The IBJ Podcast with Mason King

In 2009, a freshly graduated Jason Flora opened a law firm in a tiny office on the west side of Indianapolis near Hispanic-run car lots, Honduran restaurants and Guatemalan grocery stores. In its early days, the firm was a one-man shop, with Flora, who speaks Spanish fluently, working 60 hours or more a week and often driving back and forth between Chicago’s immigration court and his office. Last month, Flora Legal Group ranked No. 3 on IBJ’s list of the region’s fastest-growing companies based on its two-year growth, which ballooned 250%. It now has 23 attorneys among its nearly 140 full-time employees, who handle thousands of cases per year. And yet the firm’s mission is essentially the same as it was in 2009: to protect the rights of immigrants and provide the legal services they need — particularly in immigration cases — to make their lives better and more prosperous. In this week’s edition of the IBJ Podcast, Flora expounds on the evolution of his firm. As he explains it, one of the reasons he started his career as a street lawyer was due to the lack of interest from recruiters in established law firms. And he delves into how he learned he could be more valuable by pursuing more growth for the firm than he could by spending all of his time practicing law.

In this week’s edition of the IBJ Podcast, Indy Pride Inc. board Chair Alex Richardson previews the June 13 parade on Massachusetts Avenue and a revamped festival footprint spanning Military Park and White River State Park as the nonprofit marches forward under new leadership. Richardson, a DePauw University faculty member who became board chair in December, discusses the January hire of Executive Director Jennifer Carruthers, who previously led Capital City Pride in Des Moines. Richardson also addresses the financial pressures facing Indy Pride, including a $210,000 budget shortfall in 2024 tied in part to reduced corporate sponsorship, and explains how new individual giving programs and small-business outreach aim to close that gap. This year’s events will include a Saturday night concert featuring headliners Todrick Hall, Brooke Eden and Crystal Waters, in addition to a New York City ballroom showcase rooted in the Harlem ballroom scene of the early 1970s. Richardson also responds to Gov. Mike Braun's proclamation of June as "Nuclear Family Month.”

Santiago Jaramillo has been the subject of – or at least mentioned in – 44 articles in the Indianapolis Business Journal, including several columns he wrote about entrepreneurism. The stories largely appeared between 2013 and 2021, while he was building, running and exiting two Indianapolis-area tech companies. After the second firm, known as Emplify, was acquired for $50 million in 2021, Jaramillo had a severe case of burnout. He went on an extended sabbatical, planning to forego any future forays into founding startups. Then ChatGPT dropped. Suddenly entrepreneurs and executives had widespread access to artificial intelligence tools, and Jaramillo quickly saw their potential for transforming businesses and the workflows of their employees. The pull eventually proved too great. Jaramillo co-founded a firm named Pragmatico to help companies make the leap into AI in a way that sticks. In this week’s podcast, Jaramillo takes us on his entrepreneurial journey, which began in Colombia, South America, where he narrowly avoided a kidnapping. His career took turns through Florida, Indiana and Australia before settling back in the Hoosier state. Jaramillo also discusses why he decided to get back in the game, the reasons why many firms have trouble adopting AI and why the technology shouldn’t be set loose without human judgement as a guide.

Founded in 1970, Indiana Black Expo has broad brand recognition for its 10-day Summer Celebration, which highlights Black culture and elevation. But the umbrella not-for-profit organization operates 365 days a year, acting as a voice and vehicle for the social and economic advancement of Black youths and families. The other high-profile annual event hosted by IBE is the Circle City Classic, which typically features a football game between two historically black colleges or universities, along with a downtown parade and events focused on education, careers and culture. Last week, IBE announced a change at the heart of the Classic amid declining attendance, as well as the addition of a new event that would bring basketball teams from HBCUs to Indianapolis. CEO Alice Watson is our guest this week to explain in detail the economic tensions behind the switch this fall from college football programs to Indianapolis-based high school teams, including the $750,000-plus price tag IBE faced to recruit college teams and their bands this year. She also delves into the creation of an HBCU basketball invitational for 2027, which is expected to be more affordable for attracting programs. And she takes a deep dive into all of the educational programming and scholarships IBE offers throughout the year without nearly as much fanfare.

Earlier this month, Indianapolis wrapped up its ninth Final Four since 1980 — a Herculean hosting gig that requires thousands of volunteers and flawless coordination between the NCAA, the city of Indianapolis, hospitality officials, transportation services, public safety workers, a bunch of colleges and an untold number of vendors. Near the top of the organizational chart were the co-chairs of the local organizing committee — Judith Thomas and Nate Feltman. The world saw the basketball action online and on TV, and many in Indianapolis experienced big attractions staged in concert with the Final Four, including a three-day music festival witnessed by tens of thousands of fans. In this edition of the podcast, Thomas and Feltman take us behind the scenes of the three-year planning process and then the week of the event as plans played out in sometimes unexpected or poignant ways. For example, Feltman became a wingman of sorts for superstar Post Malone. Thomas, who attended Indy’s first Final Four in 1980, clearly saw her career arc from that experience to the convention industry, her role as deputy mayor, CEO of the Indy Arts Council and committee co-chair. Feltman, owner and CEO of IBJ Media, also experienced a change of heart on the city's lead role in financing the 800-room Signia by Hilton hotel, now nearing completion.

Here are a few tidbits the Indianapolis Indians want you to know this season. When it comes to professional sports in Indianapolis, the minor league baseball team is older than the Indianapolis 500 and has lapped both the Pacers and the Colts at least once. Likewise, Victory Field, which remains one of the great jewels in minor league baseball, is now older than Market Square Arena and the Hoosier/RCA Dome when they met their ends. And there’s no reason to fear for Victory Field’s fate: The Indians have been profitable every year for many decades, with the sole exception of 2020, and are always at the top or near the top of the minor league for attendance. Team operations had been under the control of the Schumacher family for many decades before 2024, when longtime executive Randy Lewandowski took over as president and CEO. The primary mission, as he puts it, is to put butts in seats while making sure those seats and the rest of the ballpark are pristine. Great players come and go, so the marketing pitch needs to focus on the Indians as an experience. Lewandowski is our guest this week to talk about the team’s revenue streams and the challenge of losing your most marketable players just as their hitting their strides. He also discusses his career in college baseball, how he found a position with the Indians organization in 1994 and then cut his teeth as director of operations at the brand-new Victory Field just a few years later.

This week's guest is Mitch Daniels, former governor of the state of Indiana and president emeritus of Purdue University. Barely a month after Daniels’ departure from Purdue's top job in 2023, the university named its business school after its former president, creating the Mitch Daniels School of Business and embarking on changes in its curriculum to emphasize technology and elements of a classical education. Daniels maintains some involvement in the business school’s evolution and is particularly interested in the growth of its programs in downtown Indianapolis, following the split of IUPUI that he championed late in his presidency. In this week’s podcast, Daniels and host Mason King cover those developments and their potential benefits for Indianapolis. They then take a deeper dive into the ways artificial intelligence is threatening to disrupt the market for white-collar jobs, and particularly entry-level positions. They also explore one of the biggest political, academic and economic debates of the last decade: What is the value of a college degree? Then, just for good measure, Daniels runs through his ideas for fixing Social Security.

Jamie Merisotis, president and CEO of Indianapolis-based Lumina Foundation, is one of the nation’s top experts on providing access to higher education and the ways higher education can prepare the future workforce. Several years ago, he realized how the rapidly accelerating development of artificial intelligence could profoundly impact these two vital currents of American life. In 2020 he published a book titled “Human Work in the Age of Smart Machines,” warning that the roles of workers will radically shift and spotlighting the need to redesign education, training and the workplace as a whole. Today, he admits he underestimated the speed of change due to AI. Last month, he delivered an address to the Economic Club of Indiana about what it means for jobs, education and the economy. On this week’s episode of the IBJ Podcast, Merisotis and host Mason King dig deeper into his conclusions. Number one: AI is here to stay. We humans need to focus on how we can complement AI and excel at work best handled with human traits and skills as AI begins to encroach on the turf of even C-suite executives. In the meantime, higher education must go undergo radical transformation.

Let’s go back about three decades to the mid-1990s when Indianapolis businesswoman Christel Dehaan sold her company Resort Condominiums International for $825 million. With a new focus on philanthropy and education, DeHaan created Christel House International, a global network of schools with a mission to not only educate its low-income students but to provide the necessary nutrition, health care and career mentoring – even after graduation – to help them break the cycle of poverty. DeHaan established Christel House schools in Indianapolis, Mexico, South Africa, Jamaica and India before her death in 2020.Today, the network is entering a new era of growth. David Harris, probably best known in Indianapolis as the founding CEO of education reform group The Mind Trust, became Christel House’s president and CEO in 2024, succeeding former Indianapolis Mayor Bart Peterson. Harris soon established a new plan for expansion that calls for boosting Christel House’s presence in countries where it already operates while opening new schools in Colombia and Nepal. In this week’s episode of the podcast, Harris discusses the challenges of continuing Christel House’s mission without its founder, how it now finances its mission, the organization’s process for establishing schools from scratch in new countries and the expansion of a global program that’s now helping students from four Indianapolis high schools succeed after graduation.

Fishers-based BiomEdit — a startup that spun out of Elanco Animal Health in 2022 — last year raised $18.4 million in a series B round. That’s despite what was a tough year overall for fundraising — nationwide and in Indiana. In this week’s episode, BiomEdit CEO and founder Aaron Schacht talks about the strategy behind the round and the changes the animal health startup had to make to secure the money it needed to bring its first product to market, which should happen this fall. You can find similar conversations and information about VC funding in The Deal, IBJ’s newest weekly newsletter covering venture capital, mergers and acquisitions, private equity, government contracts and the people who make those deals happen. Sign up for the newsletter at IBJ.com.

According to the latest federal data, the U.S. economy is chugging along at a strong clip, unemployment is under control, the prices of consumer goods are increasing at a fairly typical rate, and interest rates for mortgages are steadily dropping. Plus, the stock market is regularly hitting all-time highs. What’s there to worry about? The Consumer Confidence Index, which is used to measure how consumers feel about their expected financial situation, is at its lowest point since 2014. Specifically, Americans’ short-term expectations for their incomes, business conditions and the job market have fallen well below the marker that could signal a recession. The misalignment of the big picture numbers and how consumers feel might indicate that not everyone is benefitting from the positive economic indicators. Throw on top of that the amount of anxiety Americans feel about polarized politics, a recent wave of five-figure layoffs at large U.S. firms, and data pointing toward a bear market, and you can appreciate any undercurrent of pessimism. On this week's edition of the podcast, Pete the Planner and host Mason King discuss the role that our feelings can play in our financial decisions even when we’re presented with cold, hard data. To that point, they discuss the return of the vibecession, a term describing the disconnect between positive economic indicators and the public's negative perception of the economy and how they’re doing. Fear can inspire some people to eliminate all risk in their investments, which isn’t necessarily a good idea.

The Colts are done for the year, but news is heating up about the potential for the Chicago Bears to move their stadium to Indiana, Here’s the scouting report: The Bears want a new stadium. They say Soldier Field isn’t cutting it anymore. They’ve purchased a huge site in one of Chicago’s suburbs that formerly was home to a racetrack. The team says it's willing to pay for stadium construction, but the team needs the Illinois Legislature to help pave the way with about $855 million in infrastructure improvements and by approving a bill that would enable a long-term property tax deal. In December, Bears President and CEO Kevin Warren announced that the team wasn’t getting anywhere with the Illinois Legislature and that it was expanding its search for a new stadium site to include northwest Indiana. Indiana Gov. Mike Braun and local officials in the area immediately jumped at the opening and the chance to get the ball rolling. There was a healthy amount of skepticism that the Bears were namechecking Indiana simply to get leverage with Illinois. But several surprising developments in the last two weeks show that Indiana is moving quickly to lay the groundwork for a stadium, the Bears are giving the state serious consideration and that some Illinois officials are seriously concerned about losing the team. In this episode of the IBJ Podcast, we’ll review the moves made by the Bears and Indiana officials that have brought us to this point. We have two guests: We’ll first hear from Marc Ganis, a consultant for pro sports teams who has lived in Chicago for three decades; and then we’ll hear from Mickey Shuey, who covers real estate and sports business for IBJ.

Originally aired 8-25-2025. Cindy Schum grew up in a troubled family situation and, as she describes herself today, was terribly shy and awkward. Still, she found ways to put herself in situations that could help her be more outgoing. She was great at working with numbers, and she gravitated to a career in commercial lending that put her in front of business owners who loved to talk about how they made things work. She picked a heck of a time to jump from banking to buying a 104-year-old small business. She felt something vital was missing from her career, and her husband, Brad, persuaded her to purchase a company in 2019 in the less-than-glamorous janitorial-supply industry. She knew from her experience evaluating company financials and acquisitions that the numbers looked good. And when the pandemic hit several months later, Schum found herself in a position to help customers struggling with the sudden disruption. Still, Schum’s plans to grow A.G. Maas Supply Co. were delayed. But its headcount has swelled from two employees to 10 over the past six years, and its annual revenue has jumped 250%. Its core business is procurement—connecting customers in the utility, education, manufacturing and hospitality industries with the right suppliers of cleaning and safety products, office tools and facility furnishings. After some early trepidation, Schum learned that her career in banking perfectly prepared her for entrepreneurship. Whether you’re talking about banknotes or toilet paper, she says in this week’s episode of the IBJ Podcast that it all comes down to relationships.