Care Act, establishing the health care plan marketplace and expanding Medicaid nationwide. “I ended up spending a lot of time on my own researching the Affordable Care Act and sort of became the internal expert,” says Galeener, who grew up in downstate Marshall. He brought his find— Andrea Gibson, Cook County Health’s chief strategy officer, ings back to Chicago to who hired Galeener into his first budget analyst role take his first Cook The plan predominantly serves Black and County Health role as a budget analyst in Latino adults and children living on the 2011, around the time the organization was South and West sides who are considered developing CountyCare. The plan added 100,000 members in its low-income by state Medicaid standards. Even as CountyCare competes with giant first year after launching, and later, when aron Galeener is responsible for the health care coverage of more than 440,000 of Cook County’s most vulnerable residents, a role he’s earned over an 11-year tenure at the county’s public health system. He’s among the founding architects of Cook County Health’s Medicaid plan, dubbed CountyCare, and has been instrumental in growing its member base since it launched in 2012. “I’ve been able to see CountyCare from the first member to today,” he says from his office at the old Cook County Hospital.

“It’s a pretty meteoric rise. I do remember when he left the budget office, I said, ‘Well, we’re all going to be working for you one day.’ And that’s certainly borne out. He’s risen to every occasion.”

Galeener was serving as CountyCare’s chief financial officer and director of finance, the plan acquired two other Medicaid plans, adding about 200,000 members combined. Galeener was named interim chief administrative officer of health plan services in 2020 and was fully promoted to the role in 2022. “It’s a pretty meteoric rise,” says Andrea Gibson, Cook County Health’s chief strategy officer, who hired Galeener into his first budget analyst role. “I do remember when he left the budget office, I said, ‘Well, we’re all going to be working for you one day.’ And that’s certainly borne out. He’s risen to every occasion.”

Along the way, Galeener has navigated various challenges, chief among them the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, he’s focused on caring for migrants and retaining members as a nationwide Medicaid eligibility process resumes. Among his long-term ambitions: positioning CountyCare as a national model for an effective public option health plan. “There’s always a debate that private industry can do things better,” Galeener says. “But I think health care is one of those specific areas where there’s a very unique role we can play.” — Katherine Davis

THE FOREFRONT OF LEADERSHIP The University of Chicago Medicine congratulates Chelsea Dorsey, MD, for being named a Class of 2023 40 Under 40 leader by Crain’s Chicago Business. We are grateful for her leadership and commitment to providing superior health care to the communities we serve.

UChicagoMedicine.org

Chelsea Dorsey, MD

PHOTOS BY GEOFFREY BLACK

Associate Professor of Surgery Associate Dean, Pritzker School of Medicine Vice Chair, Department of Surgery

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Matt Gray, 33

Terell Johnson, 37

Vice president, strategy and analytics, Chicago Blackhawks

hen Jaime Faulkner left sports analytics firm E15 in late 2020 to become president of the Chicago Blackhawks, she took Matt Gray with her to help with an ambitious task: modernize the way the National Hockey League franchise uses data to run its business. Gray had done the financial modeling in 2017 that allowed the Atlanta Falcons and Atlanta Hawks to offer food and beverages at games for dramatically less than the exorbitant prices at most professional sporting events, a highly acclaimed move across the sports business industry. In 2019, he worked with Los Angeles Clippers owner Steve Ballmer on the early planning stages for the $2 billion Intuit Dome, the NBA team’s new arena set to open next year. When he arrived at the United Center, Gray took the reins on a strategy and analytics team consisting of just one analyst and one customer relationship manager, and convinced team ownership to expand the team to more than 20, the largest such team-dedicated strategy and analytics department in the NHL. “His fingerprints are on almost every major initiative and business strategy that we’ve done over the last couple years,” says Blackhawks Chairman and CEO Danny Wirtz, who calls Gray’s department the “central nervous system of the organization.” Among the first big moves born out of insights culled by the data team was a wider range of season-ticket packages to

Executive director, Chicago Philharmonic Society

offer fans flexibility, as the team was faltering on the ice with aging stars. Deeper visibility into ticket sales also helped the team justify purging hundreds of people from its season-ticket holder list that it identified as brokers, a move meant to control pricing for its seats. “I have a responsibility to grow the game and make sure that hockey is advancing the way that we want it to in Chicago,” says Gray, who grew up playing hockey in Ohio and New Jersey before his father’s job as a history professor moved his family to a small town in eastern Pennsylvania. The Penn State University graduate, who counts former Chicago Cubs President Theo Epstein as one of his heroes, had been gunning for a job as a sports executive since his high school days in the Poconos. He studied finance and business law in college and spent a summer working for the Lehigh Valley IronPigs minor league baseball team, where jobs ranged from hot dog sales to being the mascot. — Danny Ecker

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Erin Johnson, 37 Acting cannabis regulation oversight officer, state of Illinois

rin Johnson is not afraid to speak her mind. “You’re never going to leave a conversation with Erin not knowing how she feels,” says state Rep. Kam Buckner, the Chicago Democrat who first met Johnson in 2007 when they worked for U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin. “She doesn’t do it with fire and fury, but with facts. She gets people to trust her, and she gets things done.” A lifelong Democrat who grew up in the south suburbs, Johnson was an assistant general counsel for Gov. Bruce Rauner, focusing on criminal justice. She helped the Republican governor eliminate a backlog of 2,500 clemency petitions while also serving as chief diversity officer. When Democrat J.B. Pritzker was elected, she stayed on as chief of staff at the Department of Juvenile Justice for 2½ years, helping reduce the number of kids behind bars and helping those tried as adults make the transition to life outside. She returned to state government a year ago as Illinois’ marijuana-regulation czar, following a stint as a corporate lawyer for Amazon in suburban Washington, D.C. Taking the baton at this stage in the state’s journey in the legalization of weed is no easy handoff. Illinois has to make good on its promises of diversifying and expanding the marijuana industry at a time when the fundamentals of the business have been turned upside down. Big companies and newcomers alike are fighting for survival in a market where money is tight, product prices are falling and borrowing costs are rising.

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Johnson has always been a nerd for politics, telling first-grade classmates why they should want Bill Clinton to be president. Her first job out of Dartmouth College in 2008 was a teaching assignment in Philadelphia for Teach for America. After graduating from law school at the University of Wisconsin in 2013, she got a corporate litigation job before she made the unexpected detour into government. She credits Amazon with giving her valuable skills for working in the public sector. “One of Amazon’s leadership principles is, disagree and commit,” Johnson says. “One decision-maker makes the decision. You’ve voiced your opinion; they have gone another way. That’s OK. You’re now committed to whatever they decided and you give it 100%.” — John Pletz

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“I see myself really supporting the efforts to make sure that the orchestra world continues to look like the cities that we perform in.” switching to wind instruments in high school, Johnson is a musician first, which is what makes him stand out, says Philharmonic Chairman Tom Manning. He says Johnson’s impact has already enlivened the Philharmonic’s mission and expanded its reach through innovative programming, after only two years in the position. “He is bringing diversity into both the orchestra, from a professional standpoint in terms of musicians (and) composers, and additionally he has expanded the diversity of our audience participation,” Manning says. Championing diversity in the arts will be one of Johnson’s legacies. His work with Sphinx, an organization focused on increasing representation of Black and Latino artists in classical music, includes reserving Philharmonic concert tickets for young musical leaders who might not otherwise be able to experience the show. What’s next for him? Johnson says he wants to get in a little bit of trouble and continue to be himself, all while making a mark on the orchestral community. —Avery Donmoyer

Alan Kleinerman, 38 Vice president and head of disruption, Kraft Heinz

here’s a feeling Alan Kleinerman gets when he takes a bite of certain food prototypes. It’s a feeling in his bones, and when Kleinerman gets it, he knows his team has come up with something good. “Trusting your gut matters,” he says. “It’s this feeling of, ‘We just cracked a code,’ and that is incredibly powerful.” As vice president and head of disruption at Kraft Heinz, Kleinerman is constantly chasing that feeling. He leads the team that invents new products, new processes and new business models for the Chicago-based packaged-foods giant and works to integrate acquired brands. Kraft Heinz wants to drive $2 billion in incremental sales companywide in the next five years through innovation. That responsibility falls on Kleinerman’s team. Stressful? Kleinerman sees how it could be. But for him, it’s just exciting. “We’re not going to be perfect every time, but when these things hit, any one of these big bets (could) change this company fundamentally,” he says. Among the big bets soon to hit the market: Heinz Remix, a digital dispenser customers can use to customize sauces. In coming months, these machines will pop up in restaurants, cafeterias and more, with the goal of helping Kraft Heinz increase revenue from its food service channels. Another bet is called 360Crisp, a pouch for the microwave that makes foods crispy as if they were prepared in the oven. The product will be launched with Kraft Heinz’s existing brands. Out first is a grilled cheese sold under the Lunchables brand in the frozen aisle.

Kleinerman, who has been in his role since late last year, has been “instrumental” in Kraft Heinz’s transformation toward innovation, says Diana Frost, chief growth officer and Kleinerman’s boss. He set up a structure that gets innovations to market quicker, which is vital for a company the size of Kraft Heinz. Seeing a new product hit shelves that his team helped invent never gets old, Kleinerman says. He got his start in banking but went back to school for his MBA — from University of Chicago’s Booth — when he realized product marketing might be more his lane. Employers since the career switch have included Mars

Wrigley and Abbott. Ask Kleinerman to name his favorite innovation, and he can’t choose. That’s like picking a favorite among his three daughters, he says. But the first time he took a bite of that soon-to-debut grilled cheese, he got that intuition. It has the potential to make people salivate over what’s coming out of the microwave, a rare feat. “For me, the most exciting new food products are the ones that really do change the expectations consumers have for what a category can be, or what an eating occasion can be,” he says. “We can break a paradigm that’s existed for decades.” — Ally Marotti

Andrea Kluger, 34 Deputy chief of staff and legislative director, Chicago Federation of Labor

he quickest way to build relationships in Chicago’s sometimes provincial City Council is through the grind of crafting legislation. That’s according to Andrea Kluger, deputy chief of staff and legislative director at the Chicago Federation of Labor, who fights for union workers at City Hall and beyond. Those relationships have earned her the trust of the CFL’s 300 affiliated unions, and her status as labor’s chief negotiator makes her a powerful voice at City Hall, able to whip votes from politicians who rely on contributions and campaign armies provided by unions to keep them in office. Kluger helped negotiate a “labor peace” agreement with Bally’s before the gambling company was selected as Chicago’s sole casino operator. She secured a deal with myriad unions to ensure the Democratic National Convention would be built without labor strife and staffed with union workers. But often the work of a lobbyist is to prevent policies that may hurt unions before they hatch. “You don’t want to be in a situation where the day before a City Council meeting you’re having to try to kill something,” she says. “I think if you can be proactive, raise your concerns early, that’s the best approach.” Before landing in Chicago, Kluger cut her political teeth in New York, first working for a City Council member before

PHOTOS BY GEOFFREY BLACK

utting on sold-out shows is only the beginning for Terell Johnson, who’s spent his entire life enjoying live music and performing in the arts. These days, Johnson dedicates his talent to the Chicago Philharmonic, where he describes his role as part executive director and part artistic director, a wide range of responsibilities for the group that represents seven orchestras and more than 200 members. Johnson wants the Philharmonic shows to be a party, a place where people can clap throughout, wear clothes they’re comfortable in and arrive as their authentic selves. There’s no tuxedo requirement or stuffy atmosphere to muddle through. You might even hear a popular song from the radio — or a movie soundtrack, in the case of its “Black Panther,” “Encanto” and “Jurassic Park” showcases — that’s been arranged for an orchestra. It’s all part of his goal to help people reimagine what orchestral music is. Johnson understands the Philharmonic as representing Chicago’s unique music ecosystem. “I see myself really supporting the efforts to make sure that the orchestra world continues to look like the cities that we perform in. We really strive to make sure that the folks onstage look like the folks in the audience,” Johnson says. Playing piano since age 6 and then

joining one of the city’s largest labor unions. Staying ahead of what’s moving through the council includes reading nearly every piece of legislation that is introduced to probe for potential impacts on union workers, Kluger says, a task her time spent as an organizer prepared her for. “Legislation is written similar to union contracts, and I spent a lot of time reading and enforcing those contracts,” she says. “It is easier for me to see the difference between a ‘may’ or a ‘shall,’ or how the words on paper can actually be en-

forced to help workers.” Bob Reiter, president of the CFL, hired her to work on a program with the United Way before tapping her to be labor’s eyes and ears at City Hall. Reiter says Kluger “took control of the room” during her first legislative fight, gaining his trust and allowing him to step away from the nittygritty work of legislating. “She has a great understanding of government at every level and how politics and government are intertwined and yet distinct and separate,” he says. — Justin Laurence OCTOBER 16, 2023 | CRAIN’S CHICAGO BUSINESS | 25

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Jason Lee, 38

Senior adviser to Mayor Brandon Johnson

“I

’ve always wanted to be part of social change,” says Jason Lee. “We want to integrate more people into (the economy of ) this world-class city. But we have to invest to do that.” If that sounds like something Mayor Brandon Johnson might say, it’s no coincidence. Lee technically is a senior adviser to Johnson, an aide who along with two or three other top hands is involved in just about every aspect of this administration. In reality, he’s more than that, a sort of combined soul mate in the trenches of progressive politics, a little brother and, as another Johnson insider puts it, the man who brings clarity at times of uncertainty for the new mayor.

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change the world from within the financial system than through electoral politics. But that changed after he attended a labor conference here and met leaders of the Chicago Teachers Union, including the late Karen Lewis, then the union’s charismatic president, as well as Johnson, a former teacher turned union organizer. He decided that working for the CTU — and, later, another union, AFSCME — would be a better way to get things done. So he asked for a job. And asked, and asked, and asked. Finally, Johnson called and offered him a slot as an organizer. “He took responsibility for me,” Lee says, “in case I was a spy.” A few years later, he managed Johnson’s

“That’s where we are, how to deal with some of the challenges while keeping the dynamism that makes it possible. My being here, serving this mayor, seems sort of improbable. If he hadn’t called, things definitely would be different.” Lee “is a game-changer,” Johnson says. “Jason uses every tool at his disposal to serve people who need love and care and service the most. I don’t believe there’s anyone better at taking the hopes and aspirations of everyday people, and their communities, and turning them into victories.” With his mom as a member of Congress from Houston and his dad working as a law professor, Lee started his career on another path. After graduating from Harvard University with a master’s degree in politics, ethics and religion, he went to work as an investment banker at Morgan Stanley, figuring it would be easier to

winning 2018 campaign for the Cook County Board of Commissioners. Now his office is just down the hall from Johnson’s on the fifth floor of City Hall. He’s single and by all accounts dedicated to the cause, a man who knows business and knows how wealth can create things, such as change. “That’s where we are, how to deal with some of the challenges while keeping the dynamism that makes it possible,” Lee says. “My being here, serving this mayor, seems sort of improbable. If he hadn’t called, things definitely would be different.” —Greg Hinz

Joel Macholan, 38 Executive vice president and treasurer, Wintrust Financial

ccountants and finance personnel aren’t typically the most valuable players at banks. But the last 18 months have shined a spotlight on those figures as many banks found themselves, to their dismay, saddled with balance sheets loaded with securities investments that were big money-losers on paper, and little but highcost options to bolster funding. Earlier this year, Joel Macholan was promoted to treasurer of Wintrust, Chicago’s fourth-largest bank by deposits and largest locally headquartered business lender, as the banking world was reeling from the sudden failures of Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank in New York. It was, and had been, his job to position the bank’s balance sheet for the changes in interest rates that sank those banks. “Everybody else was reactive; he was proactive,” says Tom Ormseth, who recently left Wintrust after 13 years to become chief revenue officer at R&T Deposit Solutions, which helps banks with their deposit

gathering needs. Ormseth thinks Macholan — who he says has effectively been responsible for matching assets like loans with liabilities like deposits and debt instruments for several years — is Wintrust’s chief financial officer in waiting. For Macholan, a Peoria native whose father worked his whole career at Caterpillar, Wintrust filled his need as a corporate auditor for a calling beyond counting beans when he joined the bank in 2010 as a senior financial analyst. “I was sold on, ‘Hey, we’re a bank trying to establish something for this community. . . .We’re going to make decisions here, we’re going to be agile and we’re going to grow because there’s nobody else dedicated to that model right now,’ ” Macholan says. “And that’s how it panned out.” After five years, he was chosen by Chief Financial Officer Dave Stoehr to lead financial planning and analysis for the bank — a forward-looking role that took advantage of Macholan’s financial chops and also tapped

the productive mind of a young analyst unafraid to voice his thoughts and suggestions, Ormseth says. Wintrust has benefited, surviving this year’s turmoil with relative ease. Since SVB’s collapse March 10, Wintrust’s stock is down 6%, while the KBW Bank Index is down 16% in that period. Adding to Macholan’s appeal, Ormseth says, are people skills not commonly associated with accountants. “People like working for him. It’s not a fear thing. They’re just wanting not to disappoint him, which is the highest compliment you can pay a manager.” Macholan describes himself as a hard worker who’s “competitive as hell” but never was “overly ambitious.” “I never would have said I aspire to be a CFO,” he says. “I would have said I aspire to move up the ranks, kick butt, provide for my family and do the best I can.” “It’s just been the blocking and tackling at every level.” — Steve Daniels

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Joey Mak, 38

rowing up in suburban Chicago as the son of Cambodian refugees fleeing war and genocide, Joey Mak knows how it feels to be different. “Being one of the few people of color was definitely something that impacted my approach to the world, my understanding of how I fit into it,” he says. “Even though I was born here in the U.S., I very much feel like an immigrant kid.” He’s channeled that feeling into a career focused on the intersection of diversity, equity and inclusion and opportunity in the innovation economy. For more than two years, he’s helmed Chicago:Blend, a nonprofit founded in 2018 on a mission to diversify the ranks of local venture-capital firms, which invest in budding companies and often have outsize influence on shaping the next big business success stories. But investing circles have long been dominated by white men, with few women and people of color able to penetrate the inner ranks. “When you change the investor class, you start to change who is getting checks,” Mak says from Chicago:Blend’s offices at the Civic Opera Building. Through a fellowship for aspiring VCs, regular programming and demographic reports, Chicago’s VC industry is slowly diversifying. Chicago:Blend’s latest report shows that of the 884 employees from 116 firms with a Chicago office, the share of female workers grew to 34% in 2022, up from 28% in 2018. Mean-

while, the share of non-white VC workers grew to 25% in 2022, up from 14% in 2018. To strengthen the pipeline, Chicago:Blend, under Mak’s leadership, launched a fellowship program that admits up to 24 aspiring VCs a year and provides each with a $1,000 stipend. The organization’s work is supported with just a $300,000 annual budget funded by private philanthropic grants and sponsors like Wells Fargo and CDW. Mak, who lives in Uptown, started his career in the public sector, at one point serving as assistant to the chief of staff for former Gov. Pat Quinn. From there, Mak helped run the Illinois Department of Commerce & Economic Opportunity’s innovation and technology arm before being recruited to the University of Illinois by Dr. Caralynn Nowinski Collens, who was the college’s associate vice president for innovation and economic development at the time. “What impressed me most was what a builder he is,” Collens says. “He’s clearly such a leader.” Mak later spent three years as vice president of programs at the Chicagoland Chamber of Commerce, developing its DEI program, which eventually led to him discovering Chicago:Blend. “I was looking up different organizations around town that were really focused on the intersection of equity and business,” Mak says. “When I saw their mission, I got really excited.” — Katherine Davis

PHOTOS BY GEOFFREY BLACK

CEO, Chicago:Blend

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Whitney Reynolds, 37 Host and executive producer, “The Whitney Reynolds Show”

Carlos RamirezRosa, 34 Alderperson, 35th Ward, City of Chicago

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hen Ald. Carlos Ramirez-Rosa first ran for the City Council in 2015, he was hesitant to mention the “S-word.” He knew that being labeled as socialist wasn’t good for his career or for pushing for the kind of change the now 34-year-old had dreamed of since reading Noam Chomsky at Whitney Young high school. So, instead, he described himself as an “independent progressive” standing against the status quo. He won the race, defeating the incumbent. Now representing Logan Square, Avondale and Hermosa, Ramirez-Rosa is Mayor Brandon Johnson’s floor leader and chairs the powerful Zoning Committee. He’s also become the unofficial dean of the now seven-member Democratic Socialist Caucus, a growing force in Chicago politics that’s part of the broader progressive movement that swept Johnson into office and saw Ramirez-Rosa go from an outsider to power broker, tasked with lining up votes to advance Johnson’s agenda at City Hall. Ramirez-Rosa says he carried with him into office his late father’s advice that “your co-workers are not your friends.” “I didn’t feel like I was going to create the type of change that my community elected me to fight for by playing golf with Ed Burke and Danny Solis,” he says. Often the feeling was mutual, as the young radical with a sharp tongue not only cast lonely “no” votes against then-Mayor Rahm Emanuel but criticized those who didn’t as tools of the rich and mighty. By 2019, the coalition he’d been fighting alongside gave him eight new council colleagues endorsed by the progressive United Working Families party, and earlier this year the movement elected Johnson to the fifth floor of City Hall, placing Ramirez-Rosa on the powerful side of the bargaining table. “Holding power is easy. Wielding power to change the status quo is much more difficult,” he says. “But if you want to take the reins of power and change systems, (if) you want to take the reins of power and enact policies that people have said are impossible to enact, that is much harder to accomplish.” Despite his new insider status, RamirezRosa knows “more than anyone else” that he’ll occasionally feel organized pressure from allies outside City Hall to deliver on progressive promises, says Emma Tai, former executive director of United Working Families and a member of Crain’s 40 Under 40 class of 2022. “It’s our job to move the needle, to organize and to build a constituency and political will such that we’re impossible to ignore,” she says. — Justin Laurence

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Alessandro Rotta Loria, 33, and Ashish Sharma, 37 Rotta Loria (left): Assistant professor of civil and environmental engineering and director of the Mechanics & Energy Laboratory, Northwestern University Sharma: Climate and urban sustainability lead, Discovery Partners Institute; climate scientist, Argonne National Laboratory

ddressing what in literal terms could be viewed as the hottest topic of our times, Alessandro Rotta Loria and Ashish Sharma are looking above and below ground for ways to mitigate the impact of global warming and turn aspects of it to our advantage. Rotta Loria tracked how much heat from buildings seeps into the Loop underground, garnering a blaze of publicity remarkable for a scientific paper. Sharma combines science and social science, examining approaches to reducing heat islands in impoverished neighborhoods. An app could pinpoint heat pol-

luters and put them more easily on notice. Rotta Loria and his Northwestern University team mounted 150 sensors in building basements, underground garages and tunnels and found the average subsurface Loop temperature increasing 5.6 degrees Fahrenheit since mid-century, warping soil formations. Redirecting the heat into useful energy sources is a goal. His larger focus: re-engineering materials to help solve such challenges as beach erosion and living on the moon. “What I have seen in his lab is really impressive,” says Admir Masic, an MIT associate professor of environmental and civil

engineering pursuing a related effort, electrochemical-generated minerals as a substitute for mining. For green solutions, Sharma is relying on air-flow modeling techniques he learned while pursuing a doctorate in aerospace

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At 21, Reynolds became a reporter and producer, and then a morning anchor, at KTEN-TV in Dallas. In 2009 she left for a job as a TV reporter in Chicago — but when she arrived, in the middle of the recession, she discovered the station (which she doesn’t want to name) had canceled the job. It was a devastating experience for a young TV journalist building a career, but Reynolds says it was pivotal to her journey. She decided to stay in Chicago, worked at the Nine West shop on Michigan Avenue selling shoes and continued to nurture her dream of hosting a national TV show. “It was this moment where, I don’t want to forget this feeling, because I want people to always know they’re on my level, no matter where I am in life,” she recalls. That sense of empathy is one key to Reynolds’ success, says Melissa Bernstein, co-founder of Connecticut-based toy maker Melissa & Doug.

“I want to be that voice of hope for the nation.” experiences around Chicago. In 2012 the show relaunched as “The Whitney Reynolds Show,” broadcasting on PBS station WTTW-TV with a bigger goal. “I knew I wanted to become a mission-centric show, which at the time I was told wasn’t going to be sexy enough to make it. People wanted gossip,” she says. “I want to be that voice of hope for the nation.” Centering on everyday people with bigger-than-life stories is emblematic of Reynolds’ humble beginnings as a native of the small town of Durant, Okla. The show she’s created is the manifestation of a dream she’s had since she created a makeshift microphone by taping a tennis ball to a paper towel roll at age 6. With a hustle mentality, Reynolds paved a way for herself in television, beginning with an internship she landed at “Good Morning America” after graduating from Baylor University.

“I think her authenticity and her ability to take people’s life stories and bring them out in a way that honors them, as well as connect to a mass audience, is really remarkable and I think very few people have that ability,” says Bernstein, who was featured on the show and later became a close friend and mentor. These days the “The Whitney Reynolds Show” is taped in the Lawndale neighborhood, syndicated by NETA and shared with PBS stations around the country. And as the show gets ready to launch its sixth season, Reynolds has been nominated a second time for a Chicago/Midwest Emmy Award. Reynolds also voices an iHeart Radio show called “Whitney’s Women.” But she says the thing that brings her the most joy is raising her twins with her husband in the North Side neighborhood of Roscoe Village. — Corli Jay

— would not otherwise have access to,” says Geneva Mayor Kevin Burns, who chairs the effort. Rotta Loria’s interest in geoengineering stems from a childhood fascination with classic architecture in his native Italy. Off hours, he likes to read novels, with Hemingway a favorite author. Sharma prefers video. “I watch everything on Netflix,” he says. Both have seen “Oppenheimer.” How do you explain the explosion of media interest in your project, which included a front-page article in the New York Times? Rotta Loria: It was summer. It was hot. And for the first time, we were talking about something underground. It was something that was poorly explored, and that’s probably why it attracted a global reach of more than 55 million people.

engineering at Arizona State University. A contributor to the Metropolitan Mayors Caucus’ climate action plan, whose aims include reducing Chicago-area greenhouse gas emissions 80% by 2050, “he brings a network of scientists that we — me in particular

Was it difficult to get the city and private property owners to cooperate? The CTA didn’t. Rotta Loria: It was tricky because we started this project during the pandemic. So, it was the least of everybody’s problems. But organizations like the Building Owners & Managers Association have been very supportive. I collaborated with the

Dr. Emma Ross, 37 Partner, Goldman Ismail Tomaselli Brennan & Baum

aw wasn’t the plan. Since age 12, Emma Ross had seen herself becoming a doctor, inspired by a trip to Mexico, where she volunteered with a church group at an orphanage. After graduating from the University of California at Berkeley at 19, she did go on to medical school — and added a law degree, as well, with the intention of better understanding the legal apparatuses that surround the health care industry. But law soon became her primary passion in a career change that felt like “falling on my face.” “If you’ve got a plan as to what things are going to look like since you were very young, and it doesn’t work out that way, my first instinct is to call that a failure,” she says. “But in this instance, it was exactly what I needed.” Ross got her law degree from Columbia University, then earned her M.D. from Duke University. She then left during her residency in surgery at Duke to pursue a career in law. Now, as a litigator and partner with boutique Chicago law firm Goldman Ismail Tomaselli Brennan & Baum, Ross is able to put her training as a physician to use in her legal practice and pro bono work. “I get to use my medical background every single day in the way that I present to juries and in the way that I think about the kind of complex themes in scientific litigation, which is a lot of what I do,” she says. That ability to blend her two backgrounds in law and medicine makes her unique in the industry. “She is a unicorn,” says Shayna Cook, a partner at Goldman. “She has this deep scientific knowledge, and she’s able to break it down into understandable language to explain to jurors and clients.” Ross represents leading pharmaceuti-

Chicago Department of Transportation to deploy sensors in the freight tunnels. I can understand why (the CTA was) reluctant to add another potential thing on their plate. Maybe they’ll change their mind because of the relevance of the study. Do you fear we’ve reached a point of no return for climate change and its potentially catastrophic impact? Sharma: The action should have been taken yesterday, not today. But at the end of the day, countries or institutions have to balance their portfolio. Of course, they can do better for the environment, but can they feed their people today? The private sector has to step up. Sooner or later, they will be forced to do it. Rotta Loria: I agree. I don’t know if it’s too late. I’m an optimist. I’m a positive person. We cannot wait for the perfect solution that is going to solve them all. The good news is, there are already a myriad of solutions to address these problems today. Is there a danger of climate change complacency in the Upper Midwest? Sharma: Have you read the book “The Great Lakes Water Wars?” Fundamentally, why does migration happen, why do wars happen? It’s because of a lack of resources,

PHOTOS BY GEOFFREY BLACK

y 7

t was during the start of the pandemic when Whitney Reynolds was asked if she was ready to take her talk show national. “I got the call in 2020 and I literally said, ‘Hold on a second,’” she recalls. “I thought I put (the phone) on mute and I just started screaming, singing hallelujah, doing cartwheels, pulling muscles. And I hear, ‘Whitney, we can hear you.’” The call was from the National Educational Telecommunications Association, a national Public Broadcasting System distributor, and it meant “The Whitney Reynolds Show” was about to take a big leap forward. In 2009 Reynolds had started a show on Facebook called “Weekends with Whitney.” From there, she moved her production to YouTube and would soon find herself pitching for television. “Weekends with Whitney,” which aired on NBC’s former free-to-air station NonStop, saw Reynolds showcasing various

cal and medical device companies in major litigation, including German multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology company Bayer in litigation involving its herbicide Roundup. She also co-leads the national science team in litigation involving Merck’s HPV vaccine Gardasil. Though she and her family have moved to Basalt, Colo., to be closer to her husband’s family, Chicago remains her work home base, bringing her back at least a couple of times a month. And her mission — drawn from a physician’s drive to serve and help — guides her work no matter where she is. Ross is part of the Law Firm Antiracism Alliance, leading the reproductive justice group within the organization. Recently, her reproductive group teamed up with If/ When/How, a nonprofit that aims to help lawyers better understand the frameworks of reproductive justice to better serve clients. “She has a little boy and a baby girl on the way,” says Cook, “and just watching her thrive as a mom while also continuing to kick butt as a lawyer has been amazing to behold.” — Brandon Dupré

right? Yet resources will become scarce (elsewhere), and fights will happen on how the water should be equitably distributed. We should make sure we don’t misuse this big natural resource that we have. Rotta Loria: Chicago already has many problems related to climate change, like huge erosion problems, flooding problems. Tell us one aspect of your work. Rotta Loria: We’re developing a new technique that allows us to strengthen soils or heal concrete by applying electric current. Basically, we can cement soils to prevent erosion. Sharma: No city can make everything green. We’re trying to figure out the right locations, because these are costly solutions. (There’s also a balancing act) because green installations change the pressure gradient between the lake and the land. That means the lake breeze intensity will also reduce. Do you see any parallels to today’s divisive politics around climate change and those of Oppenheimer’s Cold War era? Rotta Loria: We could make the stretch. But it would be a stretch. — Steven R. Strahler OCTOBER 16, 2023 | CRAIN’S CHICAGO BUSINESS | 29

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Rachel Saunders, 36

Former CEO, Apex Crypto

achel Saunders loves puzzles. Starting her career as a corporate lawyer at Chicago’s Sidley Austin, the St. Louis native and avid New York Times Spelling Bee solver ultimately wanted to be in the business ring rather than acting as a counselor to those in the fray. She got her chance in 2021, becoming CEO of a firm that provides the nuts and bolts of licensing, compliance and other critical help to crypto trading platforms. She saw Apex through the “crypto winter” of 2022, added about two dozen clients, obtained critical licensing from New York state and completed the sale of Apex earlier this year for tens of millions. The sale to Alpharetta, Ga.-based digital asset platform Bakkt Holdings put Saunders on the map. If the crypto firm hits its earn-out targets over the next few years, the deal would ultimately be worth $200 million to Apex Fintech Solutions, a company that was launched by the founders of Peak6 Investments, a Chicago equity options trading firm that has morphed into a wideranging holding company focused primarily on financial services.

Saunders got the deal signed with Bakkt in early November 2022, less than a week before the meltdown of FTX, the global exchange owned by now-indicted Sam Bankman-Fried, shook the crypto world to its foundations. “She did it,” says Matt Hulsizer, co-founder and managing partner of Peak6. “She found the buyer, executed it and got regulatory sign-off. Which was amazing.” Fresh from her triumph, Saunders is assessing her next chapter. It probably won’t be in crypto, she says, but it may well be in fintech. Whatever it ends up being, it’s likely to involve Hulsizer and his longtime Peak6 partner Jenny Just, Saunders says. They’re ready. “We would invest with her in a second,” says Hulsizer. Saunders caught the entrepreneurial bug early. She and her then-boyfriend (now husband) were studying in China during college in 2008 when they got an idea for importing a technology product that eased the translation of Chinese to English for users of electronic tablets. They went so far as to incorporate, price out the products and arrange for campus ambassadors to help sell them, only to pull the plug right before launch because an app that did the same thing came out for the iPhone. “It was the shortest-lived business ever,” she says. But in going through the process with a Chinese lawyer they used, she got a taste of what it took to bring an idea to market. “I’d love to do this again,” Saunders says. “I like complicated problems, and I like learning.” —Steve Daniels

“I like complicated problems, and I like learning.”

Jianan Shi, 34 President, Chicago Board of Education

s an undocumented immigrant from China who was adopted, Jianan Shi has not always had the luxury of choice throughout his life. “But I got to choose Chicago,” says Shi, who grew up in the Boston suburbs and spent time in Toronto before moving here in 2016. “For me, it really felt like a place where I got to start writing my own story.” Shi’s Chicago story began at Eric Solorio Academy High School, a Chicago public school on the Southwest Side, where he taught biology. At Solorio, Shi also led the Dream Team, a student club for undocumented immigrants and allies. That work introduced him to other immigration organizing and civic engagement groups like Asian Americans Advancing Justice and Chicago United for Equity, which bring together racial justice advocates across the city. But it wasn’t until Chicago Public Schools threatened to close the National Teachers

Academy, a high-performing elementary school on the Near South Side, that Shi got involved in education organzing. Raise Your Hand for Illinois Public Education, a parentadvocacy nonprofit that has received funding from the Chicago Teachers Union Foundation and The Chicago Community Trust, was among those that fought to save the school — and won. In 2019, Shi left CPS to become Raise Your Hand’s executive director. “I wanted to be more involved in how policy and politics work together to transform and improve Chicago,” he says. “I view it as a seamless transition, where I got to work on local school council issues and school funding issues grounded in my experience as an educator in two different districts and my own lived experience.” Raise Your Hand pushed for an elected school board in Chicago, which will hold its first elections next November for 10 of its 21

positions. Mayor Brandon Johnson is the last mayor to appoint members of the board, and in July he selected Shi as the body’s president. Natasha Erskine, interim co-executive director at Raise Your Hand Illinois, calls Shi “a strategic thinker who excels at turning shared vision into mutual reality. We are excited to see him leading the school board and doing the things he did well as the Raise Your Hand executive director: collaborating with communities and creating structural transformation.” “Why I’m really here is to build and be part of a team that builds sustainable communities where families who live in Chicago get to stay in Chicago, that they get to go to great schools in their neighborhood, get the services and the stability that they need to thrive,” Shi says of his new position. “I want to be a part of that goal and vision.” — Leigh Giangreco

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Founder, APS & Associates

hicago politics isn’t known for embracing outsiders. So when Detroit native Alexandra Sims-Jones started her political career here, she was lucky to count Kurt Summers as an early mentor while working as a campaign manager for his successful 2014 race for city treasurer. “It’s true, that old saying about Chicago, ‘We don’t want nobody nobody sent,’” SimsJones says. “From Kurt, I learned how important relationships are in all different parts of the city and how valuable it is to be an expert at a topic.” After a stint working inside city government, she left in 2017 to found her own public affairs firm, APS & Associates, and kicked off her new venture with J.B. Pritzker’s gubernatorial campaign as her first client. Since then, APS has worked for the Obama Foundation, Kim Foxx’s state’s attorney campaign and health care union SEIU HCII. “Alex is someone who not only understands the local and national landscape and all of its key players, but knows how to bring people together to solve complex issues,” says Joshua Harris, the Obama Foundation’s director of community engagement. “She can quickly cut through noise and determine a measured and strategic path forward using diverse coalitions. She’s someone who provides wise counsel and is trusted by many across the city, including myself.” Sims-Jones realized her own ascent wouldn’t have been possible without Sum-

mers’ guidance, so she set out to create a mentorship program for Black professionals seeking to enter politics and public policy. In 2021, she collaborated with community organizer Ronnie Mosley, who was elected 21st Ward alderman this spring, to found the Black Bench. The nonprofit runs a six-month session teaching a hand-selected cohort of Black professionals how to build a campaign budget, manage the media, navigate city government and engage with corporate interests. Its teachers have included Mayor Brandon Johnson’s senior adviser Jason Lee and Quentin Fulks, a deputy campaign manager to President Joe Biden, while its leadership draws from a wide political spectrum, with former Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White and Chicago Teachers Union President Stacy Davis Gates serving as advisers. The group is united by the common goal of Black progress, though their theories of change may differ, Sims-Jones says. Given the diversity of opinions in its leadership and cohort, which welcomes Black conservatives and progressives alike, SimsJones has received positive feedback from previous generations of Chicago politicians — for the most part. “I did have one alderman call and tell me I was creating ‘little monsters,’ ” Sims-Jones says. “They were worried about me creating people that were going to run against them.” — Leigh Giangreco

“I did have one alderman call and tell me I was creating ‘little monsters.’ They were worried about me creating people that were going to run against them.”

PHOTOS BY GEOFFREY BLACK

Alexandra Sims-Jones, 35

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“We hope that Fifth Century Partners one day spawns several other private-equity firms with diverse individuals who (wouldn’t have) had opportunities” without their experience at the firm. — Marques Torbert (left)

While confronting both the pandemic and the racial reckoning following George Floyd’s murder, “People were having more honest, open conversations and thinking inward about, what can they do? And for me, it probably gave me even more conviction to go do something that I already was going to do.” — Bruce Hampton

Marques Torbert, 39, and Bruce Hampton, 36 Co-founders and partners, Fifth Century Partners

ruce Hampton and Marques Torbert both grew up in Cleveland. Both were star athletes in high school, and Hampton played Division I college football. Both were academic standouts. But it wasn’t until they were well along in their careers that the two crossed paths through an unlikely place: a car dealership. Hampton, before starting work for a Florida private-equity firm, was back in Cleveland for a visit and went to lease a car. His salesman was Torbert’s stepfather, who asked Hampton what he did for a living. When he found out, he exclaimed, “You should talk to my son!” They met — “He got the friends and family discount, I think,” Torbert cracks — and stayed in contact as they continued their careers in different cities. It wasn’t until more than a decade later, in 2020, that they decided to team up to form their own Chicago-

based private-equity firm, Fifth Century Partners. That firm, backed by the prominent Steans family, among other families and institutions, raised a $144 million fund in 2021 and is in the middle of raising a substantially larger second fund. One of just a few Black-owned private-equity firms in Chicago, Fifth Century employs a diverse workforce of 12. Adding founder and principal Jessica Patton to the mix at Fifth Century, Ken Hooten, partner with Steans-founded investment arm Financial Investments Corp., says: “If we could pick a dream team, it would be Marques, Bruce and Jessica. They took a pay cut to move to Chicago and start the firm. . . .Investors lined up left and right.” The Steans family office, founded with the fortune the late Harrison Steans made over a career of canny banking investments, has

for decades focused on investing in impoverished neighborhoods like North Lawndale on Chicago’s West Side. Part of that effort has included seeding minority-owned investment firms. With assets under management of about $3 billion, the Steans invested $25 million with Fifth Century. “It’s the most money we’ve ever invested in a first-time fund,” Hooten says. What makes Torbert and Hampton unusual is their disparate experiences. Although both got degrees from Harvard Business School, there’s little overlap in their careers. Torbert began as an analyst in New York at investment banking firm Lazard. He joined a private-equity firm but quickly gravitated to running one of the firm’s portfolio companies. That outfit — Ametros, based near Boston and in the business of helping injured insurance claimants handle

their medical needs — was ailing when 20-something Torbert took over in 2013. By 2020, when Torbert left to help launch Fifth Century, the company’s revenue had grown 30 times and a staff of five had grown to more than 150. Hampton, meanwhile, sourced deals for several private-equity firms, eventually landing in Chicago at Vistria Group, where he worked on education industry buyouts. While at Harvard, Hampton worked up a business plan for a future investment firm that would seek to combine best-in-class returns with a social mission. More than a class project, it was a career goal and had never been far from his thoughts by the time he and Torbert began considering a startup firm. In 2020, as the U.S. was confronting both the pandemic and the racial reckoning following George Floyd’s murder, the two

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Morgan Elise Johnson, 34, and Tiffany Walden, 34 PHOTOS BY GEOFFREY BLACK

Johnson (left): Publisher; Walden: Editor-in-chief, The TRiiBE

oining Alpha Kappa Alpha in 2008 turned out to be a life-changing move for Tiffany Walden and Morgan Elise Johnson. The two connected when they joined the sorority at Northwestern University. Walden and Johnson “just naturally kind of clicked through music and a love of cultural things: TV, film, music, all that sorts of stuff,” says Walden. Finding someone to connect with was essential for Walden, who admits she felt isolated when she first arrived in Evanston as an undergrad. The bond the two shared would expand further than culture when they learned that both of their families had migrated north from Bolivar County in Mississippi. Those connections laid the foundation for the news platform they founded, The TRiiBE, which says it is “reshaping the narrative of Black Chicago.” The site, which launched in 2017, centers Black Chicagoans in every story and has made an impact on Chicago’s media landscape. The newsroom has received multiple honors, including a 2021 Peter Lisagor Award for Best Neighborhood/Community News Website. Emphasizing their point of “literally starting with nothing” and using “creative capital” to build The Triibe, Johnson and Walden reflect the prominent characteristic of resilience in historically marginalized communities.

“When we first started The TRiiBE, it was a learning curve for us, with a very limited amount of resources,” says Johnson. Now with partnerships including independent publisher Haymarket Books and outdoor movie theater Rooftop Cinema Club, The TRiiBE has found its groove beyond the cultural things that helped bring the entrepreneurs together. The TRiiBE also operates as a for-profit site at a time when the nonprofit model seems to have caught a wave for news startups. “Because the work that we do is still a public good, we are providing a service to people, and we’ve been able to get that type of work funded through grants,” Johnson says, “but we do want to maintain our editorial freedom. We want to follow in the tradition of Black liberatory journalists.” Johnson says there was no budget when they launched in 2017. “Blood, sweat and tears was the budget,” she says. The company’s first real revenue came in a $14,000 grant from Chicago Filmmakers, and a fundraiser Johnson and Walden held in 2018 raised $20,000. The company worked without an operating budget until 2019; the budget for 2023 is $650,000. They’re seeing growth online, too. In

2017, The TRiiBE published roughly 60 articles and had an average of 5,600 page views a month. The site now publishes four times as many stories,, according to Johnson, and is averaging 42,000 page views a month. The company has nine employees and more than 10 regular contributors. Deborah Douglas, director of the Midwest Solutions Journalism Hub at Northwestern’s Medill School of Journalism, Media, Integrated Marketing Communications, says seeing The TRiiBE’s impact has given her joy and hope. “I’ve enjoyed watching them as businesswomen, building an organization from nothing into something that resonates so deeply, not only with young Black Chicago, but with Black Chicago and, really, Chicago in general,” Douglas says. Walden says The TRiiBE’s growth so far is only the beginning. “There’s a lot to expect from us in the future,” she says. “Morgan is a powerhouse in terms of how she’s building The TRiiBE financially, and how she’s growing our team. It’s just gonna be a really exciting next few years as our team continues to grow and as our reach continues to expand.” — Corli Jay

Allison Wyler, 36 President, Advocate Good Samaritan Hospital

S were galvanized. “We both had ambitions to eventually do something like this,” Torbert says. “The timing worked well.” Adds Hampton: “People were having more honest, open conversations and thinking inward about, what can they do? And for me, it probably gave me even more conviction to go do something that I already was going to do.” For now, the two are intent on building a major Chicago-based private-equity firm. But they look forward to generating offshoots, in the way Vistria and others gave them the experience to start theirs. Says Torbert, “We hope that Fifth Century Partners one day spawns several other private-equity firms with diverse individuals who (wouldn’t have) had opportunities” without their experience at Fifth Century. — Steve Daniels

ometimes leadership isn’t about leading the troops into battle. It’s about getting them to want to stay in the trenches, day in and day out. Allison Wyler understands the health care workforce is battle-weary and burned out, part of a post-COVID labor market in crisis. That makes it tough to keep employees around and engaged. In May 2021, in the middle of the pandemic, Wyler became the youngest person to lead an Advocate Aurora Health hospital. Then 35, she was specifically tasked as president with boosting workers’ spirits and improving lagging employee engagement scores at 293-bed Advocate Good Samaritan Hospital in Downers Grove. “We’ve been laser-focused on workforce development, seeing that there is a career here, not just a job,” she says. “It’s helped us drive an engaged and recruitable culture.” Under Wyler’s leadership, turnover and job vacancy rates at the hospital dropped 50%, and engagement scores, which had fallen to the bottom quartile of hospitals nationwide, rose to the top quartile, she says. “How’d she do it? Well, she and her team are highly visible,” says longtime Advocate

leader Bill Santulli. “But you can be around and not be effective. She takes real interest in what needs to improve.” Santulli, president of the Midwest region for the Chicago area’s largest health system, has mentored Wyler since soon after she joined Advocate Health in 2010. It was obvious early on that she was a “real up-and-

comer,” he says. “So we were intentional about rotating her into different roles.” “She’s self-aware and she’s got good emotional intelligence,” Santulli says. “Politically savvy, but not political.” Wyler describes her own talents as having “a knack for operations and for bringing people together. You’ve got to partner with clinical leaders, nurses, support staff, cafeteria workers, everyone from the boardroom to the boiler room. You show them you understand the impact that each of us has on the hospital.” “The headwinds of health care continue to come fast and furious. You’ve got to have a vision and work on the long game,” she says. “But with those winds coming at you, you need to be able to pivot and be nimble too.” “It’s a serious business, but it also has to be fun. I try to infuse some laughter into the day to day as well.” At home, Wyler and her husband are raising two young children in the same Evanston community where she grew up. She’s involved in volunteering in the community and is an avid Northwestern football fan. — Jon Asplund OCTOBER 16, 2023 | CRAIN’S CHICAGO BUSINESS | 33

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Founder, Leaf Trade; co-founder and president, NextME

ames Yi has a nose for opportunity. Watching his mother run a hair salon, he saw that managing appointments and walk-in customers was a major pain point for small-business owners. So he and his brother started NextME, a software app for managing customer wait times. When a friend launched a marijuana shop, Yi quickly realized that staff spent half its time ordering products. So he launched Leaf Trade, which provides software for retailers to order from growers. “People largely ignored the wholesale part of the business,” Yi says. “I’m attracted to complex, weird problems like supply chains. I was hooked.” With Leaf Trade, he signed up the 20 largest U.S. marijuana companies as customers, including Chicago-based Verano Holdings, Cresco Labs and Green Thumb Industries. Earlier this year Leaf Trade merged with Sweed, a Burbank, Calif., company that provides point-of-sale systems to nearly 2,000 dispensaries, and the company has grown to 100 people. Yi turned over the corner office and CEO title to Brian Ward, Leaf Trade’s chief financial officer, but remains on the board of directors. And Yi remains president of NextME, the startup he bootstrapped with his brother, John. “Our goal was to eliminate pen and paper with a virtual waiting room,” he says. NextME, with customers including Lou Malnati’s, runs lean, with just a half-dozen

employees. “People like James are visionaries,” says Sammy Dorf, a Verano co-founder who was an early investor in Leaf Trade. “He saw that everyone had a different ordering system and process. If you were a dispensary manager, it was a mess. As a founder, he was consistent, relatable and persistent. People who make it in cannabis are people who are persistent.” Yi credits two things for his entrepreneurial spirit: his mom and a lousy economy. His mother, Anna, came to Chicago from Seoul, South Korea, when she was 20 and started her own salon in the Lakeview building where they lived. A classically trained pianist until he went to DePaul University, Yi graduated into a recession in 2009 with a degree in international studies. He interned at the Chicago Climate Exchange, a startup for trading contracts related to offsetting pollution, then worked in publishing and clerked at a law firm. “I always knew I didn’t fit inside a certain package or box,” he says. “I’m surprised at where my life has taken me. I’ve just followed my gut and my instinct.” While Yi is still working on NextME, as well as advising startups, he pursues his latest passion: sustainability and rooftop agriculture. “When you look at the satellite view on Google Maps, you see a vast grayness,” he says. “My dream is to turn all these rooftops green.” — John Pletz

“I always knew I didn’t fit inside a certain package or box. I’m surprised at where my life has taken me. I’ve just followed my gut and my instinct.”

PHOTOS BY GEOFFREY BLACK

James Yi, 37

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