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The IBJ Podcast with Mason King

The IBJ Podcast with Mason King

By: IBJ Media
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 A weekly take on business news in central Indiana from the Indianapolis Business Journal. The IBJ Podcast is brought to you by Taft.All Rights Reserved Politics & Government
Episodes
  • “Am I crazy for doing this?” asks attorney turned bookstore owner

    “Am I crazy for doing this?” asks attorney turned bookstore owner
    Jul 7 2025
    Independent bookstores have been on the retail death watch for a few decades now. But, as one American author might put it, reports of their impending demise have been greatly exaggerated. For many, the recipe for success is local ownership, strict attention to local needs and concerns and calendars packed with special events to help create a sense of community. This is what Tiffany Phillips has found over nine years as founder and owner of Wild Geese Bookshop in Franklin. Phillips had a well-established career as an attorney in the health care industry as she was turning 40. But Franklin didn’t have a bookstore. One thing led to another as Phillips sought a new office space, and soon she was doing double-duty as a lawyer and a bookshop proprietor. She had a bigger vision for the store as a hub for cultural life and a haven for anyone interested in creativity. As Wild Geese approaches its first decade in business, it has developed a national reputation on the authors circuit as a destination where Phillips and her staff pull out all the stops to host hundreds of fans and involve other local businesses, like the historic Artcraft Theatre and the Main & Madison Market Café. IBJ’s Taylor Wooten recently wrote about this in the May 30 issue of the paper. For the IBJ Podcast this week, host Mason King wanted to chat with Phillips about the small-business challenges of opening and growing the shop and how she fights against persistent fears that investing in the printed word in a small Indiana city is, well … kind of crazy.
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    1 hr and 1 min
  • Pete the Planner’s advice for Gen X’s retirement dilemmas

    Pete the Planner’s advice for Gen X’s retirement dilemmas
    Jun 30 2025
    Coming after the baby boomers, Generation X is often referred to as “the forgotten generation,” the self-reliant generation and perhaps the last free-range generation. Today, you certainly could argue that it's becoming the financial-panic generation. The first Gen Xers hit the workforce right around the time pensions gave way to 401(k) accounts with self-directed invested assets. Recent studies indicate that Gen Xers who have retirement accounts have saved on average somewhere in the neighborhood of $180,000. That’s well below the $1 million popularly seen as the minimum requirement for beginning a comfortable retirement. (Of course, the ability to sustain income in retirement depends a lot on your spending habits and the quality of life you try to pursue.) Nearly 50% of Gen Xers don’t even have a retirement plan, according to asset management firm Schroders. So IBJ Podcast host Mason King began compiling some of the most common questions his fellow Gen Xers ask about pending retirement or, if need be, semiretirement. For example, when is the best time to start taking Social Security, especially given that it’s headed for a funding deficit early next decade? What exactly do you do with your 401k funds once you retire? And what should you start doing today if your retirement savings are in the five figures or low six figures? In this week's episode of the IBJ Podcast, columnist Pete the Planner weighs in on the big questions for Gen X and warns against a common strategy for diversifying portfolios that King thought was genius.
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    51 mins
  • Purdue's plans for downtown Indy extension and city's move to fix West Street

    Purdue's plans for downtown Indy extension and city's move to fix West Street
    Jun 22 2025
    Nearly one year ago—July 1, 2024—the urban university in downtown Indianapolis known as IUPUI—or Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis—officially split into two separate campuses. This created Indiana University Indianapolis, a standalone campus in the IU system, and Purdue University in Indianapolis, which is considered an extension of Purdue’s main campus in West Lafayette. IU Indianapolis took the vast majority of the land and buildings considered part of IUPUI. The school is focusing in part on research, commercialization and student opportunity in the life sciences and biotech sectors. With its Lafayette extension, Purdue wants to draw more students interested in engineering and business to the university, including through new degree programs such as motorsports engineering and executive education. With a relatively modest amount of land set aside for its Indianapolis operations, Purdue needed to figure out how it eventually could have an outsized impact. It recently revealed its long-term plans—16 buildings ranging from five to about 20 stories on just 28 acres of land in the northwest sector of downtown. In this week’s edition of the podcast, IBJ’s Mickey Shuey unpacks Purdue’s high-density strategy to serve 15,000 students per year by 2075. Mickey also digs deep into perhaps the greatest hindrance to growth in that area—West Street, the wide and heavily trafficked thoroughfare that essentially creates a barrier between the Mile Square and everything to the West. As Mickey reports in the latest issue of IBJ, tearing down that figurative wall is becoming a greater priority for the city of Indianapolis. The Hogsett administration has begun “preliminary discussions” with the neighborhood and universities to develop potential solutions. But any fix likely to come from those talks—whether spanning the roadway with bridges or tunnels, creating a parkway, or adding more crosswalks to slow traffic—will be expensive and likely require consensus from many stakeholders.
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    42 mins

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