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BENHAM TO OVERSEE
BRANSON’S $300 MILLION LAKEFRONT DEVELOPMENT
The city of Branson, Mo., has selected the Benham Companies Inc. to oversee a $300 million downtown lakefront development project. Benham will provide independent construction
consultant services for the city’s portion of the 1.5-mile waterfront building program on
Lake Taneycomo. The project includes a new 220,000-square-foot convention center, a town square and a boardwalk. Benham’s 125-person St. Louis office will manage the Branson
project during the estimated 34-month construction period.
ST. CHARLES EDC APPROVES $5.5 MILLION IN SMALL
BUSINESS LOANS
Since the beginning of 2004, loans totaling $5,443,000 have been approved for 11 small business projects by the Economic Development Center of St. Charles County. The total project value in this series of 504 loans is more than $18 million. Three new businesses and eight expansions make up the list of loan recipients. They include one manufacturer, three daycare providers and three automotive-related companies. An auto dealer and a daycare hold the highest loan amounts at $1 million each.
KORTE TO BUILD DINING
FACILITY FOR MARINES
The Korte Co. has been awarded a contract to build an $11.2 million enlisted dining facility at the Marine Task Force Training Command in Twentynine Palms, Calif. The single-story building will include a dining facility and kitchen capable of feeding up to 2,200 Marines in a two-hour period.
PLUMBING COUNCIL ASSISTS LOCAL FAMILIES
Local union plumbing contractors donated their time, talent and money to benefit nearly 100 families as part of the 12th Annual Rebuilding Together St. Louis event on May 1. Plumbing Industry Council contractors, supplier members and members of Plumbers and Pipefitters’ Local 562 joined together to provide plumbing repairs and home renovations for elderly, low-income and disabled residents in the St. Louis area. Contractors donated approximately 50 service trucks loaded with tools, and suppliers provided a wide array of plumbing products.
LAWRENCE GROUP COMPLETES WORK
ON URGENT CARE CENTER
 St. Anthony's Urgent Care Center |
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Construction of the $4.7 million St. Anthony’s Urgent Care and Sports Medicine Center, de-signed by architectural firm The Lawrence Group, has been completed. The 30,000-square-foot building is an outpatient urgent care, sports medicine and imaging center with doctors’ offices located on the second floor. Alberici Constructors served as the general contractor for the
project.
ARCO BUILDS NOOTER
HEADQUARTERS
Nooter Construction Co. will move into a new multimillion dollar headquarters on
S. Third Street in downtown St. Louis by the end of the year. The new building is adjacent to the company’s existing headquarters on a 5.5-acre site that is being developed by Keenan Properties.
Last year, Nooter Construction acquired two industrial firms from Houston-based Philips Service Corp. and needs larger, more modern space to house its expanding operations. The new building will provide 37,000 square feet of office space and a 48,600-square-foot warehouse. ARCO Construction Co. is the design-build contractor for the building.
RENOVATION BEGINS ON PAUL BROWN BUILDING
| Paul Brown Building |
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Paric Corp. has started transforming the historic Paul Brown Building in downtown
St. Louis into loft-style apartments. Situated on Olive Street across from the Old Post Office, the building will ultimately house 222 one-and two-bedroom apartments. The building, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places, will also include 20,000 square feet of street-level retail space, a physical fitness center, a rooftop swimming pool, a club room and 130 underground and covered parking spaces. It is scheduled to open in summer 2005.
| Pulaski Financial Corp. Chairman and CEO William H. Donius, surrounded by his senior executive team and other Pulaski representatives, gives the “thumbs up” May 10 during the ceremonial opening of the Nasdaq Stock Market. Pulaski Financial, parent company of Pulaski Bank in St. Louis and Kansas City, was invited to conduct the opening to mark the 10th anniversary of the company’s stock being listed on Nasdaq. |
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T.R. HUGHES EXPANDS TO
ILLINOIS
| T.R. Hughes has expanded to Southern Illinois with the opening of Summit Springs, a new-home community in Fairview Heights. |
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St. Charles-based T.R. Hughes, a residential and commercial construction firm, has expanded to Southern Illinois with the opening of Summit Springs, a new-home community in Fairview Heights. Located off Bunkum Woods Road, the new development will ultimately include 142 homes in ranch and two-story designs. Base prices in the first phase range from the high $150,000s to the mid-$190,000s. Most sites average one-quarter acre in size. Sales at Summit Springs are being handled through Coldwell Banker Brown.
RCGA RECEIVES EPA AWARD
James B. Gulliford, regional administrator of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Region VII, presented the EPA Partnership Award to the RCGA on May 27 in Kansas City, Kan. The award recognizes the organization’s “leadership and dedication in finding innovative environmental solutions through collaborative partnerships for the St. Louis Community.” Mike Alesandrini, director-environment for the RCGA, accepted the award on behalf of the organization.
| (Left to right): Jason Fisherman, managing director, Advent International (Boston); David Collier, general partner, CMEA Ventures (San Francisco); Greg Johnson, managing director, Prolog Ventures (St. Louis); Richard Fleming, president and CEO, St. Louis RCGA; and Peter Brooke, chairman, Advent International (Boston), discuss venture capital funding during the Invest Midwest Venture Capital Conference panel at the Chase Park Plaza. |
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CLIENT SERVICES EXPANDS FACILITIES IN ST. CHARLES
Client Services Inc. is constructing a $7 million customer service and call center in
St. Charles. The 40,000-square-foot building, scheduled to open in August, lies immediately east of the company’s headquarters off of Interstate 70 on Truman Boulevard. The expansion is a response to the company’s significant growth, which has averaged 35 percent annually over the past five years.
BARICEVIC RECEIVES
LEADERSHIP AWARD FROM FOCUS ST. LOUIS
JOHN BARICEVIC
board chairman,
St. Clair County |
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FOCUS St. Louis presented John Baricevic, chairman of the St. Clair County Board, with a 2004 Leadership Award at its seventh annual “What’s Right With the Region” celebration. Baricevic received the honor for his 14 years of service as chairman of the St. Clair County Board. He has also served as chairman of the East-West Gateway Coordinating Council.
MOZAIC AND SOUTHERN GRAPHIC SYSTEMS FORM ALLIANCE
Southern Graphic Systems, a graphics and packaging unit of Alcoa, and Mozaic, a creative design firm based in St. Louis, have announced they intend to form a business partnership. The agreement calls for Southern Graphic to make an equity investment in Mozaic to expand its own creative and related technology services, as well as to help accelerate Mozaic’s growth. Mozaic will supply creative and related services to help Southern Graphic streamline its own packaging design and production process.
JUNIOR ACHIEVEMENT OPENS FREE ENTERPRISE CENTER
St. Louis-based Junior Achievement of Mississippi Valley recently dedicated The Dennis and Judy Jones Free Enterprise Center during a grand opening ceremony. The 39,000-square-foot center in Chesterfield is the most comprehensive facility of its kind in the country, offering two capstone experiential learning programs, a volunteer training program and, later this year, an exhibition hall honoring local past and present business leaders. All programs and exhibits will
complement Junior Achievement programs already available to nearly 800 Missouri and Illinois elementary and secondary schools.
The Center features Enterprise Village, a “mini-municipality” with 19 public and private enterprises, including retail shops, a bank, manufacturing facilities, data processing, and a newspaper; and Finance Park, a hands-on program separated into 13 distinct business areas: banking, charity, clothing, entertainment, food, furnishings, health care and health maintenance, home improvement, investment, real estate, print shop, transportation, and utilities.
| (Left to right): Scott, Doris and Terry Schnuck get a firsthand look at the Schnucks Market inside Junior Achievement’s Dennis and Judy Jones Free Enterprise Center. Doris Schnuck personally donated $1 million to the project in honor of her late husband, Donald Schnuck, who was board president of Junior Achievement from 1980 to 1982. Scott Schnuck was president from 1997 to 2000, and continues to serve as a board member. |
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WEBSTER UNIVERSITY LEASES OLD POST OFFICE
The Old Post Office building in downtown St. Louis will gain its first tenant now that Webster University has signed a lease with DESCO Properties for more than 32,000 square feet of space. The university will use the space to relocate and expand its facilities. The new campus location is expected to be ready for the fall 2005 semester.
BUILD-A-BEAR OPENS STORE IN DENMARK
St. Louis-based Build-A-Bear Workshop has opened its first store in Denmark. The new store is located in The Tivoli Garden, one of the premier retail shopping areas in Copenhagen. The new store is the latest in the company’s aggressive international expansion campaign that started in the fall of 2003, when Build-A-Bear opened in the United Kingdom. Earlier this year, the company opened stores in Japan and Korea.
MONSANTO SPONSORS NASCAR’S BURTON
Roush Racing’s Jeff Burton and his No. 99 Ford racecar were sponsored by Monsanto’s Roundup brand for four NASCAR races, including races at Talladega (Calif.) Speedway, Richmond International Raceway and Lowe’s Motor Speedway. Roundup is owned by St. Louis-based Monsanto Co.
| Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge addresses the opening ceremonies of the 79th Annual American Red Cross National Convention
at America’s Center on May 21. |
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Q&A WITH MICHAEL DELL
Michael S. Dell, chairman and CEO of Texas-based Dell Computers Inc., recently spoke at the St. Louis Minority Business Council’s 2004 Business Opportunity Fair.
Dell founded his company in 1984 with $1,000 and an idea to sell computer systems directly to customers. Today, the company has more than 46,000 employees spanning six continents, and annual revenues of $39.7 billion. His company is No. 5 on Fortune magazines Most Admired List.
| Michael S. Dell (left), chairman and CEO of Dell Computers Inc., and Dave Steward, president and CEO of Worldwide Technologies, at the St. Louis Minority Business Council’s recent Business Opportunity Fair at America’s Center. |
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Dave Steward, president and CEO of Worldwide Technologies, and a major supplier to Dell Inc., shared the stage with Dell during a question and answer period at America’s Center. Here are some highlights of their conversation.
STEWARD: I’m sure everyone in the audience would like to see their businesses flourish like yours has in the past 20 years. Dell has come farther, faster, than any company in corporate history. How did you do it?
DELL: Companies are succeeding and failing faster than ever before. At some point people stopped talking about our amazing success, and they started talking about the amazing success of Nokia. And then they stopped talking about Nokia, and started talking about the next company. And each one is bigger than the one before. What we see is that a company like ours can generate far more revenue than a Wal-Mart, or a Microsoft or a GE in its first 10 years, adjusted for inflation, because what we have now is a more connected economy. Firms like yours and mine can do things together that 20 years ago were not even possible.
Great businesses are not created by doing something that somebody else is doing. You’ve got to do something that’s completely different and radically better.
STEWARD: How has diversity contributed to your success?
DELL: We have made a significant effort to tap into diversity in many different respects. Certainly in our workforce, ensuring that we have diverse talents, not only so that we can understand our markets and our customers, but also so that we can tap into all of the talent that’s out there. As a company that’s growing as fast as we are, we need every talent we can possibly find to help us grow and succeed.
And we’re also a company that has great diversity in our global markets. Our products are sold all over the world. Last year we grew our purchases from minority-owned and women-owned businesses 60 percent from the prior year—a total of $597 million—and over $1 billion in small business purchases.
STEWARD: What technology trends do you see in the future?
DELL: A lot of the different worlds that are out there—whether it’s the consumer electronics world, or the high-end data center—are all being impacted by the broadened economics of the personal computer. If you look in (a typical company’s) data center, over 90 percent of those servers use the same kind of microprocessors that are in the machines that you all are buying individually. And that’s really changed the cost of access to computing to solve some of the biggest, most challenging problems out there. Medical problems, for example, such as decoding the human genome.
Last week, we celebrated the installation of a huge cluster of Dell servers at the NSCA (National Center for Supercomputing Applications) center in Illinois. It’s the fourth most powerful supercomputer in the whole world, but it consists solely of 3,000 Dell servers that are all patched together. It cost about one-tenth the cost of a mainframe supercomputer.
STEWARD: Can you share some strategies around Internet retailing?
DELL: We have about 85 percent of our transactions that are in some way touched by the Internet. We get about 7,000 users per minute that go to Dell.com. So we really made it the basis, the parent place, to get the highest quality information on our products and services, and just made it a fantastic experience. But the information we get from our users really helps us be incredibly efficient in our supply chain and inventory—even more so than we were before.
If you take a really large customer, we work with them in a variety of ways. We might have 150 people in the field that service that customer in 100 different countries, working in identifying their needs and solutions and helping them solve their particular business problems. But what we don’t have (our field people) doing is conducting individual transactions. If you can get machine-to-machine interactions—where their computer system talks to our computer system—then people can concentrate on doing things that are more valuable.
STEWARD: You’re stepping down as CEO on July 16. What does that mean?
DELL: Well Kevin (Rollins, president and COO) and I have been working together for over 10 years. And we have this structure we call “two-in-a-box.” Essentially we take a job that’s too complicated for one person and we have two people do it. (Laughs) It’s a pretty simple idea. And we’ve been doing it for a long time now, but quite frankly I’ve gotten most of the credit. Part of that’s because my name’s on the door, and part of it’s because I’m CEO. So I thought it would be a good idea if I gave him some of the credit. But my job’s not really going to change a whole lot.
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