Greater Charlotte Biz 2007.09

Premie r • Blai r, B oh lé & W h i t si t t • Caly ptix Sec ur ity • Chr is- Cr aft/ Indian Mo to rcycle

september

Jeffrey S. Kane Senior Vice President and Charlotte Branch Manager Federal Reserve Bank Charlotte Branch

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PRSRT STD U.S. Postage PAID Permit No. 505 Charlotte, NC

Charlotte Fed Taps Region’s Economic Pulse

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ood Hargett Breakfast Club: The Premier Business Development Organization for Success-Minded Charlotte Business Owners.

The Hood Hargett Breakfast Club is a ‘category exclusive’ business development organization that develops and hosts some 36 events throughout the year for its members and guests. The goal of these events: to provide success-minded business owners with first-class venues to entertain their clients and prospects.

HHBC takes great pride in creating a pro-active, professional-yet-casual environment that gives members and guests the chance to meet and learn more about each other and their respective companies. These opportunities to develop new business relationships and enhance existing ones are key to the on-going success of HHBC.

September 14, 2007 Rich Karlgaard Publisher Forbes Magazine

NEW 2007-2008 Speaker Line-up

May 2, 2008 Jim Nantz Broadcaster CBS Sports

October 12, 2007

February 8, 2008

September 12, 2008

Michael Powell Former Chairman FCC

Ari Fleischer Former Whitehouse Press Secretary

Lee Woodruff Public Relations Executive and Freelance Writer

Lloyd Trotter Vice Chairman, GE President and CEO, GE Industrial

March 14, 2008

October 10, 2008

Pat Croce Entepreneur and Motivational Speaker

Doug Lipp Former Head of Training at Walt Disney University

January 11, 2008

April 18, 2008

November 14, 2008

Kirk Herbsteit ESPN Sports Analyst and Former Star Quarterback

Chief Richard Picciotto Highest-Ranking Firefighter to Survive WTC Collapse

Dick Hoyt Team Hoyt Motivational Speaker

November 9, 2007

HOOD HARGETT Breakfast Club America gives “Wake up and smell the coffee” full-bodied meaning!

To attend or learn more or to find out about membership,call JenniferSnyder at 704-602-9529 • jenn@hoodhargett.com

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in this issue

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Federal Reserve Bank, Charlotte Branch As senior vice president in charge of the Charlotte branch of the Federal Reserve Bank, Jeffrey Kane interacts with a lot of people, both professionally and socially. If he let inside information slip out about the behemoth banks based in Charlotte, or about any other bank, the financial consequences might be huge. Quite simply, he has to be discreet in such a sensitive job.

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departments

Premier Susan DeVore is building alliances at the helm of Premier, working toward a future in which the health care industry will be considered the best managed and most innovative of all the economic sectors in the United States.

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Blair, Bohle´ & Whitsitt In just seven years, the firm has experienced remarkable growth.

With a new office building, new clients, a new partner and an alliance with BDO Seidman, they are working hard to change the expectations of local accounting firms.

publisher’s post

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bizXperts Smart Salvos, Select Strategies and Succinct Solutions

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employersbiz Legislative and Regulatory Highlights for Area Employers

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biznetwork

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ontop

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executive homes Luxury Homes above $350,000

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Calyptix Security How do you develop security solutions for the Internet that deal with threats deployed so rapidly that they have worldwide impact in mere seconds? That’s what the founders of Calyptix Security were thinking about as they came to Charlotte.

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Chris-Craft/Indian Motorcycle

on the cover:

P re m i e r • B l a i r, B o h l é & W h i t s i t t • C a ly p t i x S e c u r i t y • C h r i s - C r a f t / I n d i a n M o t o rc y c l e

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Jeffrey S. Kane, Senior Vice President and Charlotte Branch Manager, Federal Reserve Bank, Charlotte Branch Photography by Wayne Morris.

Jeffrey S. Kane Senior Vice President and Charlotte Branch Manager Federal Reserve Bank Charlotte Branch

SENSITIVE JOB Charlotte Fed Taps Region’s Economic Pulse

If you’ve assigned Chris-Craft boats and Indian motorcycles to the business boneyard, this may startle you: both are alive and well in Kings Mountain.These iconic brands are the latest resurrection projects of Englishman, Stephen Julius and American, Stephen Heese.

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One of the most important tools we use to tailor Internet solutions for business.

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At Time Warner Cable Business Class, we make a point of visiting your business. That way we can get a better understanding of how you work, your needs and your business concerns. So you get a high-speed Internet solution that is tailored for your business.

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[publisher’spost] Vote For Charlotte’s Growth Like so many others in recent years, we moved to Charlotte in 1999 to start this magazine. After examining over a dozen cities in the Southeast region, we studied the greater Charlotte area in even more detail to learn about its quality of life and the likelihood that our business-to-business magazine could add value to business success in this community. We wanted to move from Washington, D.C., to a city that offered growth opportunities in a hospitable business environment. We affirmatively chose the greater John Paul Galles Charlotte marketplace for all that it offered as well as its commitment to growth in the future.

At the time, Charlotte had just passed a half-cent sales tax (1998) for public transportation because of the growing congestion in the region, the need for cleaner air, and the expected population growth. In retrospect, the need for the tax seems even more compelling with the addition of 30,000 additional cars on our highways each year, the rapid expansion and growth of our residential suburbs, and the increased business activity using Charlotte as its distribution center for the entire east coast. Even more important to many, rapidly increasing fuel prices and global warming are additional reasons for expanding our public transportation and adding the light rail system.

This fall Mecklenburg voters will be asked whether that transportation tax should be repealed. Repealing the transit tax makes no sense at all. The average taxpayer contributes only about $40 per year as a result of the transit tax. Losing that half-cent tax will do more harm than good. Eliminating this existing funding for public transportation will diminish our bus service while our government remains under the obligation to pay back hundreds of millions of dollars of government bonds out of general operating funds. We cannot choose to default on those bonds; they must be repaid. Repeal may even mean an increase in property taxes to offset the loss of transportation dollars.

The present tax will provide nearly $77 million for transportation in 2009, and will result in an even larger amount when matched by state and federal government monies for the light rail transportation system. Over $300 million has been contributed to this project thus far from the federal government alone. If the transit tax is repealed, not one new dollar will be spent on highways. In fact, it is likely that repeal would place more pressure to take highway dollars and spend them on public transit.

We need dollars for improving highways and for public transportation. Light rail and commuter rail are important elements of a balanced transportation system. Having lived in the D.C. area for many years, I rode the metro nearly every day. I know the value of a public rail system. The metro was being constantly improved as was the region’s highway system to keep up with growth and development; they first added one beltway and then another.

The vote on this issue is really about Charlotte’s future. We need to reconcile that we must prepare for growth from many different perspectives. We need highways, we need schools, we need green spaces, we need clean air, and we need public transportation. Charlotte is growing while many other cities are failing. We must grow responsibly and manage growth to maintain our quality of life. We must prepare for our future.

Our battle should not be with each other over the future of public transportation.

Our fight should be in our state capital for the highway funding that will bring our roads up to the quality and quantity that supports our population and its growth. We need light rail and public transportation corridors along South Blvd., Independence Blvd., I-77 to Lake Norman, and a northeast route to UNC Charlotte.

A vote AGAINST repeal of the half-cent sales tax for public transportation on November 5 is a vote FOR the smart growth of Charlotte. biz

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September 2007 Volume 8 • Issue 9 Publisher John Paul Galles jgalles@greatercharlottebiz.com

Associate Publisher/Editor Maryl A. Lane maryl.a.lane@greatercharlottebiz.com

Creative Director Joanna L. Davis Editorial & Sales Assistant Janet Kropinak jkropinak@greatercharlottebiz.com

Business Development Sandy Rosenfeld srosenfeld@greatercharlottebiz.com

Account Executive Mimi Zelman mzelman@greatercharlottebiz.com

Contributing Writers Ellison Clary Casey Jacobus Janet Kropinak Jill Purdy Contributing Photographer Wayne Morris Galles Communications Group, Inc. 5601 77 Center Drive • Suite 250 Charlotte, NC 28217-0737 704-676-5850 Phone • 704-676-5853 Fax www.greatercharlottebiz.com • Press releases and other news-related information, please fax to the attention of “Editor” or e-mail: editor@greatercharlottebiz.com.

• Editorial or advertising inquiries, please call or fax at the numbers above or e-mail: info@greatercharlottebiz.com.

• Subscription inquiries or change of address, please call or fax at the numbers above or visit our Web site: www.greatercharlottebiz.com. © Copyright 2007 by Galles Communications Group, Inc. All rights reserved. The information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable.

However, Galles Communications Group, Inc. makes no warranty to the accuracy or reliability of this information.

Products named in these pages are trade names or trademarks of their respective companies.Views expressed herein are not necessarily those of Greater Charlotte Biz or Galles Communications Group, Inc. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the publisher. For reprints call 704-676-5850 x102.

Greater Charlotte Biz (ISSN 1554-6551) is published monthly by Galles Communications Group, Inc., 5601 77 Center Dr., Ste. 250, Charlotte, NC 28217-0737.

Telephone: 704-676-5850. Fax: 704-676-5853. Subscription rate is $24 for one year. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Greater Charlotte Biz, 5601 77 Center Dr., Ste. 250, Charlotte, NC 28217-0737.

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[bizXperts] Smart Salvos, Select Strategies and Succinct Solutions

investing in your sales team During times when both business and training Individual Motivation. As a sales manager you budgets are tight, management often asks what can must create an environment to optimize the salesbe done to improve the return on the company’s person’s personal performance on a daily basis. investment of training dollars. While there’s no easy You can do that by conducting one-on-one answer to this question, there are a few basic points, known meetings with salespeople after returning as the Training Discrepancy Model, which illustrate key from training classes. During these sesSKILLS areas that must be targeted for your company’s training sions discuss what they’ve learned, and Bob Henricks investment to be 100 percent effective. how they can utilize the day-to-day First, think of a triangle. The points of the triphilosophies in order to increase productivity.

TRAINING DISCREPANCY angle will be Skills, Individual Motivation and Motivation comes from within. Sandler MODEL Corporate Support. training teaches that attitude and behavior Skills. In order for an individual to are key concepts needed to succeed as INDIVIDUAL CORPORATE be 100 percent successful, they must MOTIVATION SUPPORT a salesperson. Without personal possess proper skills. It is the motivation it doesn’t matter what responsibility of the company to identify the proper skills necesskills are being taught by the training company or reinforced sary to succeed. How do you do that? by management.

Identify the job function. Identify all the specific functions that Corporate Support. Corporate support is very a given job will entail. important in order for training to succeed.

Benchmarks. Set benchmarks for each one of the job funcTraining needs to be a process, not an event. It tions. Benchmarks are simply the acceptable level of expertise can’t be viewed from the salesperson’s pernecessary to succeed. If you have five to six different job funcspective as a “and this too shall pass” protions, you would obviously have five to six different benchmarks. gram. At times, corporations striving to Once benchmarks are set, management can then determine the allow as many programs as possible have skills necessary for each job function in order to hit those bencha flavor-of-the-month mentality. marks. You need a global view of the job in order to understand Corporate support would include what skills are necessary. things such as: • Reinforcement Motivation Isn’t a Set of Power Phrases • Debriefing • Running sales meeting When traditional sales trainers talk about motivation, they • Management participating usually do a lot of shouting and jumping. They’re like cheerin the training leaders with a big capital M on their sweaters, and their misDebriefing alone will create a culture sion is to get everyone excited by shouting one-liners and power phrases. that reinforces whatever training is being taught and will show corporate support. Salespeople Of course, it doesn’t work. The audience is pumped up for a on the street will realize that managers are continually folday or two, but then it’s back to business as usual. The excitelowing through on the concepts that are being taught. ment is gone. And true motivation never existed.

Therefore, if you want to make sure that your people are getting the most out of their training in today’s environment, and Motivation is not some mystical pump-up program. Motivyou want to maximize the investment of company dollars, it’s critiation is the ability to see in the present a projection of the future that you want for yourself: to put into motion the plan cal to focus on these three areas: proper skills, individual motivafor its achievement; to be aware of the price required to tion and corporate support. When all three components are targetachieve your goals; and then to move steadily toward these ed by management, training dollars are well spent and both mangoals on a day-to-day basis. agement and salespeople will be pleased with the results.

Bob Henricks is president of Henricks Corporate Training and All the one-liners and power phrases known to man and Development, a company dedicated to helping business owners, wrapped up in a positive mental attitude won’t get you past sales managers and salespeople succeed. Contact him at the first coffee shop unless you know where you’re going.

704-544-7383 or visit www.henrickscorp.sandler.com.

That’s motivation.

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Smart Salvos, Select Strategies and Succinct Solutions

[bizXperts]

business owner estate planning: reason and emotion When interacting with other professionals in the estate planning area (attorneys, accountants, financial planners, insurance advisors, etc.), I often hear them say that they focus on the “high net worth individual.” I will than ask whether that includes doing estate planning for owners of closely held businesses. Why is this question important?

Let’s assume that we have two separate individual clients, each with a net worth of $10 million. Client A’s assets are made up of a residence worth $750,000, an IRA worth $1 million, $6 million of public company stocks and bonds, and a leased office building in downtown Charlotte worth $1.25 million. Client B has a residence worth $750,000, an IRA worth $1 million, a closely held business (of which he is the sole owner) worth $6 million, and commercial real estate leased to his business worth $1.25 million. Each of the two clients has $1million of life insurance on their lives. The business owner’s insurance is owned by his company.

Each client is 60 years old and has income of $250,000 per year. They each have three children of the same ages. Two of the business owner’s children work in the family business and one does not.

Let’s further assume that the two clients share basically the same objectives: (1) minimizing transfer taxes during their lifetime and upon their death, and (2) treating their children and grandchildren “equally.” The fact that the business owner’s wealth is primarily tied up in his own business rather than the stock market is the major difference between the two clients.Why is this a major issue? Don’t you use the same techniques to minimize estate and gift taxes for each of these individuals? Shouldn’t their wills and trust agreements contain essentially the same provisions? Don’t the same tax laws apply? Won’t the clients have the same “basic” estate plan?

These fact situations require a totally different approach to estate planning for the business owner than for the non-business owner. In fact, about the only similarity from an estate planning standpoint is that the current net worth of each client is $10 million. Here are the major differences and why they are important.

First, the business owner has 60 percent of his net worth tied up in an asset which can be very difficult to make “liquid.” Though a closely-held business is normally marketable through a complex, time consuming and expensive sales process, the non-business owner can raise the cash he needs simply by selling a percentage of his port-

greater charlotte biz

folio. The sale of a minority ownership interest in a closely held business is extremely difficult, if not impossible.

Second, the value of an ownership interest in a closely held business depends on that business’ ability to produce income and cash flow into the future.

This asset is “unique” in that its value is dependent Robert Norris upon factors like having the proper vision, strategic plan, the “right” people, systems, leadership, management, etc. Also, the owner is often the person driving the business and exerting control over its future—a fact which raises many questions as to the impact on the business’ value through separation of the owner from the business upon retirement, disability or death. Thus, issues concerning exit strategies and succession planning (including transfer of control of the business from the owner to his successors while maintaining the owner’s retirement income) must be appropriately addressed and coordinated with the owner’s estate plan.

Third, the concept of even determining an accurate “fair market value” of a closely held business as that value may change over time is relatively complex and requires advisors experienced in business valuation in order to appropriately and “fairly” plan the disposition of the owner’s estate. Of course, qualified appraisers will ultimately be needed prior to making a gift of the business ownership interests or for estate tax purposes at the owner’s death.

Fourth, many of the decisions which have to be made by the business owner in connection with estate planning and disposition of the business interests have more to do with “emotional” issues (such as relationships with other family members) than “non-emotional” issues (such as the use of certain techniques to minimize estate taxes).

In fact, we believe that estate planners who do not take the time necessary to investigate and fully understand the inter-personal issues between family members will be unable to create a customized estate plan which balances the best interests of the family (“emotion”) with the best interests of the business (“reason”).

Planning for the business owner requires understanding not only the client’s asset information, retirement income needs and estate planning objectives, but also the client’s relationships with his spouse, his children and grandchildren, and his siblings. Though this requires the estate planner to spend a lot more time asking questions and understanding family dynamics, taking the time to custom design a coordinated succession plan/estate plan for business owners will both save the client money in the long run and best preserve both business and family relationships.

Robert Norris is managing partner of Wishart, Norris, Henninger & Pittman, P.A., a law firm which focuses on helping business owners define and achieve their business and personal objectives. Contact him at 704-364-0010 or visit www.wnhplaw.com.

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[bizXperts] Smart Salvos, Select Strategies and Succinct Solutions

reacting rather than responding The recent news coverage concerning an arrogant district attorney, Michael Nifong from Durham, and his launch of a ludicrous prosecution against three Duke University lacrosse players for rape, labeling them as “hooligans” even before they went to trial, was embarrassing to many Tar Heels. His prosecution was so vigorously pursued that even a large number of Duke students and about 100 faculty rallied and railed against these three young men.

The state attorney general dismissed the case, citing Nifong as a “rogue prosecutor” who had “insufficient evidence,” which led to a “rush to condemn.” And because of that, “A community and a state lost the ability to see clearly.”

Please remember that last part, “Lost the ability to see clearly.”

There is a major difference between a heavy fog and the smoke from a forest fire. A heavy fog eventually disappears. A forest fire may burn everything and anything in its path. It pays to see the difference.

Some in the national and international media were quick to condemn the three Duke lacrosse players who had only been accused, not convicted. In other words, some media reacted as though it were a forest fire.

However, in reality, it was more of a heavy fog.

This leads us into stupid versus credible investment behavior.

Even if you want to, you cannot escape the daily ongoing commentary about the economy and the stock market from the media in every form. Well, perhaps you could go deep into Siberia or Mongolia and get away from it. But for most of us, it’s a daily—and growing—intrusion.

Bill Staton Warren Buffett and his partner Charlie Munger have said over and over again that they leave plenty of time in their day to think. They are unruffled by outside influences during those times. And because of that reflection, they can take a good hard look at what’s really going on without being distracted by the “news of the second.” They invest responsibly rather than react.

While probably true for all aspects of life, it is especially prudent in the investment realm not to react quickly, but to have a measured response. It is especially important for your money manager(s) to have the same prudence and caution when advising you on your investments.

Bill Staton, MBA, CFA, is chairman of Staton Financial Advisors LLC, a money management firm. Contact him at 704-365-2122 or visit www.statonfinancial.com.

seeking sustainable success? try mixing art and science The Broadway play Lion King came to Charlotte again this summer. I attended for pleasure but left with a business lesson.

If you’ve not seen the production, the story, music and beautiful staging create a totally absorbing three-hour experience.

However, it was the aftershock that fascinated me. Days later, I was still wondering “How did they do that?” It took very creative artists to vision the unusual masks and puppetry and some pretty sharp engineers to execute technically on their ideas. A unique marriage of art and science created this long-running entertainment marvel.

So what’s the business lesson? Companies that succeed in the long term generate good ideas (art) and execute on them effectively (science). The challenge lies in doing both well year after year.

Art. All start ups are born of a good commercial idea. However, success can cause an enterprise to cling to things that used to work while the world changes around them. In Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Peter Drucker tells business leaders to put every product, service, technology, market, distribution channel and internal process “on trial for its life” every three years. If they would not be willing to launch it today, they need to stop doing it or at least minimize future investments. While Drucker’s audience is primarily mature organizations struggling to regain their innova-

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tive edge, we all need to beware of falling in love with what has worked in the past. It takes fresh ideas to keep delighting clients.

Science. On the other hand, some organizations are so busy innovating that they never settle down into a systematic approach. I still Mary Bruce recall my shock at hearing the leader of an acquisition target explain that production of their highest-volume item was really more of an art than a science. My concerns were well-founded. We soon learned that performance of that product varied greatly from batch to batch. Even clients who like surprises find comfort in getting exactly what they ordered. It takes a scientific approach to create consistent experiences.

If you want to leave your clients asking in delight, “How did they do that?” be sure to focus on both the art and the science of your business equation.

Mary H. Bruce of Kaleidoscope Business Options, Inc. specializes in advising business owners on improving performance and building the value of their enterprise. Contact her at 704-375-1970 or visit www.kboptions.com.

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Smart Salvos, Select Strategies and Succinct Solutions[bizXperts]

so, you’re the new kid…

Starting a new job is exciting—and stressful. Everything is new.

New people, new processes, maybe even a new town. Still, the new employee shows up excited about the opportunity. What happens in those first few days can be a determining factor in the employee’s longevity, productivity and satisfaction.

Too often, new employees are greeted with blank looks. I’ve heard horror stories about people showing up and no one knowing they were coming. (Well, obviously the person who hired them knew, but sometimes that person isn’t in the office and no one else is prepared.)

That’s not a good way to start out.

One survey recently noted that 32 percent of all new employees are already looking for another job within the first six months. You’ve spent time and money to get the new employee on board. You don’t want to begin losing him or her in the first few days.

What kind of “on-boarding” process does your company have? Do you provide a welcoming environment for your new employee? Here are a few ideas that can improve your new employee’s first weeks on the job: Spread the word—Send out a news brief to the rest of the team announcing the new employee’s pending arrival. Include a little about

greater charlotte biz

the person and what he or she will do for the company. Ask the team to be mindful to introduce themselves during those first few weeks.

Make a place—Have the new employee’s work space ready when he or she arrives. Leave a packet on the desk that includes an organization chart, Denise Altman office diagram, local places to eat and so on.

Anything that will help them become familiar with the new territory will help.

Provide a coach—Your new employee may need someone safe to talk with about concerns and frustrations. Partner with a professional coach who gets to know your company and can help the new employee learn to navigate the terrain. The coach can prove to be an important sounding board for your new team member and help them get up to full productivity more quickly.

Don’t leave the first few weeks of a new employee’s life to chance. You have too much invested already!

Denise Altman is president of Altman Initiative Group, Inc., helping companies hire and retain productive employees. Contact her at 704-315-9090 or visit www.altmaninitiative.com.

september 2007

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Add a Benefit at No Cost to Your Company North Carolina’s National College Savings Program Company Advantages • offer North Carolina’s 529 plan to your employees • no set-up fees or administrative charges • available through payroll deduction or automatic draft • minimal administrative involvement

Employee Advantages • easy enrollment and online account access • multiple investment options • tax-free earnings* • state tax deduction on contributions*

NC529.org Call 800-600-3453 to add this benefit for your employees.

* The availability of tax benefits may be conditioned on meeting certain requirements.

To learn about North Carolina’s National College Savings Program, its investment objectives, risks, and costs, read the Program Description available from NC529.org.

© 2007 Pathways, College Foundation, Inc., and State Education Assistance Authority (CFNC)

Legislative and Regulatory Highlights for Area Employers

[employersbiz]

Employees don’t know basic health care terms Industry insiders agree that the learning curve for the benefits business is steep, so it comes as no surprise when the average employee is baffled by health care information—but perhaps we aren’t aware of just how much.

Forty-nine percent of workers have trouble understanding their health care coverage and admit confusion when it comes to basic terms, according to a survey by Watson Wyatt.

Less than half of workers are comfortable explaining words like “co-pay” and “deductible” to their friends and co-workers. The rate drops to an alarming quarter of individuals for “health savings account” and a mere eight percent for “center of excellence.” Nearly half of employees feel uncomfortable explaining what their own health plans cover, Watson Wyatt reports.

“It serves notice to employers that best practice is a round-the-clock effort,” says Kathryn Yates, global director of communication consulting at Watson Wyatt. “It’s really a year-long project to help people understand where to go for information and learn the basics.”

Employees are surprisingly traditional when it comes to communication methods. Seventy percent of workers prefer to receive health care information in print, followed closely (64 percent) by those who prefer that information be accessible online. Interestingly, only 52 percent of workers read their health insurance information cover to cover; many admit to only scanning what is needed to enroll or make changes to their existing plan.

Yates suggests making communications more interesting and pertinent to employees and using a marketing-like approach to promote effective dialogue and understanding. (Employee Benefit News in Brief)

Informed Enrollment: Employees need from their employers Of the 18,000 working Americans recently polled by a national benefits consulting firm, only 34 percent said they track their health care expenses. Moreover, 58 percent described the health education tools and information they were provided as insufficient, while just half the respondents even used these materials.

One possible explanation for these troubling trends is that few employers are providing user-friendly and customized decision-support tools, according to Chris Bean, director of product management for Thomson Healthcare, who adds that many employee populations aren’t yet accustomed to bearing greater financial risks under the consumer-driven health plan (CDHP) model.

Thomson Healthcare, a global provider of integrated information-based solutions specializing in health care data analytics, offers clients personalized, claims-based health statements summarizing cost and utilization patterns to help employees estimate their coverage requirements, set appropriate flexible spending account (FSA) contribution levels each year, and make plan selection decisions based on their actual health care usage patterns.

“We’ve even heard health plan employees say they have a hard time reading their own explanation-of-benefit (EOB) forms,” reports Bean. The annual openenrollment process is the only time virtually all employees are actively engaged in the benefit plan selection process, which Bean says makes for a captive audience.

He suggests that enrollment be used as an opportunity to streamline communication from multiple sources such as health plans and providers to help reduce any confusion or complexity.

greater charlotte biz

Graovac likens the enrollment period to tax season, noting how a personalized statement that summarizes health claims experience will serve to help employees organize their thoughts. But he also stresses the importance of providing year-round communication that’s hands on and offers the right financial incentives for participating in wellness programs.

The trouble with most decision-support tools today is that they’re based on normative data sets that require individuals to enter their own experience versus summarizing critical details such as out-of-pocket costs, according to Bean. “It’s hard to piece together all the pertinent information that’s needed to make better health care decisions unless it’s your own and can be found in one spot,” he says.

Graovac says the goal of clients is to change employee perceptions about their health care consumption and encourage them to spend time making more meaningful coverage decisions to help effect change. Bean adds that a reduction in ER visits, greater use of less-costly generic drugs and improved compliance with evidencebased guidelines ultimately will result in overall higher employee satisfaction. (Benefit News) The Employers Association is a nonprofit Charlotte organization providing comprehensive human resources and training services. Founded in 1958, the Association maintains a broad-based membership of over 800 companies from all industries in the greater Charlotte region.

The above excerpts were taken from The Management Report, the Association’s monthly newsletter. For more information, please call Laura Hampton at 704-522-8011 or visit their Web site at www.employersassoc.com.

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Susan DeVore Chief Operating Officer Premier, Inc.

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by casey jacobus

[bizprofile]

Achieving Higher Value in Health Care Premier Forms Alliances to Improve Care and Lower Costs

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hy are some companies able to sustain excellence over decades while comparable organizations decline over time? What distinguishes those organizations labeled “visionary”?

According to researchers, successful businesses share some defining characteristics, including a strong sense of purpose and values, a clearly defined long-term goal, and the capacity to visualize what can be accomplished and to act to ensure that image is realized.

These are the characteristics that the Premier, Inc. health care alliance brings to the current national debate on what should be done about America’s health care system. Politicians and movie-makers alike talk about the “failure” of the current system, while Premier is already working towards transforming the system to improve the quality of health care for the consumer and to lower the costs for health care providers.

“I believe health care can be improved and that it has to be improved from the inside out,” says Susan DeVore, chief operating officer at Premier. “I would love to see the health care delivery system reformed and the payment system working more effectively.”

The leaders of the hospital and health systems in the Premier alliance envision a future in which the health care industry will be considered the best managed and most innovative of all the economic sectors in the United States.

In 1996 they endorsed the mission and foundation statements that underline the Premier alliance: “Across the nation, our owners, physicians and other allies will lead the local transformations that are the building blocks of a reshaped health care system…By the year 2020, we will have changed the world’s view of U.S. health care to ‘the best and most cost effective’ at sustaining the good health of populations.” ® greater charlotte biz

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Forming Alliances Premier is the largest health care alliance in the United States dedicated to improving patient outcomes while safely reducing the cost of care. Premier operates the nation’s largest health care purchasing network, the most comprehensive repository of hospital clinical and financial information, and one of the largest policy-holder owned, hospital professional liability risk-retention groups in health care.

Premier was founded in 1996 through a merger of three predecessor companies—

Sun Health, Premier and AMHS. With headquarters in San Diego, Premier also has offices in Washington, D.C., and in Philadelphia. The company’s two main divisions which handle purchasing management and data analysis, are based in Charlotte, and manned with more than 600 employees. Premier’s chief operating officer Susan DeVore is also located in Charlotte and is a Charlotte native as well.

As a member of a military family, DeVore moved to Charlotte when she was fourteen and attended Quail Hollow Junior High and

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South Mecklenburg High School. After graduating from UNCC with a business degree in 1981, she traveled internationally before returning to Charlotte to work with

“By figuring out how hospitals can improve themselves and sharing that knowledge, we’re really going to be able to improve health care across the country.

I get excited to think we’re going to make it better.” ~ Susan DeVore Chief Operating Officer Cap Gemini Ernst & Young (CGEY) as a senior health care industry management practice leader and member of the executive committee for the North American consulting organization. She also led high tech, manufacturing and other business units of CGEY. She brought these experiences, along with four years in hospital finance at Mercy Hospital, to Premier in 2003.

DeVore has been named to Modern Healthcare’s list of the 100 Most Powerful People in Healthcare and to the magazine’s list of the Top 25 Women in Healthcare.

She was a recipient of the 2007 Top 25 Women in Business by the Charlotte Business Journal. She is also a member of the board of HGPII (Healthcare Group Purchasing Industry Initiative), of which Premier is a member. And she serves on the board of Global Healthcare Exchange (GHX), of which Premier is an owner. GHX provides an open and neutral electronic trading exchange to improve the procurement-to-payment process in the health care supply chain.

DeVore has seen a transition take place at Premier in the four years she has been at the helm of the Charlotte office. Needing to consolidate to provide greater efficiency and company-wide integration, Premier closed its office in Chicago in 2006 and moved those operations to Charlotte.

“The business climate in Charlotte and the cost of living made Charlotte the logical

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choice,” says DeVore. “The challenge is that our customers are all over the country. Charlotte is part of a larger community.”

In October 2006, Premier purchased Cereplex, a Maryland-based company that creates Webbased tools for the detection of health care-associated infections and, last April, it purchased CareScience. Based in Philadelphia, CareScience assists hospitals in translating organizational vision and goals into quality improvement plans that optimize patient outcomes and operational performance, increase staff efficiency and reduce costs.

“These acquisitions will help us acquire and share the knowledge that will help the industry improve safety and the quality of health care in this country,” explains DeVore.

It is projected that Premier will do $31 billion of business this year and will return $660 million in savings to its members. It has an over 98 percent customer retention base and a 6.5 percent pricing advantage compared with the industry norm. So, how does it do it?

As an alliance of health care providers, Premier makes use of group contracting for hospital products and services for its members. Using the buying clout of the entire group of hospitals, Premier staff negotiate contracts. Premier’s field force then works with the hospitals to implement the contracts. This collaborative action reduces the hospitals’ staffing needs, improves productivity, and delivers hundreds of millions of dollars in savings to member hospitals.

Premier also enables hospitals to share insurance claims experience and risk.

Hospitals pool money through Premier to cover the professional liability risks they face. They also share knowledge on ways to improve patient safety and reduce risks. As a result, participants gain control over insurance costs.

The alliance also helps hospitals share clinical knowledge so that hospitals can learn from one another. Premier houses the

greater charlotte biz

nation’s largest detailed clinical and financial database, holding information on more than 130 million patient discharges. Web-based tools allow hospitals to compare their performance in specific areas to peers and best performers, to find opportunities for improvement, and to track the results of their efforts.

“Our job is to make sure our hospitals utilize a knowledge base acquired from real data,” affirms DeVore.

Alliances Pay Off Two recent initiatives demonstrate Premier’s quest for quantifiable knowledge that can help improve health care. The Hospital Quality Incentive Demonstration (HQID) project was launched in October 2003. Initiated by the Center for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) and executed by Premier’s Charlotte office, the project was designed to determine if economic incentives to hospitals are effective in improving the quality of in-patient care.

As part of the project, more than 250 hospitals submit clinical quality data to Premier. CMS then uses the data to identify and reward top performers in five clinical areas—heart attack, heart failure, pneumonia, heart bypass surgery, and hip and knee replacement procedures. These areas involve both high cost and high volume for Medicare, but they are also areas for which an evidence-based measure of ®

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quality already exists.

Nineteen hospitals from North Carolina, including Gaston Memorial, Stanley Regional Medical Center and Cleveland Regional Medical Center, as well as 12 hospitals in South Carolina are participating in HQID. The Carolina-area hospitals received more than $2.7 million of the $17 million in incentive payments Medicare paid out in the first two years of the project.

Over the first two years, the project showed an overall 11.8 percent increase in

quality. In the case of heart attack patients, improvements in mortality rate over the first two years of the project saved 1,284 lives. The HQID project showed such a steady improvement in the quality of health care in the five areas under study that it has been extended for another three years.

“What we have found is that the reliability of care had little to do with the financial incentives Medicare offered and much more to do with getting agreement on what should be done in certain medical

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situations and measuring what was actually done,” says DeVore.

This summer Premier launched “QUEST: High Performing Hospitals” based on many of the same principals used in the HQID project. The goal of QUEST, another three-year project, is to improve

“Our job is to make sure our hospitals utilize a knowledge base acquired from real data.” ~ Susan DeVore Chief Operating Officer patient safety and quality in the nation’s hospitals while safely reducing health care costs. Participating hospitals will report data to Premier on a set of clearly defined performance measures encompassing aspects of quality, efficiency, safety and patient satisfaction. Premier will analyze the data, facilitate sharing of best practices, and provide incentives for top-performing hospitals.

“We’ll learn a lot from this study,” points out DeVore. “By figuring out how hospitals can improve themselves and sharing that knowledge, we’re really going to be able to improve health care across the country. I get excited to think we’re going to make it better.”

In March, Vice President Dick Cheney presented Premier with the 2006 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, the nation’s highest Presidential honor for quality and organizational performance excellence. The award, referred to by experts as the Nobel Prize of business, is given to businesses that are judged to be outstanding in seven areas: leadership; strategic planning; customer and market focus; measurement, analysis and knowledge management; human resource focus; process management; and results. Premier was one of three companies nationwide to receive the award, which was established

by Congress in 1987 to honor the former Secretary of Commerce.

Premier also received recognition from the Charlotte chapter of the Society of Financial Services Professions when it was

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named a recipient of the 2007 Charlotte Ethics in Business Award. This award is presented annually to honor companies that demonstrate a commitment to ethical business practices in everyday operations, management philosophies, responses to challenges, treatment of employees and to involvement in civic and environmental concerns.

A Premier Purpose “We set our goals really high,” says DeVore. “Then, as a business, we are very aggressive in delivering on those goals and returning value to our members and clients.”

DeVore stresses that Premier operates under a set of core values that are shared with the hospitals and health systems that founded the alliance. The first is Integrity, both of the individual and the enterprise.

The second is Innovation, seeking breakthrough opportunities, taking risks, and initiating meaningful change. The third is Focus: focus on people: showing concern and respect for all, building collaborative relationships with the

community, customers, co-workers, and business associates.

Premier holds an annual three day conference for employees across the country in Charlotte each year. Part of their shared experience at the annual meeting is a half day of volunteer work at a Charlotte-area nonprofit organization. Last September, 700 employees from Premier took part in 37 volunteer projects throughout the city organized by Hands On Charlotte. The community service included sorting donations at Crisis Assistance Ministry, Second

Harvest Food Bank and Classroom Central and maintaining nature trails at Little Sugar Creek Greenway, Camp TreeTops and the Carolina Raptor Center.

“Our people love it,” says DeVore, who helped sort donations at the Second Harvest Food Bank. “It’s our opportunity to give something back to the community.

It’s also a way to focus attention on Premier’s core purpose: to improve the health of our communities.” biz Casey Jacobus is a Charlotte-based freelance writer.

Premier, Inc. 2320 Cascade Pointe Blvd., Suite 100 Charlotte, N.C. 28208 Phone: 704-357-0022; 877-777-1552 Principals: Richard A. Norling, President and CEO; Susan D. DeVore, Chief Operating Officer Corporate Headquarters: San Diego, Calif.

Additional Locations: Washington, D.C.; Philadelphia, Pa. Established: 1997; 1996 merger of three predecessor companies—Sun Health, Premier and AMHS Employees: 1,032 total with more than 600 based in Charlotte Awards: 2007 Charlotte Business in Ethics Award; 2006 Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award Business: Largest health care alliance in the United States dedicated to improving patient outcomes while safely reducing the cost of care; serving 1,700 hospitals and more than 46,500 other health care sites. www.premierinc.com

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(l to r) George Bohlé, CPA, M.S.T.; John Blair, CPA; Bryant Whitsitt, CPA, M.B.A.; Steve Johnston, CPA; Partners: Blair, Bohlé & Whitsitt, PLLC

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by janet kropinak

[bizprofile]

Accountants first, Advisors foremost Blair, Bohlé’s Value Enables Growth

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hen measuring the growth and success of a business, there are many variables that need to be taken into account. For example, an outsider might measure a company’s growth by its increase in sales and revenues or the number of clients on its roster. Alternatively, an insider might measure growth by the acquisition of quality team members or broadening the range of services provided.

From either perspective Blair, Bohlé & Whitsitt, PLLC (BBW) would be sized a success. In just seven years, the firm has experienced remarkable growth in terms of revenue, clients, staff and services provided. With a new office building, new clients, a new partner and an alliance with BDO Seidman, these guys are working hard to change the view and expectations of local accounting firms.

Shared Vision In 2000, George Bohlé and Bryant Whitsitt made the decision to leave their recognized firms and join John Blair, who had been performing accounting services in the Charlotte area on his own. Combining their technical skills, expertise and passionate spirits into a new firm, they set out on a mission to provide exemplary accounting, assurance, tax and business advisory services.

Bohlé and Whitsitt both brought with them advanced degrees and extensive income tax compliance and planning experience with “Big Five” firms. In comparison, Blair was familiar with what it took to operate an accounting practice as well as experience with providing assurance services.

Their different backgrounds were complementary; their common ground was their shared vision. “Bryant and George both came highly trained and were crucial to helping us get to where we wanted to be,” says Blair of his co-founders.

Striving to be seen as more than merely a “tax shop,” the partners worked hard to raise awareness of their firm and increase the range of services they could provide beyond tax compliance and planning services.

They set out to provide business value that could help clients identify ways to unlock their potential without draining the bottom line. By taking the time to cultivate relationships with their clients, the role of BBW quickly developed from accountant to advisor.

BBW focused on customer service, and in turn, were rewarded by their satisfied clients and the positive feedback which they were sharing with others about the firm.

“Above all, we were aiming to provide a high level of service and leadership to our clients. We were working hard to build relationships that would become long-term and mutually beneficial,” says Blair. ®

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balance within the firm. Blair works with accounting and assurance services, Bohlé has experience with large multi-jurisdiction filings and larger C-corporation income tax compliance, and Whitsitt is proficient in the preparation and review of tax returns including corporate tax returns and also works with large real estate developers.

“As far as technical competence, everyone that works at BBW has areas they are proficient in, some of these talents overlap with one another and that is the strength of our team,” says Bohlé.

As awareness of BBW grew, their client base began to rapidly expand and it became apparent that they would need to increase their staff if they were going to continue providing a high level of customer service to their growing client base.

(l to r) Steve Johnston, John Blair, Bryant Whitsitt and George Bohlé, Partners

base, which was solid, and its resources, which through its membership in the BDO Seidman Alliance was national in scope,” comments Johnston. “It’s exciting being part of a dynamic, growing firm.”

The newest partner, Steve Johnston, had joined a large regional firm after school and remained with them for 24 years prior to joining BBW. “Steve brings with him a wealth of experience and knowledge in an area that is so specialized that we never would have been able to offer those services,” says Blair. “We are really happy with how he has enhanced our practice.”At BBW, Johnston focuses on assurance services.

Additionally, he is trained to perform audits on governmental services, a highly specialized field, which has brought new dimension and capabilities to the firm and has given them access to a revenue stream that prior to his arrival they could not have touched.

“Steve has been an extremely valuable addition to our firm. He brings with him 24 years of accounting and auditing experience and will be the cornerstone of developing further and taking our firm’s assurance services to the next level,” comments Whitsitt of his new partner. “His specific experience in the area of governmental audits will allow our firm to enter that marketplace. We feel we can offer a unique competitive edge, as many firms of our size do not offer such services.”

It is apparent that Johnston blends well with the group and has made an already strong team even stronger. “We four complement each other well, we have an excellent balance. We have an open forum where we can debate and disagree, but we always know that no matter what happens, it will always be the four of us. That type of security allows each of us to explore our practice areas with confidence,” comments Bohlé.

Outside of its partners, BBW sets the bar high for its other team members as well. “Chemistry is a big word for us, whether it is between the partners, our entire firm or our clients,” says Bohlé.

The firm looks for people who can contribute to the organization and who are able to carry out their tradition of quality customer service and attention to client detail.

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“It’s amazing how much the four partners share the same vision for the future of the firm.” ~ Steve Johnston, Partner BBW was founded during a time when many of the established large local firms were getting acquired by or merging with regional and national firms, causing a void in the Charlotte market of large local firms.

The partners set out to fill this void by providing consultative business and personal tax advice to their clients so they could help them better plan for the future, manage costs, improve efficiency, and achieve greater profitability. By focusing on the big picture, the firm has solidified longterm relationships with many of its clients.

“Each partner brings a different set of skills, talents, and personal desires to the table. Each is open to the ideas, suggestions and visions of the other partners and as a collective team we have been extremely fortunate in the decisions we’ve made and the support of one another in our efforts to grow our practice and, most importantly, the reputation of our firm,” comments Whitsitt.

With each partner focused and trained in a different area, there was immediate

september 2007

Chemistry is Key BBW has seen growth in just about every facet over the past seven years; one of the most notable is the increase in the size of its staff. The firm has grown from three partners and an administrative assistant to a staff of 12 professionals, three administrators, and four partners.

Whitsitt, Bohlé and Blair all agree that they were fortunate when Steve Johnston joined BBW in July 2006 and became its fourth equity partner effective January 1, 2007.

“When I was looking at joining BBW, I considered its reputation, which was excellent, its client

To house its growing staff, BBW moved into their new 5,800-square-foot office building this past January, and although moving at the start of filing season brought with it some challenges, it has helped them position themselves for further growth, both internally and externally.

The Power of Many Another attributable factor in their growth came in 2004, after much thought and consideration, when BBW accepted an invitation to join the BDO Seidman Alliance, a nationwide association of independent local and regional accounting and consulting firms, making them the only Charlotte firm to hold this distinction.

BDO Seidman, LLP is the anchor to the alliance, collectively holding more than 90 years of experience, and serves clients from more than 35 offices and over 250 alliance firms across the United States as well as 107 countries worldwide.

As a member of the alliance, BBW is linked to the resources and technical knowledge of an international firm, but still maintains the personal feel of a local firm. They have been able to remain focused on helping small and independent businesses while at the same time appealing to larger clients due to their additional resources.

“Our alliance with BDO Seidman means there is nothing that we can’t do,” comments Blair. “It really has been a very rewarding arrangement and has opened a lot of doors for us. For a local firm like us, it is pretty powerful to be part of this alliance. We are unlike other CPA groups that aren’t anchored by an international firm like BDO. That is the unique aspect of our alliance.”

BBW’s affiliation with the alliance has enabled them to broaden their capabilities and gain greater technical knowledge in specialty areas. They are able to utilize professionals with experience in a wide range of industries and have access to the most up-to-date technical information and training programs. Additionally, they are

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able to provide their clients contacts throughout the United States.

The BDO Seidman Alliance has really helped the firm stand out above other firms their size. “The alliance is the reason we are able to offer, with confidence, our services to companies that may feel they need a national accounting firm,” comments Whitsitt.

Since joining the alliance, BBW has used BDO to supplement the services it was already offering, which in turn has brought greater flexibility, efficiency and cost effectiveness to both the firm and its clients.

Organic Growth By staying focused on helping their clients grow, BBW has experienced their fair share of growth. “If we can help our clients grow, we grow. It’s a win-win situation,” says Blair.

Because of the long-term relationships that BBW tries to maintain with its clients, its revenue growth over the past seven years is due in large part to their existing client base and the additional services they need. They have helped their clients grow and in turn, they are helping BBW grow.

“A significant portion of our growth is attributable to our clients’ growth,” comments Blair.

Bohlé insists that the firm’s growth isn’t because of any magic formula, merely the old familiar saying: hard work, the right people, a little luck and good decisionmaking. Though he admits, “Fortunately, for the most part, we’ve had our share and more of all of these. Our firm has rapidly grown in clients and people and that is a great compliment.”

And although the growth happened quicker than some might have expected, Blair says BBW “has grown organically.”

BBW still hopes to add to their team, aiming for a professional staff of 40 to 60.

Another goal for the coming years is to increase their involvement within the community.

The firm has already started giving

“Our alliance with BDO Seidman means there is nothing that we can’t do It really has been a very rewarding arrangement and has opened a lot of doors for us.” ~ John Blair, Partner back to the profession by setting up an intern program at UNCC and now they are looking forward to expanding to oncampus talks and office visits. Taking their responsibility seriously, the partners welcome the opportunity to give back.

But with responsibility also comes the chance for them to revel in their success.

Now that the firm has taken on momentum all its own, “It’s time to enjoy the ride and watch with pride at its growth,” comments Bohlé. biz Janet Kropinak is a Charlotte-based freelance writer.

Blair, Bohlé & Whitsitt, PLLC 10815 Sikes Place, Suite 100 Charlotte, N.C. 28277 Phone: 704-841-9800 Principals: John D. Blair Sr., CPA, Partner; George W. Bohlé Jr., CPA, M.S.T., Partner; Bryant A. Whitsitt, CPA, M.B.A., Partner; and Steven J. Johnston, CPA, Partner Established: 2000 Employees: 19 Mission: To provide superior accounting, assurance, tax and business advisory services which add value for our clients, enabling our clients to become more competitive, allowing us to grow personally and professionally, resulting in long-term mutually beneficial relationships.

Business: Innovative service provider of accounting, assurance and tax services, focusing on strategic planning and tax minimization strategies. www.bbwpllc.com

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Jeffrey S. Kane Senior Vice President and Charlotte Branch Manager Federal Reserve Bank Charlotte Branch

e talks regularly with Ken Lewis and Ken Thompson and knows operational details about Bank of America and Wachovia—so Jeff Kane has to be very careful in his job.

As senior vice president in charge of the Charlotte branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, Kane interacts with a lot of people, both professionally and socially. If he let inside information slip out about these behemoth banks based in Charlotte, or about any other bank, the financial consequences might be huge.

“I have to be discreet,” Kane says simply.

Does he know about bank dirty laundry? For the Carolinas, he does. “In terms of banks that are in trouble,” he says, “we know it. At the Fed, we lend to banks.”

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by ellison clary

[bizprofile]

Charlotte Fed Taps Region’s Economic Pulse

photo: Wayne Morris

Banking on America Congress created the Federal Reserve System in 1913 to serve as the nation’s central bank. It operates in 12 districts across the country. Charlotte, along with Baltimore, is home to branch operations of Richmond, headquarters of the Fifth District which supervises banking in North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia and Maryland.

“We are a very hard organization to understand,” Kane admits, as he proceeds to explain the three overall responsibilities of the Fed: “Probably the first thing that jumps into your mind would

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be our role in monetary policy. When the Fed chairman speaks and the stock market moves, people tend to paint us in that light. That’s because the Fed, with the interest it charges banks to borrow from it, sets interest rates that banks assess on loans to their customers.

“Another Fed role is as the fiscal agent for the U.S. Treasury.

We don’t print money, but we are responsible for the circulation and recirculation of money,” Kane says. “Banks depend on the Fed to provide cash, clear checks and facilitate various payment vehicles,” he adds. “The basement vault at the four-level Fed building on East Trade Street supports banks throughout the Carolinas and might contain $10 billion to $14 billion at any time.

“Further, the Fed serves as the umbrella regulator of bank holding companies. Charlotte’s Fed building contains teams that deal with Bank of America and Wachovia, whose towers loom on the skyline a few blocks away.

“Fed employees based in Charlotte also check up on other Carolinas banks. They look for overall compliance with monetary rules, laws and procedures and they perform credit evaluations. That’s how the Fed knows if a bank is healthy or in financial tight spot,” finishes Kane.

About 420 people work at the Charlotte Fed and about half report to Kane; Kane says that’s because the Fed has switched ®

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Congress created the Federal Reserve System in 1913 to serve as the nation’s central bank. It operates in 12 districts across the country. Charlotte, along with Baltimore, is home to branch operations of Richmond, headquarters of the Fifth District which supervises banking in North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia and Maryland. from operating strictly by geography to a system more aligned by function. Kane is in charge of the cash operations in Charlotte as well as in Baltimore and Richmond.

“The staff in Baltimore and the staff in Richmond that do all the cash processing, the lending, the reserve account functions; they report through their officer chains and it ends up here,” Kane says, relaxed on a sofa in his Charlotte office.

He also oversees the Reserve Accounts/Loans division for the Fifth District, which brings him in contact with Lewis, Thompson and many other bank chief executives and their top lieutenants.

Depositing Experience Kane has long been involved with money policies. Born in rural Virginia and raised in the Tidewater area, he earned a B.A. degree in mathematics at the University of Virginia in 1975 and is a graduate of The Stonier Graduate School of Banking at Rutgers University and the Virginia Bankers School at the University of Virginia.

Fresh out of school in 1975, he joined Bank of Virginia near his home in the Hampton Roads area of coastal Virginia.

Kane made small business loans and was the primary student loan officer for the bank that eventually became part of Wachovia.

After a couple of years, Kane was getting restless. Serendipitously, longtime friend Gene Johnson approached him about joining the Federal Reserve. “There weren’t

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many African Americans in the Federal Reserve Bank at the time,” Kane remembers, “and Gene would have been one of the few in a supervisory capacity.”

But the Fed was changing its hiring habits in more ways than one. Rather than recruiting right off college campuses, it was looking for people with banking experience for its supervisory functions. That’s where Kane fit in.

“When you start traveling around to banking organizations doing these exams and reviews, it can become painfully obvious that you’ve got somebody that just graduated college rather than somebody that’s actually been on a lending desk,” Kane explains.

Kane spent his first 20 years with the Fed based in Richmond but traveling the five-state Fifth District. He remembers the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s and how he and others were instrumental in bailing out the S&L private insurance fund in Maryland.

He spent three months in Charlotte during 1991, when then-NCNB sought Fed approval to buy C&S-Sovran, a deal which ultimately produced NationsBank, predecessor of Bank of America. The Fed wanted a full-blown credit review at NCNB before it flashed thumbs up and Kane’s team combed the books.

Branching Out to Charlotte The Richmond Fed promoted Kane to senior vice president of its Banking Supervision and Regulation Department in 1999. Soon the Fed shuttled more resources to Charlotte and, in 2003, Kane moved to the Queen City.

Right away, he started interacting with chief executives of banks across the Carolinas. Wachovia’s Thompson serves on the Fed’s federal advisory group and Bank of America’s Lewis recently attended a dinner for the Richmond Fed’s board while it was visiting Charlotte.

“There’s a tremendous amount of information that flows back and forth between the banks and the Fed,” Kane says.

“Think about now with Bank of America’s application to buy LaSalle Bank of Chicago,” he adds. “I run into Joe Price (Bank of America’s chief financial officer) all the time.”

Outside activities are the hardest part of his job, Kane says, as well as what he enjoys most. He came to Charlotte with specific instructions to focus on connecting with people. Now he voices pride in having forged closer links with communities throughout the Carolinas.

“We had trouble getting local directors,” Kane says with a shake of his head. “We didn’t know people and people didn’t know us.”

By getting involved in civic organizations, Kane has gradually raised the Charlotte branch profile. He is a frequent speaker across the Carolinas as well as for area groups and he’s joined boards of organizations such as Junior Achievement of Central Carolinas and the Belk College of Business advisory council at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

In the latter function, he forged a friendship with Claude Lilly, who recently resigned as the UNC Charlotte business school dean to become dean of the College of Business and Behavioral

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Sciences at Clemson University. Kane, who successfully pushed for Lilly to join the Fed’s Charlotte directors in May, says Lilly’s new position makes him even more valuable. “He’ll be engaged with the business community in the GreenvilleSpartanburg area just like he was here,” Kane says.

Lilly agrees, adding he can provide a

South Carolina economic perspective from an academic point of view. He welcomes the chance to repay Kane for his contributions to UNC Charlotte’s business school, he says.

“People like Jeff,” Lilly continues, “and because of that and his business background, he uncovers economic information that someone else might not find. He

also heads the diversity initiative for the Richmond Fed,” Lilly says. “I like to see Charlotte with a leader in that effort.”

Gaining Insights Kane values anecdotal economic data from Carolinas directors and passes it on to Richmond. Questions included at a recent Fed-sponsored Community ®

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Bankers CEO Forum in Raleigh reflect the type of information Kane gleans.

Sample queries: Based on interactions with your customers and others, what is your assessment of prospects for economic growth in your area? What are the biggest risks facing your bank? What supervision and regulation issues do you believe the Federal Reserve should be aware of?

“In terms of leading indicators, the information we get from our directors is never lagging,” he explains. “It’s always in

advance of things that are happening.

They’re bringing insights.”

Although he doesn’t have a big budget for civic contributions, Kane uses the Charlotte Fed to help non-profits through in-kind donations. For the United Way of Central Carolinas, for instance, the Fed’s print shop produces many of the organization’s materials.

Another reason Kane values discretion is that his wife of 12 years, Pat Nowak, is a compliance risk executive for RBCCentura in North Carolina. Until recently,

she served in a similar capacity with Wachovia in Charlotte.

Kane chuckles about a luncheon at the Charlotte Fed when someone asked him

“I think it’s important we’re here. You’ve got the two big banks here—you throw in BB&T and the vibrancy of North and South Carolina in community banking—and if you are engaged and are a central bank, you’ve got to be here.” ~ Jeffrey Kane Senior Vice President and Charlotte Branch Manager

how his wife was doing at Wachovia.

Chairman Thompson, sitting within earshot, was surprised. “Your wife works at Wachovia?” he asked.

Facing his 54th birthday this month, Kane professes his hope to remain at the Charlotte Fed for the rest of his career.

This office will thrive, he believes. For employment at the Charlotte Fed, Kane thinks 300 is the bottom and somewhere in the 400s is the top.

Although a recently announced consolidation of check clearing functions from Charlotte to Atlanta will cut Fed employment here, Kane sees that as merely a reflection of the waning importance of checks in the American payment system.

“I think it’s important we’re here,” he says. “You’ve got the two big banks here— you throw in BB&T and the vibrancy of North and South Carolina in community banking—and if you are engaged and are a central bank, you’ve got to be here.”

Kane recalls how Hugh McColl Jr., former chairman and chief executive of Bank of America, was a strong advocate

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of a significant Fed presence in Charlotte.

“He was thinking about the ability to influence policy and he wanted Fed folks here that he could interact with in forming policy,” Kane explains.

Ben Bernanke, the current Federal Reserve chairman, is from Dillon, S.C., and his parents live in Charlotte. That, too, is a benefit, if only in that Charlotte might enjoy a greater ability to entice him to visit. Bernanke will be here in late November to accept the Charlotte Chamber’s Citizen of the Carolinas award.

Asked about the economic health of the greater Charlotte region and Carolinas, Kane discounts recent negative media stories as he voices confidence in the area’s underlying strength. Credit remains available, the local real estate market is fairly solid, inflation is largely in check, and job creation continues, he points out.

“We were at a point where we had to slow down,” Kane says simply. “The secret with the Fed is to make sure you slow without going into recession.” biz Ellison Clary is a Charlotte-based freelance writer.

Federal Reserve Bank Charlotte Branch 530 East Trade Street P.O. Box 30248 Charlotte, N.C. 28230 Phone: 704-358-2100; 800-7299800 Member: In 1927, Charlotte became a branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond, headquarters of the Fifth District supervising banking in North Carolina, South Carolina, Virginia, West Virginia, and Maryland Principals: Ben Bernanke, Chairman, Board of Governors; Jeffrey S. Kane, Senior Vice President and Charlotte Branch Manager Employees: 421 full-time Building: 4 levels, 260,000 square feet, completed in 1989 Business: Part of the Federal Reserve System, the nation’s central bank; created by an act of Congress in 1913; headquartered in Washington, D.C.; operates through 12 district offices throughout the country. www.federalreserve.gov www.richmondfed.org

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[bizprofile]

by jill purdy

IT Security – It’s in Calyptix Provides Hearty Protection for Small to Midsize Businesses

T

echnology has transformed the way we do business today. With on-demand technology, companies can enjoy huge opportunities for improving productivity and reap the benefits of data sharing with customers, suppliers and business partners. However, this technology is increasingly subject to associated security risks.

Safeguarding business information assets is a key challenge. Data such as strategic plans, customer information and R&D results are both crucial to operational success and lucrative targets for attackers.

Even generic security threats such as worms and viruses can interrupt business continuity and significantly lower profitability.

According to IDC, a global market intelligence firm, “Information protection and control will be a major area of investment over the next five years. Information has become the world’s new currency.

The growing number of high-profile incidents in which customer records, confidential information, and intellectual property were leaked (or lost/stolen) has created an explosive demand for solutions that protect against the deliberate or inadvertent release of sensitive information.”

From a pure dollars and cents perspective, the average financial loss resulting from IT security inadequacies is $380,000 per retail business. That amount is not trivial to any business. Nor is the loss of customer confidence.

But how do you develop security solutions for the Internet that deal with threats deployed so rapidly that they have worldwide impact in mere seconds? That’s what the founders of Calyptix Security Corporation were thinking about as they came to Charlotte.

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the Box

Study Abroad In 2000, Lawrence Teo had been studying computer science and security under Dr. Yuliang Zheng in the Honors Program at Australia’s Monash University (the Australian “Ivy League”), when Zheng, a noted cryptography expert, was recruited to join the faculty of UNC Charlotte and to support Wachovia in several cryptography initiatives.

When Zheng accepted the offer to come to Charlotte, he invited Teo to complete his studies at UNC Charlotte.

“The invitation to study in Charlotte coincided with a rare visit that I was able to have with my parents in Malaysia. They were with me as I received Dr. Zheng’s phone call,” Teo recalls. “We were all excited, but my parents were a bit apprehensive having never met Dr. Zheng. That meeting didn’t take place until 2006 when I completed my Ph.D. and my parents came to Charlotte from Malaysia for the graduation ceremony.”

As Teo’s dissertation developed, new technology emerged. With the input and guidance from Zheng and assistance from Mark Wdowik, then head of UNC Charlotte’s Department of Technology Transfer, Teo gained confidence that his emerging Internet Defense Force had potential, and combined efforts with Zheng to form Calyptix Security Corporation.

The name Calyptix was taken from Eucalyptus Sideroxylon, the scientific name for the red ironbark, among the toughest of the hard

greater charlotte biz

wood trees. Indigenous to Australia, the tree is known for its ability to germinate by fire. At once alluding to the sturdiness of the protective software and its ability to defend relative to the swiftness and destructiveness of Internet security risks, the name seems doubly appropriate.

A Secure Birth As a foundling company, Calyptix entered the UNC Charlotte Office of Technology Transfer’s 2003 Five Ventures Business Plan Competition—and won. Soon after the competition, Zheng and Teo, with contributions from Dr. Gail-Joon Ahn, published research on Internet-scale intrusion detection and signature-less intrusion prevention at reputable IEEE and ACM computer science conferences. Zheng was elected to the Steering Committee for the International Workshop on Information Assurance and chaired ®

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“After the business plan competition and the publishing of our research, things began to happen quickly. In less than a year, the concept went from dissertation to technology.” ~ Yuliang Zheng, Ph.D. Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder its annual 2004 workshop and was also appointed as founding director of UNC Charlotte’s Information Security and Assurance Center.

More recently, Zheng was appointed as the Steering Committee chair for the International Workshop on Practice and Theory in Public Key Cryptography (PKC).

The PKC workshop is the first and longestrunning workshop on public key cryptography, which is the cornerstone technology that enables all electronic commerce on the Internet today.

Zheng comments, “After the business plan competition and the publishing of our research, things began to happen quickly. In less than a year, the concept went from dissertation to technology. We were energized by the effectiveness of our ‘dynamic inspection engine’ and the attention our research attracted.”

Calyptix next faced the challenge of commercialization. Zheng and Teo had validated their new technology, but had not turned it into a product that would be marketable to businesses.

That’s when Charlotte attorney Ben Yarbrough, longtime encourager of the technology development community, gave in to his entrepreneurial fever and accepted Calyptix’s request to lead the company. As Calyptix’s chief executive officer, Yarbrough’s mission has been, and continues to be, deploying the

(l to r) Lawrence Teo, Ph.D., Vice President of Development and Co-founder; Benjamin A. Yarbrough, Chief Executive Officer Calyptix Security Corporation

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technology as a product, identifying Calyptix’s differentiation in its marketplace, securing seed funding, and delivering the all-in-one solution to customers.

In addition to a chief executive officer, Calyptix has added IT security expertise from such noted institutions as MIT, and sales, marketing and administrative support to create the team that is now executing a “go-tomarket” strategy.

Upon solidifying their idea at the Office of Technology Transfer at UNC Charlotte, Yarbrough prompted the company’s relocation to the Ben Craig Center. After reviewing a variety of different alternatives, Yarbrough says, “More important than the reasonable terms, loaner furniture, and great facilities were the staff and programs at the Ben Craig Center—which have been tremendous.”

A Gap in the Marketplace The Calyptix principals surveyed the IT security marketplace to identify their niche— a gap in existing solutions that they could fill. Individual computer users have low level protection for their machines and huge corporations have extensive solutions that are integrated into massive security strategies, but small to midsize businesses (SMBs) have little choice in products that protect their networks and their data.

According to the U.S. Small Business Administration, SMBs account for almost 99 percent of the businesses in the U.S. and number approximately 20 million.

Unfortunately, SMBs suffer the lack of choice in the face of more than 140,000 network incidents per year. That count, taken in 2003, has increased by more than 100 percent each year since and will total more than 4.5 million network incidents per year by the end of 2007. The incidents and attacks themselves have changed over that fouryear time span.

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Historically, the goal of attacks was to be detected. Their efforts were devious but not necessarily covert. Today, the goal is financial gain. Attacks unobtrusively infect computers and turn them into “bots” to build a “botnet.” This botnet can enable cyber-terrorism attacks, fraudulent offers and transactions, and network degrading spam.

To add insult to injury, SMBs in health care, financial services, education or those who are credit card-accepting merchants face new regulatory compliance measures that require information flow to be accurately and securely tracked.

SMBs are truly up against the wall. They know that IT security is important. The legal and regulatory impact of ignoring it can have a crippling impact on a business. The loss of data and costs associated with its remediation wreak havoc on business value and financial bottom lines. The health of data and data networks is no less important to the small and midsize business than it is to enterprise level corporations.

SMBs can install a firewall or they can purchase managed services in their attempts to ward off the dangers of network intrusions.

The first is easy on the budget but totally inadequate. The second may provide peace of mind and adequate protection but is costly.

Most choose the first: Install firewalls and cross their fingers. Without a solution that fills the gap, SMBs can do little but dodge risk by employing security through obscurity.

Securing the Market The Calyptix products enable SMBs to deploy IT security that is comparable to solutions that large organizations spend more than $20,000 to implement—for about 10 percent of the cost. Their solution, built on one hardware platform, requires no other equipment, staff, maintenance or integration and provides security functions that greatly reduce the occurrence and impact of incidents.

A single IT security device integrates several security functions into one package.

Within the IT security space, this is known as a UTM or a Unified Threat Management device. Implementing other types of solutions to deploy like functions involves as many as four separate devices or platforms.

The single, unified device is predicted to be the way that more IT security solutions will

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be offered in the coming years. According to IDC, “Integrated secure content and threat management solutions will be more effective in combating the complex new blended and hybrid threats than traditional deployment of independent security technologies.”

Calyptix’s product, AccessEnforcer, is a small appliance—more like a DVD player than a microwave—and is perhaps more easily managed than a DVD player. Its operation can be monitored with a user-friendly dashboard that clearly identifies and tracks potential threats and the measures it takes in providing protection.

“This is a problem-solver for the SMB because it supports all of their basic security needs—protection, management, maintenance and compliance—in a single device that is simple to use. This solution provides an incredible amount of security ‘bang’ for their buck,” Yarbrough confirms.

Creating Noise of Its Own Yarbrough readily admits that the IT security space is fiercely competitive with several mega providers dominating the market with products that, at first glance, look similar to what Calyptix offers. “Big marketing budgets and well-known clients sometimes obscure new ideas brought to the marketplace,” Yarbrough points out.

The Calyptix team continues to analyze other products and the marketplace, prove and improve their technology and inform the industry of their discoveries. Their tenacity and their fresh approach to intrusion prevention is creating noise of its own. In 2006 and early 2007, Calyptix detected several significant malicious elements ahead of multiple leading anti-virus makers including the Storm Trojan, the Valentine’s Bug, and the Stration and NuWar worms.

Recently, industry publications noted Calyptix’s research in identifying a CSRF (cross-site request forgery) flaw in numerous existing security appliances on which large and small businesses depend for intrusion prevention. Because of Calyptix’s research, these appliances are being updated to fix the flaw.

Calyptix is building relationships with partners who can contribute value to its foundational offerings or sell its products as part of a larger strategic solution. Input from a broad array of customers such as the

Charlotte Chamber of Commerce, Commercial Credit Group, Ettain Group, JPS Industries and the Ben Craig Center is driving future development of their products to address emerging issues with fresh solutions.

While IT security and intrusion protection may be less glamorous than slick iPhones, it has tremendous impact on businesses and individuals. The Internet’s proliferation into our critical commerce and communications infrastructure required only ten years when other elements of comparable significance required 50 years. Nefarious threats are escalating at a frightening pace.

Combating illusive, rampant and increasingly malicious attacks on our vital worldwide infrastructure is quite a challenge. With their world class expertise and knowledge, Zheng, Teo and Yarbrough continue to lead Calyptix to research, test and examine technology so we can feel confident that “the world’s new currency” remains protected. biz Jill Purdy is a Charlotte-based freelance writer.

Calyptix Security Corporation 8701 Mallard Creek Rd. Charlotte, N.C. 28262 Phone: 704-971-8989; 800-650-8930 Principals: Benjamin A.Yarbrough, Chief Executive Officer;Yuliang Zheng, Ph.D., Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder; Lawrence Teo, Ph.D.,Vice President of Development and Co-founder Employees: 6 In Business: 5 years Awards: Winner of UNC Charlotte’s Five Ventures business plan competition Customers: Charlotte Chamber of Commerce, Commercial Credit Group Inc., Ettain Group, Inc., JPS Industries, The Ben Craig Center Patents: Multiple patents pending; proprietary products include AccessEnforcer and DyVax Business: Provides all-in-one network security solutions designed for small and medium businesses to stop spam, viruses, spyware, hackers and other cyber threats; advanced security technology solutions for computer networks, single and multiple database systems, and other technology applications. www.calyptix.com

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by ellison clary

[bizprofile]

Chris-Craft and Indian Motorcycle Brands Resurrected you’ve assigned Chris-Craft boats and Indian motorcycles to the business boneyard, this may startle you: both are alive and well in Kings Mountain.

These iconic brands are the latest resurrection projects of Englishman Stephen Julius and American Stephen Heese, friends since they met at Harvard Business School in the late 1980s.

Through Stellican Limited, a London-based private equity firm, Julius and Heese have bought both Chris-Craft and Indian Motorcycle; lock, stock and barrel—as well as brand. In doing so, they are adding new chapters to significant success stories.

Choosing the Charlotte Region Chris-Craft was founded in the 1870s in the Detroit area and over the course of the following century became famous for its mahogany hulled powerboats. Indian Motorcycles was established in the early 1900s in Springfield, Mass., and at one time sold nearly as many motorcycles as its major rival, Harley-Davidson. By the early 2000s, both companies had fallen on hard times succumbing to bankruptcy, which is where Julius and Heese as partners in Stellican Limited got involved.

“We have a passion for the brands,” says Julius, chairman and founding partner of Stellican, which has specialized since 1991 in buying and rehabilitating distressed companies, almost all with heritage brands, mainly in the recreational products area.

Julius, who lives in London and commutes to the United States, is also chairman of Chris-Craft and Indian Motorcycle. Heese, who splits his time between Florida and North Carolina, is president of both.

“We were surprised that great brands could be mismanaged this way,” Julius says of the boat and motorcycle firms. “Reviving

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such firms isn’t complicated,” he adds, “It’s just understanding the heritage of the brand and determining what kind of product needs to be made to reflect the attributes.”

Today, each brand’s future seems bright, from a decidedly Tar Heel perspective.

Based in Sarasota, Fla., Chris-Craft is manufacturing mostly new model boats in its Kings Mountain, N.C., headquarters facility. Nearby, Indian Motorcycle continues reengineering engines and other components, readying for the anticipated start of production in 2008.

Julius and Heese scouted more than 300 sites in seven states for existing buildings and a work force suitable for building quality boats.

“Chris-Craft is a high-end boat and it requires craft-oriented workers,” says Robin Spinks of Wrightsville Beach, N.C., president of Greenfield Development Company, which helps find operating sites. “Julius and Heese were impressed with the skilled work force in the greater Charlotte region,” Spinks adds, “a great percentage of which is made up of former

furniture and textile employees.”

For Indian Motorcycle, Julius and Heese cast a national net, but eventually were lured by the auto industry resources in the greater Charlotte area. No other region could boast the car design presence of NASCAR combined with the furniture and textile craft worker availability, she says.

Commuting from London and Tampa, respectively, Julius and Heese also were attracted by the convenience of CharlotteDouglas International Airport.

Julius and Heese say they are betting both Chris-Craft and Indian Motorcycle will succeed on a grand scale and that they are committed to them for the foreseeable future.

“In the past, I bought companies, revived them and sold them,” says Julius, whose previous successes have included the resurrection and eventual sale of the Italian firm that makes Riva motor yachts and Sarema S.p.A., Italy’s largest cash register company. Julius, whose mother is Italian, also bought from bankruptcy Vicenza Calcio S.p.A., a soccer club in the Italian Premier League. ®

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“We were on a trail to find a community where we wanted to live, with people we wanted to be around.” ~ Stephen Heese, President and CEO

Getting on Board Julius and Heese have learned two stabilizing concepts.

“One is that you can’t have more than a couple of businesses at any one time because they require so much heart, passion, soul and time,” Julius says. “And buying brands like this is very difficult.

When you have the privilege of buying them, you probably want to hang on to them. They’re like gold mines. The deeper you dig, the more opportunity you find.”

The collaboration of Julius and Heese took a while to develop. At Harvard, they were drawn to each other by similar backgrounds. Both had been in Catholic boarding schools in England, Heese by way of Wisconsin and Florida.

After their 1988 Harvard graduation, they stayed in touch. “We became advisors to each other,” says Heese, who worked for an American construction products company for more than a decade in Far East stops such as Australia, Singapore and Hong Kong. His wife Amanda is Australian and they have and 11-year-old daughter and 8-year-old boy-girl twins.

Heese, who was living in England at the time and still spending 30 weeks a year away from home, felt his globe-trotting was stealing him too often from his family. So, in 2000, he resigned from the

company and moved his family back to Tampa.

Meanwhile, Julius had just let go of the Riva boat company from the Stellican portfolio when he read in The Wall Street Journal that Outboard Marine Corporation, parent of Chris-Craft, was in bankruptcy and up for auction. He called his friend Heese, who readily agreed to drive an hour from his Tampa home to inspect the Sarasota Chris-Craft plant.

Soon after in December 2000, Heese and Julius bought Chris-Craft for $5 million, but that didn’t include the ChrisCraft trademark which, through a series of twisting transactions, had ended up with a string of television stations that were being sold to News Corporation, parent of Fox Broadcasting Company. The pair bought the trademark for another $5 million.

Thus they came to own the company and the brand that had propelled former owner Harsen Smith to the cover of Time magazine as its 1959 Man of the Year, an accolade presented, the magazine said, for bringing boating to the American people.

Riding High When the dust all settled, Julius and Heese had inherited about 100 boats in the factory’s backyard and more than a few disgruntled employees. Yet, as the

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boating industry has shrunk in each of the last three years—victimized by rising interest rates, skyrocketing gasoline prices and ever more expensive insurance— Chris-Craft has thrived.

“We believe we’re beating the trend because we target a premium customer,” Heese says. “The buyer of our boat would be less affected by $3-a-gallon gas.”

The company makes outboards, sterndrives and inboards, from 20 feet to 40 feet long. Prices range from $35,000 to $650,000. “Five to six percent of our production goes into tenders for mega yachts,” Heese adds.

The firm expects to do $60 million in sales this year. It hit $54 million for 2006 and maxed out the Sarasota plant that employs 360.

That necessitated the purchase of the Kings Mountain facility, 220,000 square feet on 20 acres. Julian and Heese paid $5 million for the structure that was started for a fiber optic firm, then passed on to truck maker Freightliner, which completed it but never occupied it.

Chris-Craft moved in last year. The Kings Mountain work force will swell to 125 by year’s end. Chris-Craft makes about 800 boats a year and the run rate in Kings Mountain, which started at zero in March, will balloon to 300 a year by January 2008.

The company markets 13 models now and plans to introduce three new ones each year for the foreseeable future.

Chris-Craft projects it will double in size in the next five years.

“That’s on the back of additional models we’ll develop, as well as geographic expansion of our dealer network,” Heese says. Currently, the company has 75 dealers, a quarter of them overseas.

“We just started production of our new 26-foot center console fishing boat, a

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“It’s just understanding the heritage of the brand and determining what kind of product needs to be made to reflect the attributes.” ~ Stephen Julius, Chairman

brand new model,” Heese adds. “The bulk of the new models will come here in Kings Mountain, just because of the beautiful physical capabilities and the availability of labor.”

Indeed, Stuart Gilbert, president of the Cleveland County Chamber of Commerce, remembers well the 3,200 resumes of workers “who had great skills” that the Chamber hand delivered to Julius and Heese to help win them over.

Wooing Chris-Craft and Indian Motorcycle was a team effort; Gilbert

willing to learn new things and they’re not be set in their ways. They’re everything we expected.”

is quick to point out, crediting local, area and state officials from Cleveland Community College, the Charlotte Regional Partnership, and the N.C. Department of Commerce.

“If they asked us a question at 5:00 p.m., we had an answer by 10:00 a.m. the next day,” Gilbert says.

Before long, Heese says, North Carolina felt like home for the world-savvy pair. “We were on a trail to find a community where we wanted to live, with people we wanted to be around.”

Heese and his associates brought 10 or so experienced boat builders from Sarasota as trainers, and they found apt students. “The textile and furniture workers are terrific,” Heese confirms. “They’re

Kings Mountain’s Battleground Road within a few miles of the Chris-Craft facility.

Currently, about 20 people, mainly engineers, are toiling toward producing

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Gearing Up for 2008 The pair will certainly be needing more skilled workers soon to build the 2008 model Indian Chief motorcycle. Julian and Heese bought Indian Motorcycle out of bankruptcy in 2003 for a price they don’t disclose. They paid $1 million for the 50,000square-foot manufacturing building on 11 acres off

that first bike that will sport a VTwin engine, weigh about 800 pounds, and sell in the $20,000 range. It will compete against Harley-Davidson, BMW and custom models from names such as

American Iron Horse and Big Dog. “One of the reasons the prior owners went bankrupt was that the bike wouldn’t work properly,” Heese explains. “They had problems with the engines mainly. We’re coming out with a brand new engine.”

He’s excited about rebuilding the brand that he says claimed 45 percent of the American motorcycle market in the 1940s. “We get hundreds of e-mails a week from Indian fans cheering us on, asking questions, making comments and wondering when the next bike’s coming,” he says.

Like Chris-Craft, the Indian brand creates immensely positive feelings, Heese adds. “When you unite great products with a brand like that, it makes it much easier to win sales and grow the company,” he says.Still, there’s a reason reviving brands is an uncluttered field. “Very few people do what we do,” Julius explains, “because what we do is not something that private equity firms or big public companies can do.”

Reviving a brand takes a long time and requires hands-on involvement. “For Indian, we’ll probably see five years of investments before we even start to make any profit,” Julius says.

“To really develop the company, it will take

15 years.”

Do other brands tempt Julius? He mentions MG, which he tried to buy two years ago, and Jaguar, which Ford Motor Company probably will sell to Chinese interests.

“There are always brands that are out ®

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there in our dreams,” Julius smiles. “I’ve got to say, though, we’ve already got two of the most lovely brands. They just ooze heritage and history.” biz

SUCCESS NEEDS A PARTNER

Ellison Clary is a Charlotte-based freelance writer.

“My bank reflects my firm’s model: easy access to decision makers and incredible personal service.”

Chris-Craft Corporation 140 Riverside Court Kings Mountain, N.C. 28086 Phone: 704-739-2279

– I’m Miller Nicholson, president of McClure, Nicholson, Montgomery Architects, PA, and my banker is Doug Phillips.

[Headquarters: Sarasota, Fla.]

Indian Motorcycle Company 116 Battleground Road Kings Mountain, N.C. 28086 Phone: 704-937-7333 Principals: Stephen M. Julius, Chairman of Chris-Craft Corporation and Chairman of Indian Motorcycle Company, Founder and Managing Director of Stellican Limited; Stephen F. Heese, President and CEO of Chris-Craft Corporation and Indian Motorcycle Company, Partner in Stellican Limited

Member FDIC

Parent Company: Stellican Limited, a private equity firm that specializes in acquiring and reviving distressed companies, almost all with heritage brands, mainly in the recreational products area

UNLEASHING YOUR MONEY’S HIDDEN POTENTIAL

Uptown Charlotte 704.945.6565 Cornelius/Lake Norman 704.987.9990 Matthews 704.814.1200 SouthPark 704.442.5900

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Employees: Chris-Craft, 400; Indian Motorcycle, 20 Revenues: Chris-Craft: $54 million (2006); $60 million (projected 2007); Indian Motorcycle: (anticipated start of production 2008)

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Founded: Chris-Craft was founded in the 1870s by Christopher Columbus Smith in the Detroit area and became famous for its mahogany hulled powerboats (Cadet and Commander, among others) sold to famous customers and used in numerous films and television shows.The Indian Motocycle Manufacturing Company was established as a motorcycle manufacturer in Springfield, Mass., in 1901 and is America’s oldest motorcycle brand and was once the largest manufacturer of motorcycles in the world.The most popular models were the Scout, made prior to WWII, and the Chief, which had its heyday from 1922-53.

Business: Chris-Craft currently offers eight models ranging from 22’ to 43’ with MSRPs starting at around $60,000.The management plans to continue to expand the model range in the future. Indian Motorcycle has goals of producing a new Chief using a modern fuelinjected 100ci V-Twin engine which they are building in-house which will have the classic valanced fenders, along with several variations of the Chief including a more modern style without the valanced fenders. New Indian also plans on offering an accessory line for both the New Indian and the Gilroy Indian motorcycles built from 1999 to 2003. www.chriscraft.com www.indianmotorcycle.com

Deb@moneycounts.biz w w w. g r e a t e r c h a r l o t t e b i z . c o m

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[ontop]

ARE YOUR SALARIES COMPETITIVE? The 2007 Wage and Salary Survey is Now Available!

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he Employers Association is the best resource for local compensation data. Capturing information from over 270 companies covering 330 benchmark positions, the 2007 Wage and Salary Survey provides comprehensive local data by industry, county and company size. New association members receive a complimentary Wage and Salary Survey or it is available for purchase.

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september 2007

Advertising Industrial Corporate Architectural Interiors & Exteriors

Awards & Achievements ForbesTraveler.com has ranked Charlotte 26th among the 30 most visited cities in the U.S. with a combination of 16.6 million annual visitors and 6.9 million hotel rooms sold annually.

Advertising & Media Wray Ward Laseter has been honored with two Gold Awards in the Graphis 2007 Poster Annual.

Apple Rock Advertising & Promotions Inc. video has been honored with a silver Telly award.

The Lyerly Agency has promoted Susie Penn to Susie Penn vice president, creative director.

Walker Marketing has acquiried Ken Vuncannon as director Ken Vuncannon Anne Clark of interactive services and Anne Clark as media director.

Multimedia marketing firm LA Management Company has hired Deborah Mason as Deborah Mason executive assistant.

Julie von Sternberg, a senior at Washington & Lee University, has completed a summer internJulie von Sternberg ship with Greater Charlotte Biz and has returned to school to finish her degree in journalism.

Business & Professional Kennedy Covington partner Amy Pritchard Williams has been honored with the Charlotte Business Journal’s Women in Business Achievement Award; the firm has also added Shannon Sumerell Spainhour as an associate in the litigation department.

Robert Fish, COO of Integra Staffing, has been named president of the Charlotte chapter Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO) for the 2007/2008 fiscal year.

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[ontop] Lonnie Harvey, president of The JESCLON Group, Inc., has been elected to the board of the Rock Hill Economic and Urban Development Council.

Lonnie Harvey Alston & Bird’s Charlotte office has appointed Kris Manzano a partner and Donald R. Rawlins as counsel in its corporate transactions and securities group.

Charlotte Copy Data, part of the Copy Data Network, has hired Ashley Higa as executive assistant.

Charlotte office of Marsh USA Inc. has hired Regina Enroughty as client Ashley Higa representative II, Eugina Visor as nuclear client advisor, and Blair Sissions who will be responsible for risk control consulting.

Kody Krady has joined Bagby Lighting as a project manager. Decision Support has hired Andy Shook as IT manager.

Shred-it has acquired Chris Peterson as an administrative specialist and Cindy McMillan as a route manager.

TOPIC 2007: Would I buy this business from me?

“What’s in it for me” is a question future owners of your business will certainly ask. Your business represents many things to you. It’s your passion, your life’s work, your means of making a living. It’s also an asset.

How valuable would your asset be to someone else if you decided to sell it? Understanding “what’s in it for me” from their perspective is the only way to answer that question.

You are invited to our

Upcoming Meeting OCTOBER 2007 “Would I buy this business from me?”

Our meetings are packed with practical information you can use to improve your business and reach your goals. Join today and become part of this exciting and worthwhile group.

For specific dates, times, locations and membership information visit www.business-success-institute.com or call Denise Altman at 704-315-9090.

Construction & Design Robert Hsin, AIA and architectural intern Brian King of Jenkins-Peer Architects have completed the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) accreditation process.

Gep Pond, LEED AP of The FWA Group has completed the LEED accreditation.

HNTB Corporation Gep Pond has hired Gregory Lipscomb as the director of urban design and planning for the firm’s Charlotte office.

Narmour Wright Creech Architecture, PA Gregory Lipscomb has promoted Peter Wasmer to principal and hired Amy Hockett as project manager and Michael McCollum as a CAD technician.

Clark Nexsen, an architectural, engineering, planning, and interior design firm, has hired Caroline Rust Ward as an administrative assistant.

greater charlotte biz

september 2007

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[ontop] trust+strategy+integrity+planning+insight+experience

it all adds up!

We're not your typical CPA firm. Instead, we go beyond traditional accounting services, adding valuable insight and guidance to your growth process. Think of us as the business development partner you always wished you had - a Champion for your business!

Our Philosophy We believe we are rewarded only to the extent that we add value to those we are privileged to serve. At Daniel, Ratliff & Company, we are here to serve you, to help your business achieve its goals. We do so by learning your business and the challenges you face, then working with you to guide you toward success.

“I think Daniel, Ratliff & Company has a real genuine interest in the success of our business. We have many different business entities, and we could

©2007 Galles Communications Group, Inc.

©2007 Galles Communications Group, Inc.

not have managed them without Daniel, Ratliff & Company’s help.”

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~ Wayne Kirby K & M Tire Company

At the lake:

Daniel, Ratliff & Company 107 Kilson Dr., Ste. 205, Mooresville, NC 28117

704.663.0193

Uptown office: Daniel, Ratliff & Company 301 S. McDowell St., Ste. 502, Charlotte, NC 28204

704.371.5000

www.danielratliff.com

september 2007

Keith Pace has joined SFL + a Architects’ Charlotte office as a project manager.

Lindsay Daniel Architecture, a residential design firm, has promoted Sarah Richardson to director of interior architecture and Cathy Hedman to project manager.

Education & Staffing Dr. Ruth Gwynn Shaw, longtime civic and business leader in Charlotte and tireless advocate of higher education, has been elected chair of the board of trustees of the University of North Carolina at Charlotte.

Dr. Ruth Shaw

Marjorie Knight Crane and Thomas Reddin have been elected to Thomas Reddin Marjorie Crane the Queens University of Charlotte’s board of trustees.

Sgt. John Brafford, Sgt. Joshua Huffman and Officers Joseph Carriker and Henry Chapman of UNC Charlotte have been honored with the North Carolina Association of Campus Law Enforcement Administrators (NCACLEA) State Award for Life Saving.

North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University has appointed Dr. Madhav Pappu director of the transportation institute; Dr. Linda Florence Callahan has been elected president of the faculty; and Maria T. Palmer, director of the multicultural student center, has been appointed to serve as a member of the North Carolina Nursing Scholars Commission.

The Gaston College Business and Information Technology Division has received full accreditation for their programs by The Association of Collegiate Business Schools and Programs (ACBSP).

Allan Kaufman, Ph.D., has joined the Rowan-Cabarrus Community

w w w. g r e a t e r c h a r l o t t e b i z . c o m

[ontop] College faculty as program head for bioprocess technology.

Engineering Barbara H. Mulkey, P.E., F. ASCE, CEO of Mulkey Engineers & Barbara Mulkey Consultants, has been elected to the membership level of Fellow within the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE).

Chas. H. Sells, Inc. (SELLS) has hired Ray Gibbs, RLA, ASLA as its senior landscape architect and urban land planner.

Finance & Insurance First Citizens Bank ranked 20th for leasing volume by employee among the 100 largest equipment financing/leasing companies in the United States according to Top 100 Monitor.

Carolina Commerce Bank has hired E. Michael Gudely as the bank’s new Mike Gudely president and chief credit officer.

Michael L. Radford has joined the Charlotte office of RSM McGladrey Inc. as managing director of the private wealth group.

Dixon Hughes PLLC has hired Corey Wilhelm, as a senior manager in the firm’s Charlotte office.

Nancy McNelis, managing director for Jefferson Wells’ Charlotte office, has been honored with a Women in Business Achievement Award from the Charlotte Business Journal.

Jeffory Madden and Raina L. Brown have joined Hinrichs Flanagan Financial as financial services professionals.

Priscilla Owenby, sales manager with Hinrichs Flanagan Financial, has been elected president of WIFS Carolina, a new chapter of Women in Insurance and Financial Services.

Robert Palmer & Associates has added senior accountant Apryl Heil.

Government & Non-Profit Kerri L.S. Mast, J.D. has joined Foundation For The Carolinas as vice president of planned giving.

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september 2007

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Century 21 Hecht Realty, Inc. Commercial Division Excellence Experience Dedication... and a touch of

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704.892.8252 Each office independently owned and operated.

Networking Services “No business is too small”

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september 2007

[ontop] International House has appointed William “Bill” Garcia as interim executive director.

Stephen Smith, senior vice president, managing director of Wells Fargo Insurance Services of NC, Inc. in Charlotte, has joined its board of directors for Curamericas Global, Inc. Stephen Smith The Greater Carolinas Red Cross has hired Dan Ogburn as a major gifts officer to work in the Charlotte headquarters office.

Health Care Dr. Barry Kramer, an interventional cardiologist, has joined Rowan Regional Medical Center’s new Smith Heart & Vascular Dr. Barry Kramer Center.

Premier Healthcare Resources has hired Michelle Donnelly as senior staffing consultant; Nicole Catizone as a staffing consultant; and Renita Boykin as payroll manager.

Manufacturing Printing Industries of America/Graphic Arts Technical Foundation (PIA/GATF) has named Ron and Katherine Harper, founders of Harper Corporation of America, the winners of its 2007 Education Award of Excellence for industry representatives.

Real Estate Commercial/Residential Crosland LLC has been awarded the 2006 National Multifamily Customer Service Award for Excellence and Dionne Nelson has joined the company’s residential division as development associate.

US Land Investments has received the Award of Distinction in the Communicator Awards 2007 Print Media Competition.

Case Handyman and Remodeling of Charlotte has been recognized as one of the area’s top 25 residential remodelers by the Charlotte Business Journal.

Susan Larkin, APR has been named vice president of marketing and public relations for the Allen Tate Company; the firm has also recognized John Shepherd for 25 years of continuous service.

Beacon Partners has hired Matt Lucarelli to its team as senior construction

w w w. g r e a t e r c h a r l o t t e b i z . c o m

[ontop] manager.

Percival McGuire Commercial Real Estate Management, LLC’s facilities director, Randy Gettys, has achieved his LEED accreditation.

Century 21 Hecht Realty has added Mona Barbee, Paul Quiroz, Stephen Huneycutt, Pedro Westbrook and Jeanette Pearson as sales associates.

Carlson Real Estate Company has added Patrick Tillman as senior property manager; Michelle Kirby as real estate services coordinator; and Rodney Harris as property engineer.

Christy Blakeley has joined the retail division at The Keith Corporation specializing in retail build-to-suit development.

WEICHERT, REALTORS Rebhan & Associates has hired Jasmine Humphrey, Brian Miller, Norma Watts, Mike Jones, and Brooks Gravitt as sales associates.

Lake Norman Realty has added Alana De Grace, Kristen Weber, John Kinsella and Karen Lapping as sales associates in its Cornelius office.

Retail & Sports & Entertainment Marc Fink of Fink’s Jewelers, Inc. has been appointed to the National Jeweler’s Retailer Hall of Fame.

Morton’s The Steakhouse SouthPark has named Shanna Shanna Cochrane Cochrane as its general manager.

Michael Slomba, RD has joined Total Nutrition Technology as a health educator for the company’s new Lake Wylie location.

Tourism Sharon Campbell has joined the Cabarrus County Convention & Visitors Bureau as vice Sharon Campbell president.

Daniel Stowe Botanical Garden has appointed Sarah Jones as thebiz new private event manager.

To be considered for inclusion, please send your news releases and announcements in the body of an e-mail (only photos attached) to editor@greatercharlottebiz.com, or fax them to 704-676-5853, or post them to our business address—at least 30 days prior to our publication date.

greater charlotte biz

september 2007

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Featuring Executive Homes in the Charlotte Region THE RATCLIFFE IN CENTER CITY Charlo tte , No rth Caro lina This beautiful upper-floor condo connects to the Overstreet Mall and features a gourmet kitchen with stainless steel appliances and a 5-burner gas stove. It includes excellent storage with a butler’s pantry and extensive California Closets and a private tile patio with gas grill and fabulous views of Southend. 2BRs/2BAs MLS# 688303 - $725,000 Property Address: 435 S. Tryon Street, Unit 502 Sandy Kindbom - 704-331-2122 www.allentate.com/sandykindbom

SETTLERS’ PLACE IN FOURTH WARD Charlo tte , No rth Caro lina This is Center City living with rare views of Uptown and Settlers’ Park.

The expansive, one-level floor plan includes a grand kitchen with custom cabinets and granite countertops, plus extras like crown molding, fireplace and surround sound. There are three terraces to enjoy and two garage parking spaces. 2BRs/2BAs MLS# 666642 - $825,000 Property Address: 229 North Church St., Unit 402 Paul Koehnke - 704-496-7440 www.allentate.com/paulkoehnke

SETTLERS’ PLACE IN FOURTH WARD Charlo tte , No rth Caro lina Unique and spacious describe this traditional-style condo in Historic Fourth Ward. The end unit features floor-to-ceiling windows and a 200-square-foot balcony with gas grill overlooking Settlers’ Park. Other extras include detailed crown molding, surround sound and a fireplace. 3BRs/2.1BAs MLS# 647890 - $1,150,000 Property Address: 229 North Church St., Unit 303 Kim Pfleeger - 704-496-7440 www.allentate.com/kimpfleeger

COURTSIDE IN FIRST WARD Charlo tte , No rth Caro lina A truly contemporary condominium home with fabulous views of the Center City skyline through walls of glass. Features include bamboo floors, custom cabinets, granite counters, stainless steel appliances, custom paint and a ceramic tile frameless shower. Also includes two secure parking spaces and a spacious balcony for entertaining. 2BRs/2BAs MLS# 666935 - $379,000 Property Address: 505 E. Sixth St., Unit 1206 Nancie Woods - 704-331-2122 www.allentate.com/nanciewoods

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Featuring Executive Homes in the Charlotte Region LAKE WYLIE WATERFRONT Lake Wylie , So uth Caro lina This one of a kind custom home is one of the most spectacular homes on Lake Wylie and sits on the main channel. Luxurious amenities include electronic privacy gates, 3-car garage, elevator, heated floors, 2nd living quarters and a level lakeside lot with in-ground pool and lush grounds. 5BRs/5.1BAs CMLS# 651516 - YMLS# 1038226 - $2,250,000 Property Address: 333 River Point Road Kay Grigsby & Linda Eggers Team - 803-322-7024 www.kaygrigsby.com

LAKE LEE ESTATE Mo nro e , No rth Caro lina Stunning secluded estate nestled on 7.84 heavily wooded acres overlooking heated pool, Jacuzzi and tranquil Lake Lee. Elegant describes this 8,288-square-foot home with 5 bedrooms, rich hardwood floors, heated porcelain tile in kitchen, AGA stove, granite counter tops, four fireplaces and magnificent beamed cathedral ceilings. 5BRs/5.1BAs MLS# 654486-$1,950,000 Property Address: 730 Saddlebrook Drive Patricia Carder - 704-575-5170 www.matchmaker4homes.com

PROVIDENCE DOWNS SOUTH Waxhaw, No rth Caro lina This elegant, custom estate boasts over 10,000 square feet and features a chefâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s kitchen with granite, a 6-burner gas range, double ovens, hardwood floors and a keeping room. Live in luxury with four gas fireplaces, an amazing ownerâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s suite, billiard room, wine room and entertainment bar. 6BRs/6.3BAs MLS# 679313 - $1,599,000 Property Address: 1905 Smarty Jones Drive Jennifer Herlong - 704-363-8755 www.allentate.com/jenniferherlong

THE GARDENS ON PROVIDENCE Waxhaw, No rth Caro lina This immaculate custom built home is sure to please with endless quality and detail. Warm hardwood floors, neutral paints, gourmet kitchen and luxurious master bath are just a few of the amazing features, as well as a large great-room with fireplace, screened porch, heavy moldings and wonderful Marvin schools. 5BRs/4.1BAs MLS# 696919- $960,000 Property Address: 1025 Sherringham Way Christy McDermott - 704-957-4142 www.allentate.com/christymcdermott

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