Hi everyone,

Two utilities just moved in opposite directions, and which one serves your building decides what your power costs in 2027. That is the lead item below, and working out which side you are on takes about ten minutes.

The rest is the usual: storm loans that reach 26 Indiana counties that never took water, a one-page sheet for the procedures nobody follows, and three rules that already changed while most people are still quoting the old numbers.

A conversation with Matt Truty of BT Pro Solutions, moderated by Nick Ladig. The title undersells it: Truty spends most of his time putting AI and new technology to work inside companies that already exist. If you never plan to buy or sell anything, this is still your room.

Bloomington, in October

Thursday, October‌ 22, in Bloomington, 5:‌00 to 8:‌00‌ PM. Venue and guest in the next issue. Block the evening now.

Correction: The Bloomington OWN night is Thursday, October‌ 29, not October‌ 22. We corrected the date in the Sept‌ 15 issue.

Andrew Wahl, Gabrielle Rubenstein and Max Wahl bought Ace-Pak two years ago and came to tell the truth about year one.

Day one was a cold garage in November. Stacks of binders. Pricing on sticky notes. No accounting system. The whole company lived on one laptop, and Gabrielle’s first thought was the one every buyer eventually has: if this breaks, we lose everything.

That is what you inherit when you buy a business nobody documented. Not mailbox money, an overtime job rebuilding what should already have existed. Documentation is not admin. It is the difference between a business somebody can take over and one that only runs because you are standing in it.

In late August, Indiana Michigan Power asked regulators to cut base rates in 2027 for most of its customers, roughly $59 million worth. I&M’s own release credits demand growth and revenue from large customers, including data centers. A decision is expected June‌ 2027.

Since the Aug‌ 11 derecho left nearly 60% of NIPSCO’s 500,000 customers without power, NIPSCO has filed three separate rate adjustments, on Aug‌ 11, Aug‌ 14 and Aug‌ 20. It also faces a proposed class action alleging inadequate tree trimming contributed to repeated and prolonged outages. Governor Braun has asked regulators to investigate, including whether money approved for reliability was actually spent on it. His words: “NIPSCO has failed to keep its end of the bargain.”

Nobody has put this side by side. In the same weeks Indianapolis finalized its data center moratorium through the end of 2027 and Elkhart passed its own 9 to 0. One utility says data centers are why your bill can fall. Communities are voting to keep them out. Both are true.

What to do this month

Confirm which utility serves each location, then ask your rep what the filings do to your rate class. The widely quoted $100 a year is a household at 1,000 kilowatt hours a month. It is not your number.

Sources: I&M · WVPE · NIPSCO filings · Indianapolis · Elkhart

Open job postings in Indiana as of Aug‌ 1

In the same Aug‌ 21 Department of Workforce Development release, private employment fell 4,900 from June to July, to 2,843,900. For scale: unemployment here is 3.3% against 4.1% nationally, and labor force participation is 63.1% against 61.4%. That makes Indiana a tighter market than the country, and a looser one than the 2.1% record low of November‌ 2021. Hiring is easier than the 2022 crunch and still hard by any longer measure.

Where that turns concrete: the WARN list was empty last issue. Postal Center International is closing its Brownsburg plant in Hendricks County, and 151 people are out by Sept‌ 30. CDL drivers, dispatch, data entry, quality control, supervisors. The list.

A major disaster declaration for Indiana was approved Aug‌ 25 (FEMA-4933-DR). The SBA published details Aug‌ 31. Everyone covered the 21 counties where homeowners qualify. Almost nobody reported the second list. Under Contiguous Counties, Economic Injury Loans Only sit 26 more Indiana counties:

Bartholomew, Blackford, Boone, Brown, Cass, Clinton, Fulton, Grant, Hendricks, Howard, Jasper, Jay, Jennings, Johnson, Marshall, Monroe, Newton, Ohio, Owen, Putnam, Ripley, Shelby, St. Joseph, Starke, Tippecanoe and White.

If your building was never touched and you lost a week of revenue, you may still qualify for working capital at 4%. Physical damage closes Oct‌ 25, 2026. Economic injury runs to May‌ 25, 2027. Apply at lending.sba.gov or call 800-659-2955.

Read your county off the notice itself.

And a wage benchmark worth knowing. RayzeBio, a Bristol Myers Squibb company, is putting more than $173 million into central Indiana, and the number that matters is the pay: average wages above $130,000 at its new Whitestown plant. That resets what skilled labor costs across Boone County and everywhere that commutes into it. Details.

People do not ignore procedures because they lack discipline. They ignore them because the system forces a choice between following the procedure and getting the job done.

If the documented way is slower than the real way, the documented way loses every time, and the person taking the faster path is behaving rationally. So do not start with your people. Time the documented path against what they actually do. The gap is the bug.

Then use three columns, not two. The method is Job Instruction, the wartime training program that became Toyota’s standard work: Important Steps, Key Points, and Reasons Why.

The third column is the one everybody skips and the one that works. Capturing why a key point matters is what makes somebody remember it instead of merely complying, and writing the reasons forces your team to answer a question most never answer out loud: what is the one best way here, and why?

We built you the sheet.

One page, three columns, two worked examples, the rest blank. Free, no email required.

The test that settles it: hand the sheet to somebody who has never done the task and ask them to follow it. Watch, and do not help. Wherever they get stuck is your revision list, because the sheet needs the fix, not the person. The bar is not is it written down, it is can somebody who has never done this finish it without asking.

Two more, briefly. Record video for the reasoning, transcribe it to text for the steps, because you cannot update step four of a video without reshooting it. And give every document a named owner and an effective date, in one list. Borrowed from ISO 9001, and the cheapest part of all of this.

One Indiana operator doing the harder version. Lydia Henshaw bought Journey Warehousing in 2023 and is now partner and COO at Neace Transportation. She brings her operations managers into the monthly financial reviews so they see the whole profit and loss. Same move as the third column: people follow a plan when they know why it is the plan.

Thank you. Genuinely. You backed this when the only things to point at were a newsletter and a room full of people who kept showing up.

Two things are new. The community opens next month, and members get in first. And the private member directory is now the reason to be listed rather than just a perk: when somebody replies asking us for a name, members are who we look at first. It is $50 a year for the first 50 operators, then $100.

Not news, which is the point. These already changed, and plenty of owners still run the old version.

The 1099 threshold is $2,000, not $600. The IRS is explicit: $600 for payments made before 2026, $2,000 for payments made in 2026, inflation-adjusted after. This hits the forms you file in January. IRS

The overtime salary threshold is $684 a week, not $1,128. A court vacated the 2024 rule and the Labor Department rescinded it in May. Enforcement is back to the 2019 numbers, $684 a week and $107,432 for highly compensated employees. If you budgeted for an increase that never came, that money is still yours. DOL

There is no federal noncompete ban. The FTC dropped its appeal and the rule left the federal code in February, so state law governs, which means Indiana law governs. The FTC still enforces case by case: in April it ordered a national pest control company to stop enforcing them against 18,000+ employees. Background

That chart is the honest answer to a question most people are too polite to ask: what does somebody actually buy with an SBA loan, and for how much? Jared W. Johnson funded all ten last year, from a chiropractor at $420,000 to stone cutting and concrete at $5 million.

If you take one thing from him, take this. On his podcast Before You Buy or Sell a Business, episode 64, The Five Cs, Mark Sims lays out what separates a business that holds its value from one that carries risk into a sale. Two of his five are clean financials and operational capability, which is the Playbook above said in a lender’s language. Start there.

He also runs Acquire Fort Worth, a monthly room for searchers and operators, which is roughly what you would expect from someone who spends his week underwriting these deals. He will be in Fort Wayne on Sept‌ 17.

Jared W. Johnson is VP and Senior Business Development Officer at First Internet Bank, Member FDIC, which sponsors the Sept‌ 17 room. We tell you when something is sponsored.

Most people are planning capital as if money gets cheaper. It might not. Prime sits at 6.75%, putting SBA 7(a) variable ceilings roughly 9.75% to 13.25% by loan size. The Fed held in July on a 9 to 3 vote, with three members dissenting in favor of a hike, and J.P. Morgan Wealth Management now expects a quarter-point hike in September while other desks still price a cut. Their own chief economist disagrees with them. Plan against both.

41.4% of M&A advisors closed half or fewer of their deals last year. Not half of what they pitched. Half of what they took on. That is the 2026 lower-middle-market outlook, and it is the argument for the Playbook: the work that makes a business sellable is the same work that makes it runnable without you, and you get that benefit whether or not you ever sell.

Date | What | Closes

Labor Day is Monday, Sept‌ 7. Every early-September deadline gives you one fewer working day than it looks like.

Some things in this issue end with a link. Others end with needing an actual person. Chasing an economic injury loan and want somebody who has filled one out before? Overtime numbers just turned your payroll into a question? Reply and tell us what you need.

We will point you at somebody we would use ourselves, and say so if it is somebody we are connected to. It runs both ways: members are who we look at first when somebody asks.

Tap the one you need. It opens a reply, already addressed to us.

Host an OWN night, October through December. A facility tour, a founder story, or one system you use to run better. Reply if you want a month.

Nominate an owner for a Spotlight. Somebody who just bought, sold to their team, or turned something around.

Feedback, an idea, an intro? Just reply. We read every one, or reach us at [email protected].