Crain's Cleveland Business

Hospitals posted big gains before hitting rough patch.

‘FOREVER HOME’ FOR CITY CLUB

Free-speech forum will join the cast at Playhouse Square

BY MICHELLE JARBOE

e City Club of Cleveland plans to move to Playhouse Square, ending the free-speech forum’s 40-year run in its eponymous home near East Ninth Street and Euclid Avenue.

e institution has signed a long-term lease on the rst oor at 1317 Euclid Ave., a two-story building owned by an a liate of the Playhouse Square Foundation. At 14,600 square feet, the space will boost the City Club’s seating capacity by roughly 50% in a more accessible, visible location.

SCORE is sending business experts into East Cleveland

BY KIM PALMER

e owner of the company hired to cater the East Cleveland Growth Association’s (ECGA) Community Lunch and Learn pulled founder and CEO Sean Ward aside after the Nov. 5 event, headlined by a SCORE Cleveland volunteer, and said he planned

to be at the next event — both as caterer and attendee, so he could learn how to grow his business.

“ ey heard the SCORE message and they were so impressed with it, got so much helpful information for their business, that they told me

O ce market trends hold steady

Pandemic impact may be less than thought

BY STAN BULLARD

As the lockdowns at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic and masking mandates recede into memory, signs of the impact of work-fromhome and hybrid work patterns on the Northeast Ohio o ce market are starting to emerge.

A detailed analysis of o ce tenant patterns in downtown and suburban Cleveland markets since 2020 by national realty brokerage JLL’s area unit shows that as occupants execute new leases, the perceived movement to higher-quality o ce space and a generalized diet for o ce space are apparent.

Andrew Batson, a Cleveland-based

JLL senior vice president for research and strategy, said in a phone interview, “I do not think there has been a monumental shift in terms of what we see in terms of migration (between building types), ight to quality and other o ce trends. e trends pre-COVID-19 remain very much intact post-COVID in terms of executed leases.”

The City Club of Cleveland plans to move to the Playhouse Square district next year. The organization’s new venue, at 1317 Euclid Ave., will ll the rst oor of a historic retail space that’s currently occupied by Dwellworks, a relocation-services company.

| MICHELLE JARBOE/CRAIN’S CLEVELAND BUSINESS

JACK opens sportsbooks at casino, racino

Gamblers can get a sneak peek and place fake bets before legal sports betting arrives on Jan. 1

When JACK Entertainment started planning its two sportsbooks, it had one goal in mind: to make them the best place to watch sports in Cleve land.

(Not counting your therapist’s of ce.)

“When you’re putting together a list of places to enjoy a game on a Sat urday afternoon or a Sunday during football season, we expect our prop erties to be at the top of that list,” said Adam Suliman, JACK’s senior vice president for sports and digital gam ing. “We’ve invested to get that out come.”

Now, Clevelanders can see for themselves. JACK unveiled its bet JACK sportsbooks at the downtown casino and istledown racino on Tuesday, Nov. 22, giving gamblers a sneak peek at what life will be like when legal sports betting arrives in Ohio on Jan. 1.

JACK o cials targeted the late No vember opening to coincide with the World Cup, as well as the Michi gan-Ohio State game. Fans won’t yet be able to bet on those games — they can place fake bets on the company’s betJACK app — but they’ll be able to experience the sportsbook, and the games, in a fun environment, Suli man said.

“It’s going to be bonkers in here this weekend,” he said on the 22nd.

JACK’s 6,000-square-foot down town casino sportsbook is located on the rst oor, just o the Prospect Av enue entrance. It has 99 seats, includ ing 45 theater-style recliners with phone chargers, as well as a 35-footby-10-foot main video wall and 14 85-inch TVs.

istledown’s sportsbook is slight ly smaller, with 76 total seats, a 30-foot-by-8-foot video wall and 14 85-inch TVs.

e sportsbooks’ opening marks the completion of a $100 million cap ital investment plan consisting of renovations and improvements to both JACK locations.

“Typically with JACK, whenever we build something, we don’t spare any expense,” Suliman said. “Some regional gaming properties, they just stick it (the sportsbook) in a corner, add a couple TVs and some bench seating and call it a day.

“When we build it, we build it right. And we know our customers appreciate it, because they tell us.”

Several area sportsbooks planned

JACK’s sportsbooks are the rst to open in Northeast Ohio, but they won’t be the last. e Ohio Casino Control Commission (OCCC) has al ready given conditional approval to nine Northeast Ohio properties for Type B (brick-and-mortar sports book) licenses.

Five of those sportsbooks will be in Cuyahoga County: the two JACK loca tions, as well as Rocket Mortgage FieldHouse (RMFH), Progressive Field and Cleveland Browns Stadium.

e Cavaliers plan to open their Caesars Sportsbook in time for the Jan. 1 launch, while the Guardians (who are partnering with Fanatics) and the Browns (Bally’s) will open

their sportsbooks at a later date.

North eld Park will partner with BetMGM on its sportsbook, which will also open on Jan. 1. Summit County is allowed to have as many as three brick-and-mortar sportsbooks based on its population, but North eld is the only one to apply so far.

e Hall of Fame Village in Canton has partnered with BetRivers on its sportsbook, which is scheduled to open in the second quarter of 2023.

Spire Institute and Academy in Ge neva, which received Type A and B approval last week, is planning to open its sportsbook sometime in the rst quarter of 2023.

Hollywood Gaming at Mahoning Valley near Youngstown, which is

partnering with Barstool, is the only Mahoning County entity to get con ditional approval so far. Phantom Fireworks successfully lobbied the Ohio General Assembly to allocate a second Type B license to Mahoning County with plans to build a sports book inside the downtown Covelli Centre. at application has been submitted, but the OCCC has not yet made a ruling on it. Phantom Fire works has told the OCCC that, even if approved, it would not be ready for the Jan. 1 start date.

Small piece of the pie

Although Vegas-style sportsbooks can add a “wow factor” to places like

casinos and racinos, they don’t drive the same amount of revenue as table games and slot machines, Suliman said.

“It’s not even close,” he said. “Table games and slots are the core of our business. ey will produce, from now until forever, the majority of the gaming revenue in the state of Ohio.”

Still, sportsbooks have two big ad vantages. First, they drive foot tra c to the casino/racino, especially on big dates in the sports calendar such as the NFL playo s and March Mad ness. Second, they tend to boost rev enue in other parts of the building, Suliman said.

“ e beauty of a sportsbook in a casino environment is that in those

circumstances where you get a large crowd in a sportsbook, you get an equally large crowd at the table games and slot machines,” he said. “In Pennsylvania, they reported that gaming revenue was up nearly 20% when they opened a retail sports book. When you build a sportsbook as a draw, it lifts all your gaming reve nue.”

Both JACK sportsbooks will have betting windows ( ve downtown, four at istledown), as well as 20 self-serve kiosks split between the sportsbooks and other strategic parts of the casino. Once sports gambling becomes normalized in Ohio, about 80% of the sports bets inside the casino will be at the ki osks, Suliman said.

“Di erent customers like di erent things,” he said. “Some customers like to talk to the cashiers about the bet they’re making. Other customers have a strategy and they don’t want anybody else to know, so they go to the kiosk. Initially, we’ll see a lot more transactions done at the count er as folks will want to understand the game a little bit, but as they get more and more familiar with the bets they like, they’ll skip the counter and go to the kiosk.”

at day is coming soon. When Ohio legalizes sports gambling on Jan. 1, it will literally happen at mid night.

In other words, this year’s Times Square ball drop will be the last time Ohioans will be watching a ball on TV and not be allowed to bet on it.

“At 12:01, we can start taking bets,” Suliman said. “All the terminals will be turned on at that point and ... away we go.

“It’s going to be wild.”

Joe Scalzo: joe.scalzo@crain.com, (216) 771-5256, @JoeScalzo0

JOE SCALZO

JACK Entertainment unveiled its 6,000-square-foot sportsbook at the downtown Cleveland casino on Tuesday, Nov. 22. JACK ENTERTAINMENT PHOTOS

ARTCRAFT OF THE DEAL: e city of Cleveland picked a preferred site for its new police headquarters — the historic Artcraft Building in the Supe rior Arts District, just east of down town. O cials chose the roughly 260,000-square-foot building, a one time garment factory and recent art ists’ enclave that looms over the In ner Belt, after soliciting proposals from developers, property owners and real estate brokers. e city has been exploring options for a new public-safety headquarters for years and previously selected, but walked away from, the former Plain Dealer o ce building downtown and a new construction project on the Opportu nity Corridor. Amid rising costs, and with a new administration at Cleve land City Hall, o cials paused plans for the Opportunity Corridor project earlier this year. e Artcraft Building entered the picture this fall, after an investor group led by CrossCountry Mortgage CEO Ron Leonhardt Jr. purchased the property — just down the street from CrossCountry’s new headquarters complex.

NEW OWNER: Bentley Coe Plaza, a neighborhood shopping center on Lorain Road in North Olmsted, changed hands in a $4.45 million sale, according to Cuyahoga County land records, after the Florida-based seller repositioned the property. e new owner, Bentley Coe LLC of Rocky River, acquired the property from an a liate of Timber Develop ment of Longwood, Florida, which had bought the plaza in 2018 for $2.8 million. Timber, which the CoStar online real estate data provider said has a portfolio of more than a dozen retail properties in 13 states, worked for its gains. Kyle Hartung, director of investment sales at the Goodman Real Estate Services Group LLC of Lyndhurst, said the seller lost a Mur ray’s Auto Parts location shortly after buying the center but refurbished the space as a home for multiple tenants. As a result, more than 30% of the cen ter is devoted to food-oriented ten ants.

THINKING BIG: Tokyo-based tech gi ant Canon Inc. announced plans to establish a new subsidiary, to be called Canon Healthcare USA Inc., that likely will be based in the Cleve land area. By strengthening its pres ence in “the highly in uential Ameri can medical market, Canon Inc. aims to accelerate the growth of its medi cal business,” the company said in a statement. Canon said it “has decid ed to consider the greater Cleveland area, a key hub in the country’s medi cal industry, as a candidate location for establishing Canon Healthcare USA, in order to strengthen the com pany’s competitive presence in the global market.” e “establishment of this new company and expansion of business operations is expected to require $300 million of investment capital,” Canon said. e Cleveland market is home to the headquarters of Quality Electrodynamics LLC, a May eld Village company that Can on acquired in 2019. QED makes coils that go inside magnetic reso nance imaging machines.

LONG-TERM PARTNERS: Goodyear is set for more good years with NA SCAR. Akron-based Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. reached a multiyear agreement to continue as the exclu sive tire supplier for NASCAR’s top three national series: the Cup Series, the X nity Series and the Craftsman Truck Series. In addition to Good

year’s designation as the “O cial tire of NASCAR,” the company will con tinue to serve as the title sponsor of

the Goodyear 400, NASCAR’s o cial throwback weekend Cup Series race at Darlington Raceway. Goodyear

and NASCAR have partnered for nearly 70 years, and Goodyear Eagle tires have been the exclusive tire for the racing series for more than 25 years. Teams currently use an 18inch Eagle tire on NASCAR’s Next Gen stock car.

GET ROLLING: Lordstown Motors Corp.’s rst customer vehicles are leaving the Foxconn plant in North east Ohio for delivery, the electric ve hicle maker announced last week. e company’s Endurance electric pickup truck has reached “full ho mologation, a key condition to start sales,” Lordstown Motors said, earn ing certi cation from the EPA and CARB. e rst trucks left the Fox conn-owned plant in Lordstown. Lordstown Motors and Tai wan-based Foxconn, or Hon Hai Technology Group, entered into con

tract manufacturing and joint ven ture agreements in the spring, when the facility sale to Foxconn was com pleted.

COOKING UP A DEAL: North Ameri can Kitchen Solutions (dba Hoodmart), an Elyria-based provid er of commercial ventilation sys tems and related products, was ac quired by Valesco Industries, a private equity rm in Dallas. Finan cial terms weren’t disclosed. NAKS specializes in the design, manufac ture and sale of ventilation systems, re-suppression systems, exhaust hoods, walk-in coolers and comple mentary products for commercial restaurants and food trucks. NAKS has 100 employees. Its 2022 revenue is projected to be in the range of $40 million to $50 million, according to Valesco.

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The Artcraft Building, in Cleveland’s Superior Arts District, is the preferred location for the city’s new police headquarters. | MICHELLE JARBOE/CRAIN’S CLEVELAND BUSINESS

Owner of blue-chip east suburban portfolio lands lender lenience

BY STAN BULLARD

Shelbourne Global Solutions, the Brooklyn, New York, owner of a huge o ce portfolio in the suburbs east of Cleveland, has secured additional terms from its lender for a $40 million loan against four of its properties here.

Trepp, the New York City-based provider of collateralized mortgage-backed securities and other loan information, reported Nov. 25 that Shelbourne had secured a twoyear loan modi cation of a mortgage that came due last July.

e $40 million mortgage that Shelbourne had used to buy the Landerbrook Corporate Center I, II and III buildings in May eld Heights and Metropolitan Plaza in Highland Hills is what is known as a “bullet loan.” at means the bulk of its principal needs to be replaced by other nancing.

Securing such a replacement loan could be a dicey proposition with lender wariness growing amid a pandemic-roiled o ce market and growing predictions of a recession.

However, as a Shelbourne executive had predicted it would, the national property owner not only secured an additional two years to extend the loan but also secured two potential one-year loan extensions, according to Trepp.

Ben Schlossberg, a managing member of Shelbourne, declined in a phone interview to discuss terms of the loan modi cation.

“It gives us time to retenant our buildings,” he said. CoStar, the online data service, said there was an injection of capital into the deal.

However, there is some pain. Trepp noted that the value of the six

properties was cut in November to $46 million from $60 million.

Winning a loan modi cation for a CMBS loan is typically considered virtually impossible by many Northeast Ohio real estate owners and attorneys. e loan was placed by Argentic, a New York City-based direct lender, with its own special servicing arm in Dallas. Most property owners consider a trip to special servicing a one-way trek leading to loss of the property.

Jason Laver, a senior vice president at Cushman & Wake eld Cresco, an Independence real estate brokerage, said some borrowers avoid CMBS loans because of diculties securing loan workouts, which are more common with bank and insurance lenders.

“ e challenge of a CMBS loan is that if you miss a beat, you break a (term) of the loan,” Laver said. “ e CMBS lenders like to call the loan and be in control. But things do change in real estate, especially as it relates to multitenant o ce buildings in a changing environment. is says Shelbourne is a solid borrower to be able to modify a loan with a CMBS lender. Not many would be able to do so.”

Schlossberg, who had earlier called the special servicing move a “non-event,” said the company plans to properly position the 1990s-era buildings to retain tenants and attract new ones.

“We have a substantial amount of funds reserved for this purpose,” Schlossberg said. “We intend to invest heavily to amenitize our buildings so as to make them compatible with the current ight to better-amenitized buildings.” Such steps include adding spaces for sta ers to connect over beverages

and co ee bars, upgrading conference centers and o ering tness centers.

“ e last two months we have seen a very big uptick in interest in our spaces and showings that we have done with potential tenants,” Schlossberg said. “Most companies are getting to be more realistic about hybrid work practices and urging their sta to return to the o ce. ey’re starting to reevaluate their space needs in a positive way.”

Although Shelbourne has continued to land new tenants in the pandemic, it faces some big challenges.

Park Place Technologies, which occupies 100,000 square feet of space at Landerbrook Corporate Center, has launched a high-pro le, public search for a potential move to di erent or new o ces. e data center and network optimization rm has said it wants to double or nearly triple the size of its headquarters to accommodate its recent and anticipated growth.

Meantime, May eld Village-based Progressive Corp. (NYSE: PGR) has announced it intends to exit its 100,000 square-foot Landerbrook o ces in January. However, that also means Shelbourne might have room at Landerbrook that the insurer is exiting to accommodate a big expansion by Park Place Technologies.

Asked if that might help retain Park Place Technologies or if Shelbourne hopes to do so, Schlossberg said, “ ey are a value tenant and have a lease with us through the middle of 2025. You’re better o asking Park Place Technologies about that.”

Stan Bullard: sbullard@crain.com, (216) 771-5228, @CrainRltywriter

The owner of three-building Landerbrook Corporate Center complex has won a loan extension for its mortgage on the properties. However, the value of the buildings was cut to about $46 million from $60 million. | COSTAR

Akron Urban League’s MCCAP program a boon to minority contractors

BY DAN SHINGLER

Even many successful businesspeople have bad memories of starting their careers and nancial lives — applying for coveted initial jobs, only to be told they needed experience rst, or being denied a loan because they hadn’t had one before.

How, many have wondered, does a person get experience or build a credit record, when no one will hire them or give them a rst loan?

Minority contractors, many of whom start their businesses after working for other companies and mastering their trades, say they often feel the same way.

ey’re told contracts are too big for them, because they’ve never done similarly sized jobs. ey operate on bootstraps, because it’s often di cult to get that rst loan when their company doesn’t have a credit history or a track record with a lender.

Enter the Akron Urban League and MCCAP.

MCCAP stands for Minority Contractor Capital Access Program and, while it de nitely does help small, minority contractors to access capital, it does far more than that.

“Our goal is for them to be successful and grow their business — we provide them with the tools to do that,” said Gail Wilson, the Urban League’s director of the two-year MCCAP initiative.

that gure now stands at $4.1 million, with the last $2 million or so coming in only about six months.

Participants credit the program with helping them to understand contracts, manage their books, get new business and, perhaps most importantly, access nancing. e MCCAP program, which along with the Urban League gets support from the city of Akron and Summit County, works with the county Development Finance Agency’s Western Reserve Fund to o er lines of credit to MCCAP participants. It’s a godsend and a lifeline, say some in the program.

“I’m a small contractor, so I don’t have a lot of capital,” said Rodney Griggs, owner of Kingdom Construction and Builders in Akron.

Griggs, who described himself as “the poster child for MCCAP,” said he realized that what he got out of the program would be the result of what he put into it. So, he tried to use every service and o er of help the program made available, he said, from accessing “every ounce” of the credit line available through the DFA to meeting with every adviser he could and even calling some at home. ey were all more than willing to help, he said.

In the two years he’s been in the program, his 19-year-old construction company was nearly reborn.

“I went from doing a couple hundred thousand a year to more than $600,000 a year, and I’d say that’s all because of MCCAP,” Griggs said of his revenue growth.

“MCCAP helped me with bonding. e program has done some wonderful things for us as contractors, starting out with just giving us tools to work with.”

Others echo his sentiments.

at includes, she said, technical help with marketing, accounting and legal services from local professionals. ey work with the program to make sure participants have and can use things like QuickBooks; are able to properly go over and fully understand contracts and other legal documents; and know how to target their marketing and get their names out e ectively and a ordably.

e program even provides a new laptop that runs QuickBooks and a new mobile phone to ensure that participants can communicate with employees, clients and others e ectively.

Coaching and mentoring are provided, often by seasoned construction entrepreneurs, some of whom have retired and some of whom are looking for new subcontractors.

“We try to give them everything they need and make all these things available for them,” said Wilson, whom participants and volunteers alike credit with keeping the program not only going through the pandemic, but able to graduate its rst cohort of local business owners and be in a position to expand next year.

e program also works to nd business opportunities for enrollees, connecting them with local general contractors and larger construction companies that come in to talk to participants.

It works, too, Wilson attests — and is gaining momentum.

In March, Wilson was happy to report that the program had helped those enrolled to capture more than $2 million in revenue from new contracts over the program’s rst two years. On ursday, Dec. 1, she said

“It was a struggle before we got into the program,” said Gary Barton, owner of B&G Masonry Remodeling in Akron. “MCCAP is a wonderful thing. It really helped me out 100%. It kind of made us able to do more projects and bigger projects.”

Barton said the program helped him spend less time on administration and more time on actually growing and operating his business — including access to a line of credit that gave him more exibility with his cash ow.

LaQuata Williams, who owns White Glove Cleaning Solutions in Akron, said the program helped her to better understand contracts, to develop relationships with new clients and to expand her seven-person business from residential to commercial cleaning.

“I love the MCCAP program. I think it has allowed me to kind of build relationships with people in diverse corporate communities and various elds that I didn’t know existed,” Williams said. “It kind of opened my eyes in terms of how far I could take my cleaning business. Before MCCAP, I was pretty small-minded and thought, ‘Oh, I’ll just clean businesses and houses.’ But so many doors opened up to me through the MCCAP program.”

She also said that the nancing made available through the program helped her a lot, especially when it comes to managing payroll for jobs that might not pay as quickly as she has to pay her workers.

“I’ve used it for employment when I do post-construction cleanup. It can take you a month to get paid, and with the line of credit I can say, ‘I need this amount to cover payroll.’ ey take care of it, and when I get paid from the

job, I pay it back. But the process is easy, and it’s allowed me to hire employees,” Williams said.

at’s just what Rachel Bridenstine said she wants to hear, too.

Bridenstine oversees lending for MCCAP as executive director of DFA’s Development Fund of the Western Reserve & Western Reserve Community Fund. To date, she said MCCAP participants have gotten 17 lines of credit, with outstanding loans ranging from a peak of nearly $1 million to about $700,000 today, as some have paid down their initial borrowing.

e Western Reserve Fund was integral in working with the Urban League to get the MCCAP program up and running — not only on the lending side, but in helping to organize the program and the two years of technical support it provides to each participant. It’s been a success, Bridenstine said, and might soon be able to lend more money to participants with more ease.

Currently, loans for more than $100,000 require third-party approval, but the DFA has gotten access to up to $3 million in loan guarantees, some of which will go toward MCCAP to eliminate the need for a third party, Bridenstine said.

“For some of the contractors doing residential work, that ($100,000) is ne, but for some of the larger ones doing commercial work, it’s not enough,” she said.

Some non-minority people in the construction industry say they aren’t surprised that the program is working, or that minority rms need the assistance and nancing it provides.

It’s been too long in coming, said Lou Ciraldo, retired owner of Summit Construction and a mentor for MCCAP who has volunteered with the Urban League for more than 20 years. In the past, lip service was paid to helping minority businesses, but little was done to actually help them succeed.

“In the late ’90s, it was more of a gladhanding. It was not a real opportunity for minority companies to get into the business,” Ciraldo said. “We sometimes shoot ourselves in the foot.”

But MCCAP is di erent, he said, because it takes a more holistic, organized approach that’s meant to help the companies it works with grow to the point that they no longer need help.

“I think a lot of the MCCAP program because of how they’ve structured that support network, with

bankers, insurance people and others,” Ciraldo said, “and I’m happy to be a mentor.”

Now, with support growing, its rst cohort about to graduate and a third signed up earlier this year, the Urban League is preparing to expand the program, said its vice president of programs and operations, Larry Chadwick.

“What we’re doing now in the new year is, instead of bringing people in twice a year, we’re going to bring in people quarterly. So, it will be four to six people per quarter,” Chadwick said.

MCCAP has shown too much progress for the Urban League not to pursue it further, he said.

“I de nitely think that, 100%,” Chadwick said. “ e opportunities out there and the participants we’re reaching, it’s been great. And now they (participants) are telling their peers about the program.”

ey’re doing more than that, too.

“I’m graduating from the program and now I’ll be on the other side,” Griggs said. “As a mentor.”

Dan Shingler: dshingler@crain.com, (216) 771-5290

“OUR GOAL IS FOR THEM TO BE SUCCESSFUL AND GROW THEIR BUSINESS — WE PROVIDE THEM WITH THE TOOLS TO DO THAT.”

—Gail Wilson, the Urban League’s director of MCCAP

Dodson, Hardy helping Akron-area leaders get things done

BY DAN SHINGLER

ree years ago, James Hardy and Jason Dodson were at the epicenters of political power in Akron and Summit County.

Both were in high-pro le, though non-elected, positions. ey worked — sometimes separately, but often together and with other local leaders — on projects such as the Elevate Akron economic development plan; the expansion of local hospitals including Summa; and Akron’s Bowery District. Dodson was chief of sta to Summit County Executive Ilene Shapiro, and Hardy was in the same role for Akron Mayor Dan Horrigan.

Dodson stepped down in 2019 to go into private practice at Akron’s Roetzel & Andress law rm. Hardy left his post in 2021 to become a senior program o cer at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

But if you ask some of the movers and shakers in the city and county, they’ll tell you this: Both men have remained not only active in the local community, but have retained their positions as counselors, contributors and composers behind many important issues, initiatives and decisions made today.

Shapiro and Horrigan both said that’s true, and that they still rely on their former chiefs of sta .

“We still talk often, and I’ll bounce things o him,” Horrigan said. “I just texted him the other day. Obviously,

Hardy Dodson

he’s busy with young kids and a family, but we stay in pretty regular contact.”

Shapiro said she, similarly, stays in close touch with Dodson.

“All the time,” Shapiro said, when asked if she still talks to her former chief lieutenant.

“I just had lunch with him (on a ursday in November). He’s under contract with us, too (via Roetzel). ...

When we have good people, I tell them they can leave but never quit.”

Dodson now runs the county’s business retention and expansion program as outside counsel, Shapiro said. e two men have a lot in common. ey share not only a commitment to public service and to the Akron area, but a desire to remain involved and a strong bond of close friendship, Hardy said.

In fact, Hardy said, you can add him to the list of local people who turn to Dodson for advice, especially on political matters

“Absolutely,” Hardy said, noting that he went to Dodson for advice before recently deciding to run for Akron City

Council’s Ward 8 seat in 2023. “We are still very good friends. In fact, I consider him to be one of my best friends.”

Hardy says the two men complement each other well. Hardy is more of a front-line guy, who misses the public aspect of public service (and the service, as well), while Dodson is more of a behind-the-scenes player who doesn’t relish a lot of attention, said Hardy and several others.

Shapiro, for one, was hardly shocked that Dodson didn’t respond to interview requests for this article, though he generally returns calls quickly when a reporter asks for help with a story.

“I’m not surprised,” Shapiro said. “He doesn’t like the spotlight.”

Dave Lieberth, a former Akron deputy mayor and local broadcast journalist who himself has remained involved in the area as a civic leader and source of advice to others, said Dodson is quietly growing to ful ll an important role in town.

“He’s the new Ray Kapper,” Lieberth said, referring to a well-known Akron public servant and politician who served as a con dant to local leaders for decades, even after he retired in 1992.

Some, like Horrigan, think it’s a bit early to put that mantle on Dodson. Hardy, however, thinks it’s an apt comparison, at least so far.

“I think he brings all that Ray brought from a political acumen aspect, but he also brings such incredible intelligence and a great legal mind that just makes

him sought out,” Hardy said of Dodson. “If he’s not at the top of the list, he’s always on the list of people you call.”

Shapiro was downright e usive.

“Jason Dodson is one of the most talented individuals I know,” Shapiro said. “He is bright, he is rock-solid, and he is able to envision big-picture things, take them down and put them into something that’s actionable. ...

His communication skill is in being able to talk to people, hear what they have to say and reason with them.

at’s a knack, and he has it.”

People speak similarly about Hardy, including Horrigan.

e mayor credits Hardy with much of the work that went into reorganizing city government when he took over, and then helping to shepherd numerous other projects and issues ranging from the expansion of local hospitals to the shaping of an economic development strategy that city, county and economic development leaders use today.

“He did a wonderful job in a few di erent roles,” Horrigan said.

“ ere’s no apathy or ignorance in James, and I would say that about Jason, too. You have to be able to stand your ground and ght for your position, but also be able to compromise.

I think James got that.”

Horrigan has helped clear the way for Hardy to re-enter local politics by announcing he will not seek re-election next year. at brought Akron Ward 8 Councilman Shammas Malik into the race for mayor, leaving his

council seat open.

Now Hardy hopes to win that seat.

Somewhat famous locally for a 2018 speech in which he implored other local leaders to stop talking about doing things and “get shit done,” Hardy said he misses the direct involvement and fray of working in city government.

“I miss the trenches, which is in part why I’m leaning in,” he said.

Hardy said he’ll try to convince voters that he brings not only hands-on experience via his past work with the city and other local entities, but also his policy work at the Johnson Foundation, where he focuses on issues facing older industrial cities such as Akron.

Horrigan said he’s already committed to endorsing Hardy in his council race.

As for Dodson, he’s apparently keeping his future activities to himself. No one said they’re expecting him to abandon what seems to be a successful legal career. He’s a shareholder at his law rm and a director of its consulting group already.

But there are still local boards and organizations that need help, and Shapiro said she and others think Dodson will still take time to help lead them. He’ll be welcomed to do so, she said.

“When we talk about future leadership in the community, Jason’s name is always involved in that conversation,” Shapiro said.

Dan Shingler: dshingler@crain.com, (216) 771-5290

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EDITORIAL

Sour welcome

This is not, to say the least, the welcome MetroHealth wanted to o er its new CEO, Airica Steed, or the one the veteran Chicago hospital executive deserved.

Steed comes to Cleveland with a stellar resume and a sig ni cant history of accomplishment, most recently as execu tive vice president/system chief operating o cer of the Sinai Chicago Health System and president of Mount Sinai and Si nai Children’s Hospital. She previously worked in leadership roles at Presence Health, the University of Illinois Health Sys tem, Advocate Health System and Pricewaterhouse Coopers. Steed holds a doctorate of education in leadership, an MBA, a bachelor’s degree in nursing and is pursuing a master’s in international relations with a focus on health care.

She has earned numerous accolades in her ca reer, including from our sister publication, Modern Healthcare, which in 2020 named Steed to its list of the country’s “Top 25 Healthcare Innovators.”

What we should be talking about, in short, is how an outstanding health care system with a strong commit ment to serving all populations, and that is in the mid dle of an exciting transformation plan, has brought in a dynamic leader for a new era in its history.

But on Monday, Dec. 5, Steed takes the top job at the health system not with a smooth hando but with an epic fumble: the Nov. 21 ring of now-for mer CEO Dr. Akram Boutros, after the MetroHealth board received results of an investigation by outside counsel indicating Boutros from 2018 to 2022 re ceived more than $1.9 million in supplemental bo nuses that he authorized for himself based on self-evaluations, without disclosure to the board.

MetroHealth on Nov. 25 released the 48-page report, which was produced by John F. McCa rey, a partner at the Tucker Ellis law rm and a former FBI agent, and it subsequently made available documents showing Boutros’ supplemental performance-based variable compensation, or SPBVC, came from self-assessments using metrics that he designed.

e report, in meticulous detail, looks at how Boutros re ceived about $1.98 million in payments based on self-assess ments of his performance in the years from 2017 to 2021. It is, in its own way, a riveting read. As cleveland.com noted, the

review showed Boutros “graded himself between 85% and 100% most years, for meeting certain goals he’d set for him self. e percentages were based on weighted metrics, which changed every year.”

It’s disheartening, at minimum, and maddening, mostly, to read through this report about the opaque process related to the bonuses and nd a sentence like this one: “ us, it is dif cult to independently con rm how Boutros arrived at the amount he received under the Supplemental PBVC plan for 2017.” If, after this level of scrutiny, the bonus pro cess still can’t be fully explained, there has been a massive failure all around.

Boutros came under investigation in the fall as the board was preparing its compensation package for Steed, and discrepancies between the former CEO’s payroll records and his contract raised questions that led to the investigation. In a matter of weeks, Boutros’ decade-long career came to an end. e former CEO has denied the allegations against him, maintaining that the board was fully aware of his bonuses. As Boutros sees it, the ring was retaliation for him blowing the whistle on what he says were board member violations of state Sunshine Laws re lated to the hiring of Steed. Boutros last week led a lawsuit that seeks to nullify the investigation of Boutros and his termination for cause as CEO.

It’s not our intent to adjudicate the matter. at will be left to the Ohio Ethics Commission, which is reviewing the case, and the court system, which will evaluate the merits of Boutros’ lawsuit and, poten tially, any criminal charges. ( e McCa rey report suggests charges could include theft in o ce.) It is imperative, though, that the board immediately reviews its processes around executive compensation and makes sure there is no room for error, misinterpretation or deceit in the way the CEO or other top o cials are paid.

MetroHealth receives more than $32 million annually from Cuyahoga County residents, who deserve to know that their dol lars are being spent responsibly. Steed’s big to-do list at Metro Health now includes rebuilding trust in the system. e entire community needs her to succeed. MetroHealth’s mission to build a healthy Cuyahoga County is more important than ever.

Executive Editor: Elizabeth McIntyre (emcintyre@crain.com)

Managing Editor: Scott Suttell (ssuttell@crain.com)

Contact Crain’s: 216-522-1383

Read Crain’s online: crainscleveland.com

PERSONAL VIEW

Dr. Akram Boutros’ tragic ending at MetroHealth

Many of us have spent the last several years trying to make sense of a world that seems more incomprehensible by the day. I am rarely surprised anymore, but I must ad mit Dr. Akram Boutros’ alleged secret bo nus scheme stunned me.

I am heartbroken and angry.

I do not want to weigh in on whether he stole almost $2 million from a public hospi tal or whether he was wronged by a venge ful board. I worked closely with Akram for ve years and have my private thoughts. But I’d like to focus on something much more important.

After a career helping build strong brands — Raytheon, Dell, Staples, Citicorp and Huntington Bank — I came to MetroHealth in 2013 for its mission and to work for a quirky CEO and a little-engine-that-could hospital with a mediocre brand but a zeal to improve the health of everyone in Cuyahoga County.

Akram helped people understand the crucial role a public hospital plays in the health of an entire community. He rejected the notion that an old, rundown gaggle of ugly buildings in an i y neighborhood was “good enough for those people.” He helped build respect for the sta who chose public health over fancier patients and facilities.

He de ed conventional wisdom by raising a billion dollars in the public markets in the face of a county executive who wouldn’t support a much-needed new hospital.

Akram’s leadership helped deliver the new Glick Center, the most advanced hospital in the region, and then he reminded us all that it nally gives MetroHealth’s patients a hospital that is worthy of them.

I believed MetroHealth was proof positive that it’s not always all about the money. at skilled, mission-driven people can em brace and serve the patients the other hospitals and their patients don’t want in their waiting rooms. at public employees are not second-class talents and inherently corrupt.

Akram now joins a distinguished group of former MetroHealth executives in serious trouble and loudly proclaiming their inno cence: John Carroll, nine years in prison on corruption convictions in 2011; former chief operating o cer Ed Hills, 15 years in federal prison on racketeering convictions in 2018; and now an outgoing CEO who may have helped himself to an extra $2 million because he thought he’d earned it. Yikes.

What the hell happened? e lure of more money? Arro gance? Is there something in the water on West 25th Street? Something about public hospital governance that allows ques tionable, even felonious, behavior to take root?

e collateral damage of this latest scandal will spread far and wide. No matter the outcome, MetroHealth, its employees and the community will su er. And that is just wrong.

MetroHealth’s dedicated sta and caregivers have built one of the most admired public hospital systems in the nation. It can go head-to-head with Cleveland’s other world-class hospi tals. Yet, instead, these mission-driven folks will again face the whispers that their employer is corrupt.

MetroHealth’s caregivers will face disdain and skepticism from patients, elected o cials, donors, potential employees and their family and friends. eir already-tough jobs just got harder. At the same time, they must deal with their profound and personal dis appointment in a man who inspired them, then embroiled them in an embarrassing spectacle.

All of this should infuriate everyone who loves Cleveland and who values the region’s robust and diverse health care commu nity. I ask this of the community: Please try to separate the al leged behavior of one man from the vital role MetroHealth plays in the health of everyone in Greater Cleveland. Please welcome the new CEO with an open mind and open arms. And nally, build upon Akram’s achievements while rejecting his tragic outcome at the nish line.

Write us: Crain’s welcomes responses from readers. Letters should be as brief as possible and may be edited. Send letters to Crain’s Cleveland Business, 700 West St. Clair Ave., Suite 310, Cleveland, OH 44113, or by emailing ClevEdit@crain.com. Please include your complete name and city from which you are writing, and a telephone number for fact-checking purposes.

Sound o : Send a Personal View for the opinion page to emcintyre@crain.com. Please include a telephone number for veri cation purposes.

Elizabeth Heller Allen was MetroHealth’s senior vice president of external a airs from 2013 until January 2019.

ELIZABETH HELLER ALLEN

Boutros

Steed

The MetroHealth Glick Center opened Nov. 5. The hospital system board recently red CEO Dr. Akram Boutros, saying he had given himself more than $1.9 million in unauthorized bonuses. |COURTESY OF HGA/NIC LEHOUX ARCHITECTURAL PHOTOGRAPHY

Surprise hospital bills for employers will lead to rising health care costs

BY DR. FIROUZ DANESHGARI

As citizens of Northeast Ohio, we were all surprised when two major hospital systems announced a plan to charge patients for instant messaging their doctors through their much-advertised patient portals. e hospitals would charge up to $50 out-of-pocket for an uninsured person or bill insurance companies directly for some messages.

In the same week, eyebrows were raised when the board of another nonpro t hospital system red its CEO and said he had given himself more than $1.9 million in bonuses over four years, in addition to his seven- gure salary. is ultimately led to an array of legal actions between the CEO and the board.

is news prompted me to ask the same old questions that I and other physicians have been pondering for decades. Why is our health care system the most expensive in the world? Why do we consistently spend 300% to 500% more than our European counterparts, while our health outcomes (including access to care) rank between 30th and 40th among developed nations? Why do we spend $11,500 per person per year on health care, compared with $3,000 to $5,000 per person per year in Europe or Japan?

Over the past 20 years, the major health systems in Northeast Ohio have increased their revenue by more than 400% on average. As an example, Cleveland Clinic’s total unrestricted revenue was $12.4 billion this year, compared with $10.6 billion in 2021 and $9.1 billion in 2020 (and these gures do not consider donations or endowments). When I joined the sta of the Clinic back in 2001, our revenue was $3 billion. Over the same period, University Hospitals’ revenue has risen from approximately $1 billion to $5.3 billion in 2021.

OVER THE PAST 20 YEARS, THE MAJOR HEALTH SYSTEMS IN NORTHEAST OHIO HAVE INCREASED THEIR REVENUE BY MORE THAN 400% ON AVERAGE.

e 2022 Milliman Medical Index reports that the cost of health care for a family of four with employer-sponsored insurance is $30,260. More than half of those health care costs are tied to hospital inpatient and outpatient care. e same family pays an average annual cost of $17,000 for housing, $9,000 for transportation and $6,000 for food. Why should health care cost more than housing, transportation and food?

What would happen if other service industries — airlines, car dealerships, hotels — started charging their consumers for communicating with them? Could you imagine the outrageous price tags if every click you made on a mobile device or website would result in a $50 fee?

is, of course, would never happen. In other industries, service providers eagerly facilitate communication from their consumers through online chat assistants, instant messaging platforms and mobile applications to gain the loyalty of their customers. Why are hospital systems so di erent?

e answer is simple. e existing “health care” in the U.S. is truly a “sick care” system, and its services are delivered primarily through 5,000 hospital systems nationwide. Despite many of these systems’ nonpro t status, they still set and strive for quarterly and annual nancial goals (i.e., pro t). ey have therefore become nancial institutions that aim to increase their revenue by delivering more sick care services, regardless of whether the services positively a ect the health outcomes of their consumers.

is hospital-based sick care system enjoys the privilege of setting prices that are hidden from consumers. Hospitals charge di erent prices for the same service to di erent consumers. Medicare prices for Medicare bene ciaries, and many multiples of the Medicare price for other health care consumers. Some hospi-

tals charge up to 1,000% of Medicare-level prices for their services and refuse to accept a reference-based pricing (referenced to Medicare) for consumers from self-insured employers or uninsured.

Further, if you need an MRI of your knee in Northeast Ohio, you will pay anywhere between $3,000 to $4,000 at a major hospital, or $300 to $400 in an independent facility less than 2 miles from the that hospital. If you see one of the employed physicians of the hospital, you will get additional charges for “facility fees” above and beyond your doctors’ professional fees that will make it at least twice as expensive compared to a doctor who is not a hospital employee. Pricing variability and price gouging in health care has become so egregious in our country that it has recently led to implementation of the Price Transparency Law that went into effect in July 2022. However, it remains to be seen whether that law will have an impact on price transparency and affordability for consumers.

So who ultimately pays for all this: the waste, price gouging, the $1.9 million bonuses, and now the $50 messaging fee in myChart?

The answer is very simple: employers and their employees. Today, employer-sponsored health insurance covers two-thirds of Americans. Both the Affordable Care Act and Employee Retirement Income Security Act dictate that any employer with more than 100 employees must provide health care benefits to their employees. Aside from coverage mandates, the tight labor market has made health care benefits a leading reason for why employees choose to stay or leave their employer.

The irony is that even with having employer-sponsored insurance, nearly 100 million Americans have found themselves in financial ruins after experiencing our “health care,” as they are financially responsible for hospital charges and ultimately receive the balance bill. As a result, hospital bills have become the No. 1 cause of personal bankruptcy in the U.S., with more than $140 billion per year.

The cost of employers providing health benefits (premiums, rising claims costs, etc.) and the cost of employees using those benefits (deductibles, copays, out-of-network costs, etc.) continues to increase every year, with no end in sight.

But there is a better way forward, and it already has started to take root nationwide. Over my 30 years of practicing medicine and working with physicians who fight day-in and day-out against the machine of hospital-based sick care, I’ve seen the impact of those who act as guardians for their patients. Those with a deep understanding of both medicine and the bravery to take on the additional work of empowering patients to navigate “the system.” I’ve come to refer to this approach as “health guardianship”: empowering the patient-doctor relationship by proactively fighting against the misaligned incentives of the hospital-based sick care system.

True health care is too important to our livelihoods to sit by and watch the costs and waste of our health care industry continue to spiral out of control. It’s why I wrote a book about health guardianship, “Health Guardianship: The Remedy to the Sick Care System,” to empower anyone willing to start pushing back against an ever-expensive sick care system.

Let these recent news stories in Northeast Ohio be the wakeup call we all need to do something. Accordingly, I would like to pose a final question: How are employers going to respond to a new surprise (and unlimited) $50 bill that can potentially mount to a substantial figure and will be undoubtedly added to their health care bill next year?

Daneshgari is a professor of surgery at Case Western Reserve University.

Heartland Ventures brings together industrial and manufacturing businesses with tech rms looking for investment. PAGE 12

OPPORTUNITY MOUNTS IN SAAS SECTOR

Trends fuel software-as-a-service investment even as VC, PE funding slumps

BY JEREMY NOBILE

WillCo Tech, a cybersecurity credential and workforce management company headquartered in Akron, has undergone a swath of changes since its acquisition in 2017 ahead of securing capital from venture investors earlier this year.

Behind WillCo’s path to funding is a coalescing of trends that are influencing investments in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) space at a time when venture and private equity firms are being more cau-

tious about where they put their money.

WillCo CEO Marling Engle originally rolled up the software business, established in 2007, for Metisentry, a full-service marketing, design, development and hosting agency in Akron he founded in 2006.

While there were some complementary areas between them, it was decided the startups might function and grow better independently from one another and with their own dedicated leaders.

As the two were spun out, Engle turned his attention to WillCo. E orts to refocus and im-

prove the company were set in motion from there.

“WillCo had hit a plateau for sure,” Engle said. “And when we acquired them, there were what I’d describe as a number of oddities that we had to overhaul.”

e company, whose customer base includes out ts working with the U.S. government and military, evolved from a cybersecurity compliance provider into a more rounded workforce management business, which Engle described as an intrinsically higher-value proposition.

Among other things, in 2019, MilitaryHire,

a platform that connects veterans with potential jobs in elds like cybersecurity, was bolted on to WillCo.

e company also launched a commercial version of its software this year, greatly expanding its potential user base.

Developments like this positioned WillCo to raise $1 million earlier this year in a venture round led by Cleveland’s Comeback Capital. (Metisentry, by the way, was acquired by an undisclosed Canadian company this summer.)

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What would you like the power to do?®

Heartland Ventures aims to create a

BY KIM PALMER

Max Brickman, CEO and founder of Heartland Ventures, wants to connect coastal startups with established customers in the Midwest.

Heartland, based in Columbus, employs a distinctive strategy. e venture capital rm brings together traditional, established Midwestern industrial and manufacturing businesses with tech rms looking for investment and an environment to test, validate and sell their product or service.

“We want to create a pipeline of technology from the coast to the Midwest and to support the companies here as reshoring happens and the labor shortage continues, so that Midwestern businesses can grow,” Brickman said. “Technology can be a tool to help resolve some of those problems, but to be able to do that, we need to be more e cient in how we identify technology for Midwestern businesses.”

Recently, Heartland — which also has o ces in Indianapolis; South Bend, Indiana; San Francisco; and New York City — closed on a second investment fund worth $52 million. at’s well above the group’s rst, $15 million fund, which closed in 2017, and signi cantly more than the $40 million that was originally targeted. Also, as Brickman points out, one investor in the rst fund returned to invest in the second.

Heartland plans to invest between $500,000 and $2 million in companies that are at the seed or Series A level — companies raising from $2 million to $10 million, with ve to 15 employees — over the next two years to provide tech answers to the challenges facing Ohio’s industrial, construction and manufacturing industries.

“ ese tech companies have been around for a year or two and might already have a little bit of revenue, but most importantly they have a nished product. We help them validate the product, nd a market t, by connecting them to these industrial businesses and provide funding,” Brickman said.

Prioritizing increased e ciency

Brickman hopes to expand the Cleveland-coastal connection with the second fund, which he estimates will be used to invest in more than 20 businesses.

Heartland Ventures is looking for technology that can address some of the pressing issues for Ohio’s manufacturing and construction industries — including businesses in and around Cleveland — focusing on workforce e ciency and talent de ciencies.

“Ohio is right in the middle of the reshoring trend,” Brickman said. “ at will create a lot of opportunity, but without huge population growth, technology will be needed

connection

to increase e ciencies for workers to be able to meet future demand.”

ose e ciency gains, he hopes, will come from some of Heartland Ventures’ investments in startups aimed at providing better talent acquisition, worker safety and project productivity. ose include Claira, a talent and hiring analytics app; StrongArm Tech, a safety science company developing and accessing wearable safety gear for industrial workers; and FIRMUS, a company with a product that identi es design-related risks in construction projects.

“A lot of what we’re looking at right now and excited about is training and upskilling, to help existing workforces do more with a nite number of people,” Brickman said.

Worker safety, particularly in construction, also is an area where Brickman said he sees a lot of opportunity.

“Safety really does translate into work e ciency,” Brickman said.

“ ere are studies that show that in construction, worker production rates were actually better decades ago and that there’s been very little e ciency gains, so that presents a huge opportunity.”

Enter corporate venture capital

“In the Midwest, there are thousands of small and medium-sized manufacturers, and they all need innovation, but they don’t know how to talk to startups. So many of these new technologies look good at rst glance, but part of the appeal of the corporate venture-like structure Heartland provides is that in the end it is a much safer way to invest in these types of startups,” said Ray Leach, CEO of JumpStart Inc., a Cleveland nonpro t venture development organization.

Heartland’s strategy is similar to the global trend toward corporate venture capital, where companies invest in startups creating tech identi ed as useful or bene cial for the investor. In the case of larger companies, an investment gets

solves a problem and essentially “de-risks” the investment overall.

“Companies need innovation but do not always want to do it in-house. With this collaboration model, Heartland Ventures is solving a market need in a unique way,” Leach said.

e partnership provided by Heartland allows for a more robust due diligence, Leach said, also limiting risk for other investors who do not have the expertise to evaluate these companies themselves.

Manufacturers also can solve their problems while investing in a company at the early stage, which Leach said provides a bigger nancial return.

Making the coastalCleveland connection

Intentionally bridging the chasm between the technology and industrial hubs is something no other venture capital fund has speci cally been designed to do before Heartland.

ese tech companies, Brickman said, the ones that need funding to continue to build out teams and technology, are “silo-ed in certain parts of the country” that are not anywhere near the industries their product is intended to serve.

Cleveland, which has the bene t of being known as an industrial hub, is helped because of the high number of multigenerational, family-owned rms in the area, Brickman said.

ese midsize and smaller family-owned companies are looking to grow and see the bene ts of using new technology to address problems. ey also are structured to be exible as a result of having fewer decision-makers.

them access to problem-solving, innovative tech that gives an existing business a competitive advantage or provides an avenue into a new market.

e rise in corporate venture capital in the last decade, Leach said, comes in part from the desire for companies to innovate with less risk — and by partnering with Heartland Ventures, companies can discern if a new tech product works, which

“ e technology companies are thrilled to be able to have direct access to potential customers who are fast-moving. We are not connecting them to Fortune 50 companies. We are connecting them to Fortune 1000 companies that are not overly bureaucratic but are mid-market companies that can move quickly,” Brickman said.

“A startup could go out of business by the time a Fortune 50 business makes up their mind whether or not to become a customer, and that's just too slow,” he added.

CRAIN’S CLEVELAND

Brickman believes that Silicon Valley founders and Cleveland

coast-to-Cleveland

Brickman

“IN THE MIDWEST, THERE ARE THOUSANDS OF SMALL AND MEDIUMSIZED MANUFACTURERS, AND THEY ALL NEED INNOVATION, BUT THEY DON’T KNOW HOW TO TALK TO STARTUPS.”

—Ray Leach, CEO of JumpStart Inc.

“A LOT OF WHAT WE’RE LOOKING AT RIGHT NOW AND EXCITED ABOUT IS TRAINING AND UPSKILLING, TO HELP EXISTING WORKFORCES DO MORE WITH A FINITE NUMBER OF PEOPLE.”

—Max Brickman, CEO and founder of Heartland Ventures

Leach

manufacturers have more in common than most people might think, because at the core is an entrepreneurial level of passion shared by both.

“It’s really exciting to see, when you pair someone who has owned or built a manufacturing company 50 years ago with a younger tech founder. They have a lot more in common than you would think and a lot more shared passion. Those are fun conversations to watch,” Brickman said.

ose comfortable relationships, and that fact that it’s di cult to build any meaningful business relationship with a customer based in the Midwest when your company is half a country away, is why Brickman believes Heartland’s investments mean more tech rms will relocate to the region. at's another bonus for places like Cleveland, Brickman said. rough this second fund, Heartland and its investors plan to support these coastal-Midwestern investments well into the future, whether through funding or simply other collaborative introductions.

“I think once they have a presence in Cleveland and continue to raise more money, our hope is that a group of tech companies will grow and raise another $5 million to $50 million as those o ces grow, adding not just software developers but sales or customer support,” Brickman said.

Kim Palmer: kpalmer@crain.com, (216) 771-5384, @kimfouro ve

Six steps to navigate in ation for restaurant owners

By Dirk Ahlbeck, National restaurant practice lead, Apple Growth Partners

The impacts of in ation are being felt by consumers across all walks of life – paying more for goods and services can often result in cutting extra spending, which could mean holding back on dining out in restaurants and bars.

But consumers aren’t the only ones feeling the pain points of in ation; restaurants are increasing menu prices to help offset costs. Raising prices may seem like a solid action plan to maintain the restaurant’s bottom line; however, these six additional strategies can help offset the industry’s thin margins, especially during in ation.

1. Offer more discounts

3. Reduce staff

Consider evaluating poor performers and determining whether the risk of reducing their hours, whether entirely or partially, bene ts the overall nancial health of the restaurant, including associated risks with staff morale.

4. Remove lower-margin menu items

Now’s the time to pause or altogether remove low-margin menu items, which will save on production and supply costs. Understanding your menu’s offerings and their impact on the restaurant’s margins is key to knowing which things to consider cutting. Owners should be routinely analyzing sales according to the menu to classify which plates can be dropped safely. This category is historically known as “dogs” –low pro t, low popularity dishes that aren’t ordered often and cost a lot of money to prepare.

5.

Simplify the menu

and promotions

Who doesn’t love a sale? What better way to lure diners – especially those who have adjusted their budgets – than a two-for-one meal deal or perhaps a free appetizer with the purchase of an entree? Buyers love the feeling of a good deal, and it may be just the motivation they need to get out of the house for a night out.

2. Reduce operating hours

Limiting your restaurant’s hours to combat in ation helps cut back on operating and staf ng costs. Consider trimming available hours at either the start or the end of the day to condense traf c ow to your most popular hours.

Menu strategies and management are a hot topic for all restaurant owners, and considerable thought and time should be placed in ensuring the eatery’s menu is primed for margins during the recession. Slimming down a menu has several bene ts, including catering to the average customer’s attention span of only 109 seconds when studying a menu. Engineering your menu can help you capitalize on your most popular and pro table dishes while managing supply and labor costs.

6. Create loyalty programs

The psychological bene ts of sales and promotions can also carry over into a customer loyalty program, where frequent diners are rewarded for going out to eat. An actual win-win scenario – customers receive an

This

Crain’s Cleveland

incentive (for example a free appetizer, drink, or discount) to leave the house and go out to eat.

The restaurant gets ongoing traf c through loyalty program members. Loyalty programs are easy to design and implement and can often utilize existing resources within the restaurant.

Customers can be rewarded for frequent visits, special events, or birthdays and holidays, creating a sense of excitement, exclusivity and inclusion throughout the dining experience.

Understanding your restaurants’ margins is key to making critical decisions for navigating in ation. Understanding a complete view of your restaurants’ nancial and operational performance enables owners to make the best decisions for their bottom line. Contact me today to learn how we can help your restaurant operation grow.

section/feature

With more than 20 years of public accounting experience, Dirk joined AGP as a tax principal and national restaurant practice lead in 2021. Dirk’s expertise

consists of servicing restaurants, including breweries and wineries, and other industries such as distribution, construction, and professionals in the service sector. A frequently requested presenter, Dirk provides business owners within the food industry best practices for tax planning, accounting, and most recently, navigating the changes brought on by the pandemic and in ation for restaurant owners. He has also provided extensive consulting services to assist his clients with improving pro tability and performance by utilizing benchmarking and related metrics, developing more streamlined accounting systems and other best practices from the restaurant industry, and identifying tax-saving opportunities. Dirk holds a Bachelor of Arts in Accounting from Michigan State University. He is an active member of the AICPA, ILCPAS, and Illinois Craft Brewers Guild.

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TRENDS

Several factors made WillCo an attractive investment in a competitive market for investor dollars, said Comeback managing director Scott Shane.

As an SaaS company with growing revenue in the B2B space, WillCo certainly had good fundamentals in place. Such elements, which have been enticing investors for many years now, have supported an almost sevenfold increase in funding by venture and private equity investors in SaaS companies between 2010 and 2020, according to data from Pitchbook.

More importantly, the business is helmed by an entrepreneurially minded team led by Engle, who is experienced in managing other companies, facilitating M&A deals and identifying a startup’s holistic needs — the sort of skills that not every founder in the software arena with a background in engineering and a useful idea is equipped with.

“If the team at WillCo had not grown revenue since acquiring the company and had not refocused the company and expanded the product o erings and target market, Comeback Capital would not have led the investment round, nor invested,” Shane said. “To us, the team at Will-

Co took a tiny little SaaS business that was not venture-backable and turned it into one worthy of external equity investment. Marling and team turned a little company into a highgrowth SaaS business.”

Fueled by a growing economy and a buildup of dry powder, funding from the venture capital and private equity sectors has poured into companies at record levels in recent years.

Peaking in 2021, that activity has slowed this year amid surging U.S. in ation and worldwide economic uncertainties.

e global pullback in venture capital alone was noticeably stark in the third quarter, with year-overyear funding deployed down 53% compared with the same point in 2021, according to Crunchbase.

Firms are still investing. ey’re just being more cautious than they were during the free-for-all of the last several years. A common approach in downturns like this is to prioritize support for existing investments in the portfolio over new investments.

Investments that are being made tend to cluster in the SaaS sector, where startups are likely to have recurring revenue, low cost of operation and high margins. Businesses

with these characteristics are “literally some of the best companies out there,” Shane said.

“Since the bubble in VC popped, what happened is investors are eager to nd companies at more reasonable valuations and that have a higher probability of surviving,” he said. is is where a more established

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software startup with cash ow and good leadership becomes an even hotter commodity — especially compared with another young business that has yet to prove itself at all.

A founder with a good idea but no customers or cash ow had a greater change of enticing VC and PE investors before economic factors and a

potential recession were pressing concerns.

Intuitively, there is simply less appetite for risk when times get tough and the future is less predictable.

“ e idea that someone comes to you with a brand-new idea who will burn through a few million dollars before guring out if customers are

'The best companies out there'

WillCo Tech managing director Mike Fischer, left, and CEO Marling Engle. | CONTRIBUTED

Shane

actually interested is far less appeal ing versus someone who has $1 mil lion in revenue,” Shane said. “And maybe a better solution is that the existing leadership team gets re placed by people who know how to grow it even better.”

In the case of WillCo, the leader ship transition happened years ago as Engle acquired the company, spun it o , stepped in as CEO and made some key improvements. e divi dends of that materialized in its re cent fundraise.

SaaS ecosystem and NEO

Similar dynamics will continue shaping the companies entrepre neurs and investors seek out in this climate, particularly in the software space.

“SaaS is way better for investors to make money than any other types of innovation that investors back on av erage,” Shane said. “ en there’s this realization that people who come to you with an idea on Day One are ei ther probably not the ones who can grow it. And it’s risky to back an idea without any customers or revenue.

“ is is why we’re seeing entrepre neurs buy little SaaS companies, in vest in them and then solve these problems. If you go back 10 years ago or more, no one was really doing that in software. And now they are.”

is approach is quite visible in Northeast Ohio.

In the past, Engle was making ac quisitions through the SaaS Factory,

an investment and holding company that was the parent of WillCo and Metisentry before their spinouts.

And there are many tech-focused

land-based co-founder of the investment rm Verne and a former operating partner with Builders VC in San Francisco, where he helped incubate early-stage tech companies.

an opening for rms like his to step in and take a company to its next level ahead of a possible future fundraise or potential exit.

“We think that in the next year, we will see a lot of venture deals go at. Rather than at meaning death, we feel like we can take them as some thing that works with modest growth and still be a great business,” Sanders said. “To use a sports analogy, we’re good with just getting on base. It doesn’t have to be a home run every time.”

Sanders and his partner at Verne, Colin Keeley, are the kinds of leaders future investors, like those with a VC or PE fund, might like to see in con trol as they considered where to ship capital. But they're also actively con sidering compelling opportunities in their sweet spot for deals.

Westlake’s River SaaS Capital, a provider of alternative nancing for the SaaS sector, will look at debt op portunities for software startups that may need it — which may be all the more common as VC funding ebbs.

On the buyout side, even global pri vate equity shops like e Riverside Co., which is co-headquartered in Cleveland, are increasingly attracted to early-stage software companies they wouldn't have looked at years ago, because of the potential for lucra tive returns and the ease with which they can be bolted on to and improve existing portfolio companies.

“ e COVID pandemic has creat ed increased appreciation for the sta bility of recurring revenue models of software companies,” Riverside se nior partner Joe Manning told Crain's in 2021.

On both selling and investing fronts, Promise Partners, a nonpro t membership group that began years ago as a sort of alumni group for Case Western Reserve University’s Weath erhead School of Management, can serve as a resource for entrepreneurs looking to purchase, scale and grow a company in this region in a variety of industries, not just software.

venture out ts in this market besides Comeback Capital, including North Coast Ventures and JumpStart.

Other independent entrepreneur ial investors engaged in the SaaS sec tor include Brent Sanders, a Cleve

Some of the startups in the Verne portfolio include small online invoicing platform Blinksale and Scout, a developer of software for managing dog walk ing and pet sitting.

ose businesses are too small to interest private equity shops and not growing quite enough to draw more traditional venture investments. But that, Sanders said, just creates

But when it comes to equity invest ments, which is newer territory for the business, the rm prefers to only get involved with companies that have strong cash ow and good lead ership, said chief investment o cer Wendy Jarchow.

If you are a startup in this environ ment, “Just focus on your growth,” she said. “You are always going to be attractive if you can show there is at least double-digit growth year-overyear and low churn.”

Promise likes to hear from compa nies interested in selling, since the group can connect buyers and sell ers, according to Promise board member and CWRU professor Simon Peck.

“If people are looking to exit a business,” Peck said, “they can cer tainly come to us, as we are promot ing the idea of letting someone else come in to have a pathway to owner ship.”

Jeremy Nobile: jnobile@crain.com, (216) 771-5362, @JeremyNobile

Unpacking the marketing toolkit for small business owners

By Vince Guerrieri, Crain’s Content Studio-Cleveland

The term “marketing” covers a lot of ground.

It’s your web and social media outreach. It’s your brand and logo. It’s your packaging and customer experience. And yet, it’s even more.

“How many senses can I activate with my brand?” said Diego Hodge. “Buying is an emotional experience, and you create emotion with your senses. Marketing is anything that activates the senses.”

Hodge, the chief operating of cer for FLOH Spirits and an investor in business and real estate, was one of the panelists in the latest installment of “How To Grow Your Business” webinars presented by Huntington National Bank; this one focused on marketing for small businesses.

Established companies with large footprints are often able to staff specialists in social media, e-commerce and graphic design. But that doesn’t mean such processes can’t be scaled down for small businesses. In fact, it’s almost a requirement for small start-ups.

“We’re not Beyonce,” said Jacquelyn Darby, consultant and owner of The Darby Creative House. “We can’t put [product] out there and expect people to run to it.”

The good news is that there are easier ways to market than there were even a decade ago. Adam Armstrong, a member of Huntington’s marketing team, said that we live in “a golden age of tools.” Automated software can help design a logo. You can develop a web presence with a Squarespace or WordPress site, and you can watch tutorials on YouTube.

“You have access to the same solutions as Huntington,” he said.

MEET THE PANELISTS

data about your customer base – which in turn can be used to help retain customers.

“Ten to 20 years ago, we didn’t have access to the data we have now,” Hodge said. “It wasn’t a guessing game, but it was far less exact than it is now.”

It’s important for a small business to know its customer base in order to form a business plan – and that can get lost in the shuf e compared to more immediate operational concerns, Armstrong said. But it’s still important.

Even though you’re offering solutions, Hodge said, those solutions won’t turn into sales unless you’re offering them to the right people.

And when you have a brand, Darby said, it’s crucial to make sure you have a consistent voice for it.

“Your brand voice is how you communicate on all platforms,” she said. “It’s the copy of the website, it’s how you communicate when someone comes into a store. It’s your advertising copy.”

The most important factor in developing a website is ease of use, Darby said. Make sure your content answers any potential questions about your product. You can easily take your own photos with your phone, against a white backdrop. And make it easy to purchase your product.

“We’ve all left our carts full because the payment system isn’t as intuitive as we thought it would be,” Armstrong said. Web-based transactions are also important because they provide

“I may have a restaurant,” he said, “but that doesn’t mean everyone who eats is my target. If I’m a personal trainer, my competition might not be other personal trainers. It might be a couch and a remote control.”

And above else, Hodge said, understand you’re making a tough ask: You want someone to make a change.

“You have to understand you’re interrupting relationships,” he said. “If I have a problem and I’m solving it, I have a relationship with that solution, whether it’s effective or ineffective. How do I effectively interrupt a relationship to have someone see what I have and give it a chance?”

This

section/feature

Panelists discuss the various disciplines that entrepreneurs should learn, from brand voice consistency to demographic targeting and more

SPONSORED CONTENT

advertising-supported

is produced by Crain’s Content Studio-Cleveland, the marketing storytelling arm of Crain’s Cleveland Business. The Crain’s Cleveland Business newsroom is not involved in creating Crain’s Content Studio content.

DIEGO HODGE Chief Operating Of cer, FLOH Spirits

JACQUELYN DARBY Owner, The Darby Creative House

ADAM ARMSTRONG AVP, Marketing Content Manager, Huntington National Bank

WillCo Tech, whose customer base includes out ts working with the U.S. government and military, secured $1 million earlier this year in a venture round led by Cleveland’s Comeback Capital. | CONTRIBUTED

“SAAS IS WAY BETTER FOR INVESTORS TO MAKE MONEY THAN ANY OTHER TYPES OF INNOVATION THAT INVESTORS BACK ON AVERAGE.”

—Scott Shane, Comeback Capital managing director

Customers keeping cars longer leads to growth for local remanufacturer

BY RACHEL ABBEY MCCAFFERTY

Stellar Automotive Group in Seville has long o ered transmission parts and products. But with a new division, it’s expanding its reach to include remanufactured transmission units.

And the addition already is paying o .

Justin Archer, president and co-owner of Stellar Automotive Group, said the remanufacturing business has already grown more than expected, reaching return on investment within six months, rather than its projected two or three years.

Archer attributed some of the business unit’s initial success to the recent struggles in the automotive supply chain. With new cars tough to nd, the used car market — which makes use of remanufactured transmissions such as those from Stellar — has been “thriving,” Archer said. And people have been holding onto their vehicles longer, investing in upkeep, which o ers another customer base.

Stellar serves automotive retail stores and transmission distributors, but also sells direct to customers online.

e company got its start in 1990, buying back and reselling unused transmission rings, Archer said. e company expanded to o er other transmission parts in its portfolio over time. In 2007, the Archer family purchased the company and continued its growth. at included a signi cant acquisition in 2012 of International Lubricants Inc., which makes the Lubegard brand of products. Stellar ultimately moved Lubegard’s blending facility to Se-

ville from Seattle, making those products in Northeast Ohio, though it maintains an o ce and chemistry lab in Seattle, Archer said.

After adding transmission uids to its portfolio of transmission parts, the next “logical” step was to o er whole transmission units, Archer said.

“Eventually, it only made sense that, well, we’re selling all those parts and uids that go inside that unit. Why wouldn’t we start trying to do that ourselves?” Archer said.

In April 2020, Stellar was supposed to close on the acquisition of a transmission remanufacturing facility in Canada, but COVID complicated matters. e deal got put on hold (and ultimately set aside entirely). But instead of waiting to see what happened with the pandemic, Stellar Automotive began laying the groundwork to do remanufacturing at its site in Seville instead.

e company hired experts in remanufacturing and expanded its facility, buying remanufacturing and testing equipment. In total, the company invested a little less than $500,000 to get the remanufacturing business up and running, Archer said.

e supply chain for a remanufactured product can be an interesting one. ere is a limited number of transmissions that were made for each make and model of a vehicle, Archer pointed out. A company that wants to revamp those needs to be on the lookout for product — from companies or junkyards, wherever those used transmissions may land — and be able to buy it when it’s available, even if it sits on a shelf for a while.

“ e biggest challenges we have moving forward today are people and space,” Archer said.

Stellar Automotive has about 45 employees currently, but it’s actively looking to hire more. Archer declined to share annual revenue.

Higher costs and scarcity of product for both used and new cars in recent years has made the cost of repairing vehicles more attractive, said Paul McCarthy, president and CEO of the Automotive Aftermarket Suppliers Association, part of North Carolina-based Motor & Equipment Manufacturers Association (MEMA). And that’s helped remanufacturers.

And though used car prices are coming down a bit, he said, society seems to be leaving the pandemic with more reliance on automobiles, as people moved further apart.

at’s going to continue to create demand for manufacturers.

And remanufactured parts have a lot of bene ts, said John Chalifoux, president and COO of MERA — e Association for Sustainable Manufacturing, which is also part of MEMA. ey o er like-new quality and lower-cost value, he said, and they’re a sustainable choice.

Remanufactured products are cleaned and tested, he noted, and it’s a eld that’s been around for a while. But it’s one in which he sees a lot of growth potential.

“In today’s world, that is so focused on sustainability and ESG, we’re all being driven to reuse as much as possible, and remanufacturing is sustainable by de nition,” Chalifoux said.

Rachel Abbey McCa erty: (216) 7715379, rmcca erty@crain.com

Stellar Automotive Group recently added remanufacturing to its portfolio. | STELLAR AUTOMOTIVE GROUP

Eric Wobser comes back to Cuyahoga County

After more than eight years as Sandusky’s city manager, Eric Wob ser will boomerang back east to join Cuyahoga County Execu tive-elect Chris Ronayne’s administration as chief of sta . Under Wobser’s leadership, Sandusky’s downtown and lakefront experienced a urry of reinvestment, both private and public, in ev erything from renovated apartments, o ces and retail space to a complete overhaul of the lakefront with the Jackson Street Pier, now a vibrant public gathering spot.

Wobser, a Sandusky native who previously worked in former Cleveland Mayor Frank Jackson’s administration and served as exec utive director of Ohio City Inc., talked with Crain’s about what he thinks the new Ronayne administration can and will do for the coun ty. is interview has been edited for length and clarity.

` How is the transition going? How is it working with the outgoing Armond Budish administration?

They’ve been incredibly gracious so far with their time, and they’ve been very open with us as we dive in and learn as much as we can. We are sitting down with the people at the county, and we are talking to partners, and everyone has treated us really well so far.

` Talk a little bit about how you were able to make such a dramatic transformation to Sandusky’s downtown and waterfront.

We were able to step back and see what an amazing collection of assets existed in Sandusky: the historic architecture, the waterfront, Cedar Point and so many other assets. Leveraging those assets, we were able to — rather than wait for someone to come in and save the city — invest and move the community forward. We prioritized funding toward revitalizing the Jackson Street Pier, creating a bike pathway and other opportunities to create a publicly

LIST ANALYSIS

— Kim Palmer

accessible waterfront, because it turns out people really do want to live on the water.

We made signi cant investments in the housing stock with down-payment assistance, rehabilitation programs, targeted demolition of blight within the city. Ultimately, working hand in hand with the folks in the business community and with neighborhood leaders, we were able to develop a plan. The city’s revenue is in a much better place, because we were able to work with the business community, work with residents to increase taxes citywide. This includes the admission tax, which was raised from 4% to 8% on a ticket to Cedar Point or any other Sandusky-based venue, and only has a modest impact on the residents.

` Sandusky is a city of 25,000 resi dents, where Cuyahoga County has more than 1.2 million. How will you scale the work you did out west to Northeast Ohio?

I think that in a lot of ways Sandusky

is a microcosm of Cleveland, in that both were built up quickly as industrial cities, and the waterfront was a utility rather than an amenity. It was utilized for industry, it was utilized for transportation, and at the end of the day we neglected to think about it as the quality-of-life amenity that it could be.

If you look at the lakefront now, with our new economy and the new world we’re facing, our ability to provide an attractive quality of life for the people is ultimately what is going to drive people to live here. We have to recognize that human capital and talent are what is going to make cities and regions successful in the 21st century.

` Is it important to talk positively about legacy places like Sandusky and Cuyahoga County in order to

create the right atmosphere to grow?

Absolutely. Part of what attracted me to work for Ronayne is that he’s always spoken positively about Cleveland and Cuyahoga County. He is always talking about what they could become. We have challenges, but I think that for far too long communities like Cleveland and Cuyahoga County have allowed others to de ne us by our challenges, rather than really de ning ourselves by our assets. Ronayne’s vision has been being a freshwater capital, and he doesn’t apologize for the challenges of the county. Instead, he looks to the future.

` Cuyahoga County received more than $240 million in federal pan demic relief funds; about $50 mil-

lion has been left unencumbered. What is the new administration looking to do generally with these assets?

I think this is a unique generational moment, and from what I’ve heard County Executive-elect Ronayne say publicly, he wants to make sure of two things.

One is that we’re making catalytic investments that will improve the lives of people in the county, partnering with the city of Cleveland to work in concert to make an even deeper impact. The other thing he has been really clear about is that everything should be done openly and transparently with the people of the county. He’s been listening to them now for over a year on the campaign trail, and he wants to continue that dialogue as we move forward and make decisions about how to invest these funds.

` What will you miss about San dusky, and what are you looking forward to coming back to Cuyahoga County?

I think the biggest thing I will miss is just either taking my dog or my kids for a quick walk to the waterfront. We did that almost every morning, especially on the weekends. But that is also part of what we will be excited to work on as we build on the lakefront and make sure that as many people in the county as possible have their own ability to wake up early in the morning and take a quick walk to the lake.

What I’m looking forward to in Cleveland, it is absolutely the food. Not any speci c restaurant, but I think when I was here before I took for granted what an amazing culinary scene exists in Cleveland, and it continued to blossom in the time that I have been away. I can’t wait. My waistline will probably pay for it, but I can’t wait to dive into to sample some of the new local restaurants.

Kim Palmer: kpalmer@crain.com, (216) 771-5384, @kimfouro ve

Hospitals posted big gains in 2021 before hitting rough patch

2020 was rough for local hospitals, and 2022 hasn’t been great, either. But at least they had that one year in the middle.

Northeast Ohio hospitals by and large posted big nancial gains in 2021, more than enough to recover from the hits they took the prior year, judging by data from the Crain’s Hospitals list.

Combined net patient revenue jumped 14.8% for hospitals on the full digital version of the list, which is built with data submitted by hospi tals and some gures pulled from public sources such as the American Hospital Directory.

the 52 hospitals on the full digital list. Even when you remove all their hospi tals, the median increase was 14.1%.

Net income gures saw even big ger gains: Combined net income for the entire list jumped 48.3%, or 25.7% when you exclude Cleveland Clinic and UH hospitals.

Of course, 2022 hasn’t been so rosy. During the rst half of the year, net patient revenue did not keep up with in ation at Cleveland Clinic, UH, MetroHealth or Summa Health, judging by nancial reports from each health system. ( eir main campuses all made the top ve on the Hospitals list.) Meanwhile, ex penses have climbed. us, each in stitution other than Metro Health reported negative net income during the rst half of the year.

A few local hospitals that saw revenue gains in 2021 closed in 2022 anyway.

date those services at other east side hospitals.

Likewise, St. Vincent Medical Cen ter, No. 33 on the list, stopped o er ing inpatient services on Nov. 11.

ough it saw a 4.9% bump in net patient revenue in 2021, it wasn’t enough to make up for years of de clines, not to mention steady nan cial losses and what it called “seismic shifts” in health care in the last de cade. But the facility continues to provide outpatient services and to operate a psychiatric emergency de partment under the name St. Vincent Charity Community Health Center.

at revenue increase easily beats in ation, which rose 4.7% during 2021. It also makes up for the 2.4% decrease the group felt in 2020 when the COVID-19 pandemic was ramp ing up.

And the increase wasn’t just driven by the Cleveland Clinic or University Hospitals, which own more than half of

UH announced in July that it would discontinue inpatient services at its hospitals in Richmond Heights and Bedford, which still appear on the list at Nos. 40 and 41, respective ly, since it’s ranked by 2021 net pa tient revenue. Both still provide out patient services. UH told Crain’s at the time that sta ng shortages played into its decision to consoli

It also will focus on programs de signed to improve the health of Cleve land residents, especially in the city’s Central neighborhood. It will operate under the umbrella of a new nonpro t called the St. Vincent Charity Health Campus, which aims to execute on a long-term community-focused vision announced by Sisters of Charity Health System in mid-2021.

e full Excel version of the list in cludes several years of historical rev enue and income gures for most hospitals. It’s available to Crain’s Data Members. To learn more, visit CrainsCleveland.com/data.

Chuck Soder: csoder@crain.com, (216) 771-5374, @ChuckSoder

CHUCK SODER

Eric Wobser is chief of sta for County Executive-elect Chris Ronayne. | CONTRIBUTED

HOSPITALS CRAIN'S

RANKHOSPITAL 20212020% CHANGE FTE STAFF 9-1-2022 STAFFED BEDS YEAR FOUNDEDPARENT ORGANIZATIONTOP EXECUTIVE

1 CLEVELAND CLINIC — MAIN CAMPUS

2

3

9500 Euclid Ave., Cleveland44195 216-444-2200/clevelandclinic.org

UNIVERSITY HOSPITALS CLEVELAND MEDICAL CENTER

11100 Euclid Ave., Cleveland44106 216-844-1000/uhhospitals.org

VA NORTHEAST OHIO HEALTHCARE SYSTEM

10701 East Blvd., Cleveland44106 216-791-3800/va.gov/northeast-ohio-health-care

METROHEALTH MAIN CAMPUS MEDICAL CENTER

4

5

6

2500 MetroHealth Drive, Cleveland44109 216-778-7800/metrohealth.org

SUMMA HEALTH SYSTEM — AKRON, ST. THOMAS AND BARBERTON CAMPUSES

141 N. Forge St., Akron44304 330-375-3000/summahealth.org

AKRON CHILDREN'S HOSPITAL

One Perkins Square, Akron44308 330-543-1000/akronchildrens.org

CLEVELAND CLINIC AKRON GENERAL HOSPITAL

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

21

One Akron General Ave., Akron44307 330-344-6000/akrongeneral.org

CLEVELAND CLINIC FAIRVIEW HOSPITAL 18101 Lorain Ave., Cleveland44111 216-476-7000/fairviewhospital.org

CLEVELAND CLINIC HILLCREST HOSPITAL

6780 May eld Road, May eld Heights44124 440-312-4500/hillcresthospital.org

AULTMAN HOSPITAL 2600 Sixth St. S.W., Canton44710 330-452-9911/aultman.org

MERCY HEALTH — ST. ELIZABETH YOUNGSTOWN HOSPITAL 1044 Belmont Ave., Youngstown44501 330-746-7211/mercy.com

SOUTHWEST GENERAL 18697 Bagley Road, Middleburg Heights44130 440-816-8000/swgeneral.com

CLEVELAND CLINIC MERCY HOSPITAL 1320 Mercy Drive N.W., Canton44708 330-489-1000/cantonmercy.org

FIRELANDS REGIONAL MEDICAL CENTER 1111 Hayes Ave., Sandusky44870 419-557-7400/ relands.com

MERCY HEALTH - ST. ELIZABETH BOARDMAN HOSPITAL 8401 Market St., Boardman44512 330-729-2929/mercy.com

UH LAKE HEALTH — TRIPOINT AND LAKE WEST MEDICAL CENTER 3600 Euclid Ave., Willoughby44094 440-953-9600/lakehealth.org

UNIVERSITY HOSPITALS AHUJA MEDICAL CENTER 3999 Richmond Road, Beachwood44122 216-593-5500/uhahuja.org

UNIVERSITY HOSPITALS ELYRIA MEDICAL CENTER 630 E. River St., Elyria44035 440-329-7500/uhelyria.org

MERCY HEALTH — LORAIN HOSPITAL 3700 Kolbe Road, Lorain44053 440-960-4000/mercy.com

MERCY HEALTH — ST. JOSEPH WARREN HOSPITAL 667 Eastland Ave. S.W., Warren44484 330-841-4000/mercy.com

UNIVERSITY HOSPITALS ST. JOHN MEDICAL CENTER 29000 Center Ridge Road, Westlake44145 440-835-8000/uhstjohn.org

$6,037.2$5,241.715.2%35,7921,2981921Cleveland Clinic Health System TomislavMihaljevic, president, CEO

$3,157.4$2,765.414.2%19,7339831866University Hospitals StathisAntoniades, president, UH Cleveland Medical Center; Cli Megerian, CEO, University Hospitals

$1,328.1 1 $1,261.9 1 5.2%4,8535941946Department of Veterans A airs JillDietrich Mellon, executive director, CEO

$1,198.4$1,057.113.4%7,3804491837The MetroHealth System AiricaSteed, president, CEO 2

$1,156.4$941.022.9%3,930 648 3 1892Summa Health System Cli Deveny, president and CEO, Summa Health System

$978.7$848.615.3%—4681890Children's Hospital Medical Center of Akron

ChristopherGessner, president, CEO

$779.6$649.520%4,4384631914Cleveland Clinic Health System BrianHarte, president

$591.8$515.314.8%2,5144861892Cleveland Clinic Health System NeilSmith, president

$528.7$480.810%2,2404501968Cleveland Clinic Health System RichardParker, president

$495.9$434.514.1%2,9535541892Aultman Health Foundation AnneGunther, COO

$463.3 $398.2 3 16.4%1,9264011911Bon Secours Mercy Health JohnLuellen, Youngstown market president

$425.7$379.312.2%1,8202441920Southwest General, partnering with University Hospitals

WilliamYoungJr., president, CEO

$368.2$320.514.9%2,1393371908Cleveland Clinic Health System TimothyCrone, president

$275.9$245.412.4%1,4012871876Firelands Health JeremyNormington-Slay, president, CEO

$271.1 $216.9 3 25%8932292007Bon Secours Mercy Health EugeniaAubel, president

$267.9 4 1,9244021961University Hospitals RobynStrosaker, president and COO, UH Lake Health Medical Centers

$246.5$212.815.8%1,0011442010University Hospitals PercivalKane, chief operating o cer, UH Ahuja Medical Center; AlanPapa, chief operating o cer, East Market

$214.4$196.79%1,1602291908University Hospitals ToddHarford, chief operating o cer, UH Elyria Medical Center

$206.2 $194.3 3 6.1%9941301892Bon Secours Mercy Health GilPalmer, president, Mercy Health — Lorain Hospital; JohnLuellen, Lorain market president

$201.1 $167.6 3 20%6081301924Bon Secours Mercy Health CharlotteWray, president

$188.1$154.621.7%920901981University Hospitals JonathanSague, chief operating o cer, UH St. John Medical Center

22

UNIVERSITY HOSPITALS PARMA MEDICAL CENTER 7007 Powers Blvd., Parma44129 440-743-3000/uhparma.org

$182.2$163.111.7%1,0951931961University Hospitals JamesHill, chief operating o cer, chief medical o cer 23 CLEVELAND CLINIC MARYMOUNT HOSPITAL 12300 McCracken Road, Gar eld Heights44125 216-581-0500/marymount.org

$178.7$143.124.9%8712021949Cleveland Clinic Health System DanielNapierkowski, president 24

UNIVERSITY HOSPITALS GEAUGA MEDICAL CENTER 13207 Ravenna Road, Chardon44024 440-285-6000/uhgeauga.org

$166.2$129.128.7%6861262016Cleveland Clinic Health System RebeccaStarck, president

$169.7$151.112.3%8211331952University Hospitals JasonGlowczewski, chief operating o cer, UH Geauga Medical Center 25 CLEVELAND CLINIC AVON HOSPITAL 33300 Cleveland Clinic Blvd., Avon44011 440-695-5000/my.clevelandclinic.org/locations/avon-hospital

Joan Evelyn Southgate Milton S. Maltz Alex B. Johnson, Ph.D.

Digging into 396 o ce leases signed since 2020 in the metropoli tan Cleveland area, JLL identi ed 203 as leases for new o ces, and it could identify the prior location of 142 of those companies. Of those, JLL found 38% moved to new locations among the designations of o ces by class (trophy, A, B or C) and most, 62%, moved within the same submarkets.

Over the last two years, tenants moved to a building six years newer than their current one, or a building constructed since 1993, and exited one constructed before 1987.

Moreover, since 2020, 45% of the tenants signing new leases upgraded, 39% remained in the same type of structure and just 16% moved to less er-quality space.

Other ndings: ` 47 companies or professional rms moved from one Class B building to another Class B building, typically one with more amenities that was better maintained or located.

`

19 tenants moved up to a Class B building from Class C (functionally obsolete or more than 60 years old).

`

18 tenants moved from Class B to Class A.

`

14 moved to trophy buildings — Key Tower, 200 Public Square and EY — from Class B buildings.

JLL also looked at the typical foot print as tenants signed new leases in this period and reported, looking across all leases signed since 2020, the average tenant decreased its foot print by roughly 2,000 square feet, or 11%. However, when looking speci cally at tenants signing new longterm leases of ve years or more, the average tenant footprint decreased by 10,000 square feet or 29%.

JLL’s study also di ers from the typical observation that when ten ants expand to Class A or trophy space, they take less space. Its data showed the net change was a reduc tion of just 254 square feet.

“It’s not doom and gloom for the (o ce) industry,” Batson said. “It’s

From Page 1

they wanted to come back ... and sign up for the mentoring program,” Ward said.

e East Cleveland lunch and learn talks are one part of a recently formed partnership between ECGA and SCORE — an acronym for Ser vice Corps of Retired Executives, a nonpro t arm of the U.S. Small Busi ness Administration that provides free small business advice and men toring from retired business execu tives and experts.

“SCORE has this vast group of ex perts with experience in a number of industries,” Ward said. “ ey have re ally helped people in this community see the great potential that they have with their business ideas and how to start to developing those ideas.”

Community Navigators

e mentoring program is part of SCORE Cleveland’s nod to the Com munity Navigator Pilot Program de veloped by the SBA during the pan demic, which is aimed at helping underserved businesses recover.

e program pairs community leaders with SCORE volunteers to work directly with entrepreneurs and owners at all stages of their business development.

the trend that tenants are continuing to get more e cient in their use of space. It’s a natural evolution of how we interact in the o ce.”

Andrew Coleman, a rst vice pres ident at CBRE Inc.’s Cleveland o ce unit, said he views the movement in the market as more of a drive for amenities to help attract workers back to the o ce than a shift to new er buildings.

“It’s going to be haves and havenots for o ce building owners going forward,” Coleman said. “Some B buildings compete really well in terms of amenities, with o ce loung es and vending machines. e build ings that will su er are those where the owners are not putting money back into their buildings.”

SCORE members even tually pair up for one-onone mentoring with hope ful entrepreneurs or existing owners looking to grow or pivot their busi ness. Ward said the pro gram has been a timely t for a city that, among many other challenges, is plagued with blighted commercial areas and high retail vacan cies.

“We are really focusing on all the di erent areas in and around East Cleveland that could quickly help re vitalize the overall business community,” Ward said. “Part of our mission is to in troduce new businesses and new business concepts into East Cleveland and build up our tax base.”

Ward believes SCORE’s hands-on approach can help make the most of East Cleveland’s bene ts and assets.

East Cleveland, he said, has poten tial and is a bit of a blank slate with an abundance of available, low-rent commercial space that, with some work, could accommodate an in ux of new businesses immediately.

“ ere’s a lot open in East Cleve land that is there to be developed,” Ward said.

Another objective for ECGA is to help entrepreneurs gravitate toward

“ e ight to quality is easy to un derstand in terms of moving from a Class B to a Class A building. But plenty of tenants in B buildings want to get their o ces updated. It’s the older buildings where no money has been spent where we’ll be talking about conversions to other uses from o ce.”

He noted that suburban building owners are generally “quite happy” with the market at this point.

Ben Schlossberg, a managing member of Shelbourne Global Solutions of Brooklyn, New York,

businesses and enterprises that might not be the rst ones to come to mind when someone is looking to start a small business.

“We really needed peo ple to think outside of the traditional businesses that you see opened in our com munity,” Ward said. “Bar bershops, beauty salons, mom-and-pop stores — those are important, but we want our entrepreneurs to start thinking outside of that box and be open to businesses like sta ng agencies, medical o ces, businesses that don’t re quire a lot of foot tra c.”

Ward is optimistic that East Cleveland has entre preneurs and owners interested in and ready to start diverse new busi nesses. Since partnering with SCORE, he said East Cleveland resi dents he’s talked with who are in volved in the mentoring process are thinking broadly about the area’s im mediate needs. One is looking to open a sta ng agency, Ward said, and one is considering a cloud-serv er facility in the city limits.

Tailored to the community

Business startups have been surg ing since the pandemic, according to

which has the Cleveland suburban office market’s largest portfolio, said in a phone interview that he feels owners of office-using con cerns are “getting more realistic about hybrid and work-from-home practices. They’re urging to be back some of the time, and as a result starting to reevaluate space needs in a positive way.”

He said the company has seen re newed interest in o ces the last few months, including an increase in showings to new o ce prospects.

By traditional measures, the Cleve land metropolitan o ce market is staging a comeback, though part of it is from old buildings getting taken out of surveys as they are targeted for recon guring to apartments or ho

data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

“During the pandemic, we got slammed with people looking for help,” said Robert Cohen, SCORE Cleveland co-chair. “What we found is that there were a lot of folks previ ously employed as factory workers or in entry-level positions that left and went into the gig economy or started their own company.”

Cohen is one of the leaders behind the Community Navigator and men toring program, which began in the Lee-Harvard area and has since ex panded to Slavic Village, Metro West and, most recently, East Cleveland.

“We knew that working with un derserved communities was a good way for us to help small businesses, small-business owners and people who are aspiring to become small-business owners,” Cohen said.

During SCORE’s 2022 scal year, Cleveland SCORE volunteers were part of 132 one-on-one mentoring sessions.

A big part of those mentoring ses sions is giving would-be business owners the con dence to esh out their ideas or, in some cases, helping existing businesses pivot to more in-demand products or services, Co hen said.

Each community and entrepre neur is unique, Cohen noted, and SCORE volunteers do not go into a mentoring session with any precon ceived notions.

tels.

Overall vacancy fell to 13% as of the third quarter of this year from 19% in the like period of 2021, ac cording to JLL data.

Doug Price, CEO of K&D Group of Willoughby, which has a substantial portfolio of downtown o ces and apartments in buildings that were formerly o ces, said in a phone in terview the o ce market remains tough.

“All we’re doing is trading the same tenants between buildings,” Price said, because too few new o ce ten ants are emerging or expanding in the region.

Stan Bullard: sbullard@crain.com, (216) 771-5228, @CrainRltywriter

“We are not going into these com munities with a set formula or with the idea that this is what we’re going to do and how we’re going to do it,” he said. “We try to build programs from the bottom up. ere can be similarities, for sure, but there are also some big di erences, just based on each particular community’s as sets and needs.”

Establishing a track record

e SCORE program is one of the rst steps in what Ward hopes is a comprehensive revitalization of East Cleveland’s business districts.

“ e ECGA has had struggles over the last four-and-a-half years trying to get our projects o the ground. We have had to compete against a dis trust and a lack of a track record,” Ward said, referring to other eco nomic development projects that have started and ended before com pletion in East Cleveland.

“But if we stay true to our mission and we start asking for enough funding to really have a develop ment budget, I think more opportu nities will open up to us,” Ward said. “We just have to be prepared to take advantage of those opportu nities, and we have to do it the right way.”

Kim Palmer: kpalmer@crain.com, (216) 771-5384, @kimfouro ve

Jason Laver, a senior vice president at the Cushman & Wake eld Cresco brokerage in Independence, said the study re ects a closer look at the of ce market.

The pandemic may be accenting long trendlines in the Cleveland o ce market rather than upsetting them, a new JLL Inc. real estate study nds. STEPHEN LEONARDI/UNSPLASH

Ward Cohen

“We’re creating a new venue for Playhouse Square, purpose-built for civic engagement. … To layer that onto the already exciting and vibrant vitality of Playhouse Square, the arts and culture that exists here, creates this exceptional opportunity,” Dan Moulthrop, the City Club’s CEO, said during a recent interview.

And, he added, “we get to do it at street level.”

‘A forever home’

Since its creation in 1912, the City Club has occupied a handful of downtown addresses.

e nonpro t moved to its current digs, the second oor of the historic Citizens Building at 850 Euclid Ave., in the early 1980s. at property was renamed as the City Club Building in 1999, as part of a major renovation project and lease renewal.

e current space has served the City Club extremely well, Moulthrop said.

“But the conditions of the building are preventing us from reaching our aspirations right now,” he said, ac knowledging that the City Club will leave the space early, before the end of its lease with Columbus-based landlord E.V. Bisho Co.

e Playhouse Square lease will begin Sept. 1, 2023. Gina Vernaci, the performing arts center’s president and CEO, said the agreement runs for 10 years, with many renewal options.

“It’s a forever home,” she said, de scribing the City Club as the newest resident company at Playhouse Square, on par with the Cleveland Ballet, Great Lakes eater, Cleve land Play House and other headlin ers.

Moulthrop, who took the City Club’s helm in 2013, has been quietly exploring a move for years.

He and Vernaci started talking about a potential Playhouse Square address before the pandemic. eir conversations heated up, though, as fallout from the coronavirus and re mote work reverberated through the commercial real estate industry.

e City Club’s future home, a for mer F.W. Woolworth department store that housed a well-known rug shop for decades, is full of empty cu bicles and darkened o ces today.

It’s the headquarters of Dwell works, a relocation-services compa ny that decided to migrate to the city from the suburbs in 2011. e com pany is not leaving downtown. But Dwellworks is cutting its physical footprint in half, keeping only the second oor of the building.

“ ere’s no question that it’s an ex ample of the changing dynamics in the o ce market that employers, owners and downtown management organizations are having to address,” said Michael Deemer, president and CEO of the nonpro t Downtown Cleveland Alliance.

“I think this is a positive example of how an owner can work to keep an o ce tenant in place, work with them to meet their needs — and then also identify a use for the neighbor hood that is going to contribute posi tively to the experience of residents, workers and visitors in the area.”

Welcoming broader audiences

Remaking the space for the City Club is a $3.5 million to $4 million endeavor. e renovations are part of a fundraising campaign that also will

support broader programming and an expanded endowment. Moulthrop wouldn’t publicly disclose how much money the organization hopes to raise.

“Our planned move is re ective of ongoing discussions regarding not only how the City Club is doing, cur rent course and speed, but what we need to do to keep the City Club vi brant into the future,” said Kristen Baird Adams, president of the club’s board and chief of sta for PNC Bank’s o ce of regional presidents.

Design work by DLR Group calls for opening up the space, which has a 15-foot-high ceiling, and removing four columns toward the center of the oor to create an auditorium.

at hall will seat between 300 and 330 people, Moulthrop said.

e entryway behind the store front windows will become a large pre-function space as part of the City Club’s e ort to roll out the welcome mat to broader audiences. “ e con nection to Playhouse Square and Eu clid Avenue, and that glass, the trans parency is needed in times like now,” said Charlie Olivo, an associate and interior designer in DLR Group’s Cleveland o ce.

Both Olivo and Moulthrop refer enced the City Club’s creed, penned in 1916.

It says, in part, “I am accessible to people of all sides — literally and g uratively — for I am located in the heart of the city — spiritually and geographically.”

At one time, East Ninth and Euclid felt like that heart, said longtime City Club member Bob Lustig.

“When the big law rms and ac counting rms were concentrated in that Ninth and Euclid area, it was an ideal location,” said Lustig, an attor ney who joined the City Club in 1964 and religiously attends the club’s weekly Friday forums. “Today, it isn’t.”

e City Club Building, with tem peramental elevators and other maintenance needs, can be particu larly challenging for elderly audience members, Lustig said.

Landlord David Bisho , president of E.V. Bisho , did not respond to questions about the City Club’s looming departure and the potential for back lling the space or reposi tioning the building.

A t for the district

Moulthrop said the City Club aims to o er continuous programming while it prepares to move, though it’s possible that the frequency of events will brie y slow. e organization hosts about 100 programs annually between paid forums and free dis cussions at other venues.

e programs are livestreamed and archived online. e Friday fo rums and other key events also air on the radio and television through a broadcast partnership with Ideas tream Public Media. Ideastream will be one of the City Club’s new neigh bors in the Playhouse Square district, where Moulthrop hopes to deepen the club’s relationships with other nonpro t and civic groups.

“We just don’t even know what’s possible with all of this,” Vernaci said.

Imagine, she suggested, bringing playwright Aaron Sorkin to the City Club the next time his stage adapta tion of “To Kill a Mockingbird” comes to Cleveland. Or lighting up a tempo rarily dark theater with a speaker when the City Club lands a big name that’s guaranteed to draw an over ow crowd.

“ eir business was a glove t for the district,” said Connor Redman, a

senior associate with Cushman & Wake eld-Cresco Real Estate, which represented Playhouse Square. With its focus on midday events, the City Club will bring more daytime foot tra c to an area that bustles in the evenings, where there’s ample access to restaurants, nearby parking and public transportation.

Vernaci, who will retire in Febru ary, is preparing to cede the stage to incoming CEO Craig Hassall. On his watch, she expects the City Club to serve as an anchor for eventual rstoor master planning in the district, where new theater marquees will be unveiled in June and patrons are ocking back to KeyBank Broadway Series shows.

“ e most exciting thing is the thing we can’t even see or imagine right now,” Vernaci said. “But you know it’s there.”

Michelle Jarboe: michelle.jarboe@ crain.com, (216) 771-5437, @mjarboe

Top: Dan Moulthrop, the City Club of Cleveland’s CEO, describes the vision for the free-speech forum’s new street-level home at Playhouse Square. Above: The rst oor of the Dwellworks o ce was empty on a recent Tuesday afternoon. The City Club of Cleveland has signed a long-term lease to take over, and reimagine, the space.

BANKING

Civista Bank

Dave Bell has joined Civista Bank as a VP, Commercial Lender.

He is based out of Civista’s Akron, OH of ce, located at 529 N. Cleveland Massillon Road. Bell brings over 23 years of banking experience to the Civista team. He has a BBA in Accounting from the University of Cincinnati and an MBA in Systems Management from Baldwin Wallace University. He will provide customers with a personalized and responsive working relationship as he assists them in reaching their business goals.

EDUCATION

Northeast Ohio Medical University

Rebecca Z. German, Ph.D. was appointed as vice president for research, Nov. 7, 2022. She will provide strategic advice and guidance to the president, University and faculty to ensure research activities continue in collaboration with members of NEOMED’s clinical and academic network which includes several of the nation’s top health care systems.

Dr. German is an NIH R01funded researcher with more than 30 years of research and academic leadership experience. Over the last nine years, she has served as a professor of anatomy and neurobiology at NEOMED. Dr. German studies swallowing dysfunction and the protection of respiratory airways in pre-term and other medically compromised infants. Her doctoral degree in biology is from Harvard University.

EDUCATION

Northeast Ohio Medical University

Frank Beck, D.D.S., FAAHP, was appointed interim inaugural dean for the Bitonte College of Dentistry at NEOMED.

Dr. Beck is program director of the GPD - Dental Residency Program at Mercy Health - St. Elizabeth Youngstown Hospital and an associate professor of internal medicine at NEOMED.

He chaired the External Advisory Council which set principles to develop a dental college to meet the needs of Northeast Ohioans.

He received his Doctor of Dental Surgery degree from The Ohio State University.

CONSULTING

Gladegy Consulting, LLC

Stacy Sufka is pleased to announce her transition from Chief Strategy and People Of cer at Koinonia to Founder and Principal at Gladegy Consulting, LLC. At Gladegy, Stacy leads a team of management and leadership consultants who work with diverse organizations to meet their strategic goals. Gladegy Consulting offers a suite of strategic services that include: human resources and organizational development consulting, executive and leadership coaching, corporate training, and assessments.

INSURANCE / FINANCIAL SERVICES

OneDigital

OneDigital, a leading insurance, nancial services, and human resources advisory rm, is pleased to announce Craig C. Gabel, CPFA, as Vice President, Retirement Plan Services for the Ohio market. Craig has over 25 years of nancial services experience with a special emphasis on retirement plan consulting. He provides fresh thinking and strategic guidance to employers around duciary oversight, investment consulting and participant engagement as it relates to their retirement plan(s).

LAW Hahn Loeser & Parks

The Firm welcomed associate Ryan Geary, who was recently admitted to the Ohio Bar. A former Hahn Loeser summer associate, Geary focuses on complex commercial litigation matters, including commercial contracts, labor and employment, construction, and business torts. His experience includes working with two judges, advising law of cials at the City of South Bend and Summa Health Systems’ Of ce of General Counsel. Geary earned his J.D. from Notre Dame Law School and a B.A. from Miami University.

LAW

Brouse McDowell, LPA

Brouse McDowell is proud to welcome Ryan Robinson to the rm’s Business Transactions & Corporate Counseling Practice Group. Ryan joins Brouse as an associate with both corporate and rm experience. His practice focuses on counseling and advising clients on sophisticated mergers and acquisitions, complex transactional matters, contract review and negotiations, strategic legal initiatives, and issues arising in day-to-day business operations.

LAW

Walter Haver eld

Sarah Fontana is a member of the Walter Haver eld Litigation team and focuses her practice on civil matters. She has drafted opinions and motions, conducted settlement conferences and worked on depositions and mediations under judicial direction. Prior to Walter Haver eld, she worked as a staff attorney for the Cuyahoga County Court of Common Pleas and as an assistant prosecuting attorney for the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Of ce.

Waldheger Coyne is pleased to announce that James Egleston and Mary Giganti have assumed management of the rm as president and vice president respectively. Jim manages the rm’s health law practice and Mary heads the rm’s employee bene ts practice.

INSURANCE / FINANCIAL SERVICES

Chicago Title Insurance Company

Jamie Chapman, Esq. has joined Chicago Title Insurance Company as Commercial Underwriting Counsel. She has over 13 years of transactional real estate experience, having practiced law in both New York and Ohio.

Jamie has represented a wide variety of clients in acquisitions and dispositions of residential and commercial properties, lending and leasing. Jamie has extensive experience working on commercial transactions involving communications towers and multi-site commercial transactions.

LAW

Hahn Loeser & Parks

The Firm welcomed associate Makela Hayford. A two-year Hahn Loeser summer associate, Hayford focuses on complex commercial litigation disputes at all stages, including engaging and managing discovery, drafting pleadings, and researching and drafting dispositive motions and briefs. Hayford earned both her B.A. and J.D. from Case Western Reserve. She was president of both the Student Bar Association and Black Law Students Association. She was also a First Amendment Fellow with Harvard Law School.

LAW

As a member of the Walter Haver eld Litigation team, Anthony Santiago manages all aspects of commercial litigation matters from inception through resolution; including pleadings, motion practice, discovery, and settlement agreements. He defends businesses involving employment, personal injury, property damage and wrongful death claims. He also has experience defending litigation matters involving mass torts.

Prior to Walter Haver eld, Anthony was an assistant prosecuting attorney for Cuyahoga County.

MANUFACTURING

American Punch Company

American Punch announces that Matt Bendula has been named VP of Operations. Mr. Bendula will oversee all day-to-day manufacturing operations, de ne and implement operations strategy and processes, and plan for future growth and expansion of manufacturing capabilities. He will also be responsible for maximizing work ow ef ciency. American Punch is the leading manufacturer of punches, dies, shear blades, and other tooling used in structural steel, metalworking, and stamping industries.

REAL ESTATE

CBRE

Mr. Joseph Khouri is a 20-year commercial real estate veteran and joined CBRE in 2013.

He is the rst CBRE Cleveland retail professional to be promoted to Senior Vice President while with the rm and is a member of the Advisory & Transaction Services group.

Mr. Kevin Moss is a nine-year commercial real estate veteran and joined CBRE in 2015.

He the youngest CBRE Cleveland professional to earn the title of First Vice President and is similarly a member of the Advisory & Transaction Services group together with Mr. Khouri.

Together, Mr. Khouri and Mr. Moss have executed more than 500 transactions in excess of 2.5 million square feet, resulting in over $500 million in consideration.

LAW

Waldheger Coyne

Giganti

Egleston

Moss

Khouri

Walter Haver eld

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