Hi everyone,

If you ran overtime last week, the IRS now wants the premium half of it in its own box on the W-2, and the year is already nine months gone. That is the lead below, and it is a ten-minute conversation with your payroll provider.

The rest is the usual. Five carriers’ approved 2027 health increases with the dollar figures next to them, $50,000 of research that never touches your bank account, and nineteen seats left for Thursday in Fort Wayne.

Thursday, September‌ 17 · 4:‌00 to 7:‌00‌ PM

Ruoff Mortgage Stadium, VIP Room, West Concourse

Build It or Buy It, a conversation with Matt Truty, moderated by Nick Ladig, with time for questions. Truty built one company and bought another, so the trade-offs are not theoretical for him.

Nineteen tickets left.

Presented by First Internet Bank. We tell you when something is sponsored.

If you added October‌ 22 from our last issue, that date is wrong.

It is now Thursday, October‌ 29. Sorry. New calendar link below.

Thursday, October‌ 29 · 4:‌30 to 7:‌30‌ PM

Bloomington. Venue announced this week.

Almost Never the Competition

Ask an owner what almost killed their business and they will not name a competitor. They will name a partner. Or a family member. Or the month payroll barely cleared.

Pablo Fuentes built Proven into a hiring platform used by millions and sold it in 2019. He runs Bloom Spatial in Bloomington now. In between he drove 15,000 miles and recorded more than 150 episodes of Small Business War Stories, asking owners what almost took them down.

Fifty seats. $15.

The room is not booked yet. We are settling the Bloomington venue this week and everyone holding a ticket gets it by email the day it is set. If you know a room anywhere in Bloomington that seats fifty, reply and tell us.

The IRS finalized the 2026 Form W-2. Three codes were added to Box 12, and they apply to tax year 2026, which means the wages on this month’s payroll and the forms you file in January.

Code TT is the one that will cost somebody money. The IRS defines it as the “total amount of qualified overtime compensation.” That is not total overtime. It is only the “and-a-half” portion of time-and-a-half, the premium half that the Fair Labor Standards Act requires. Most payroll setups record overtime as one number. This asks you to split it.

Code TP is “total amount of cash tips reported to the employer.” Code TA covers employer contributions to a section 128 Trump account. All three come from Public Law 119-21.

You cannot reconstruct this in January. If your system is not separating the overtime premium today, nobody is going back through nine months of timecards by hand.

What to do

Ask your payroll provider one question this week. Are we already capturing qualified overtime and cash tips under the new Box 12 codes for tax year 2026? Not whether they will be ready in January. Whether the data is being captured now.

The IRS instructions confirm the codes and the year. They do not say whether use is mandatory, so neither do we.

A Tier-1 supplier in Columbus just filed to close 150 jobs. A defense parts company in Fort Wayne is spending $3.4 million on five times the floor space. Both are the same 24%, and it is why a tariff or a customer moving a program hits Indiana harder than most states.

Bureau of Economic Analysis figures, same vintage, divided by us. A “number one in the nation” claim travels with this figure. We could not verify the ranking, so we are not printing it.

Two are small asks.

The Innovation Voucher pays an Indiana university or approved nonprofit to do research for your company. Product development, simulations, proof of concept, testing you cannot run in-house.

From the program’s FAQ: “The grant funds will go direct to the research organization, not the small business.” It pays the researcher on your behalf, so no money reaches your account.

Missing the cut-off costs nothing. Applications are evaluated three times a year and the application never closes.

Four rules that trip people up:

ARI makes the introduction if you have no partner. Start here, or (812) 758-4338.

FHLBank Indianapolis Elevate is a grant, not a loan, for equipment, capital improvements, working capital or training.

Know two things before you spend an afternoon on it. The $20,000 is capped per member bank, not per business, and a bank may split it into two $10,000 requests for two customers. So you are in a line at your own bank. And it only flows through a member whose registration closed September‌ 4.

Your bank applies, not you. So the move is a phone call: did they register for Elevate 2026, and is their allocation spoken for. Applications close October‌ 1, awards announced October‌ 22. Details

IN-STEP covers 80% of export-development costs up to $15,000 a year. Trade shows, trade missions, export education, Commerce Department services.

Eligibility requires you to “be new to exporting or pursuing market expansion,” so it is built for the company testing one foreign market rather than the one already shipping containers.

Before you start: you need a year in operation and an Indiana SBDC relationship, which takes more than ticking a box. Overview

Central Indiana Top Workplaces costs nothing to enter, survey or win. You write nothing. Your people take a 26-question survey and that is the entry.

The floor is 50 employees, across a 23-county region, so it is not for everybody. If you clear 50 heads it is the cheapest recruiting asset on this page. Sign up

Indiana published its final approved 2027 small-group rates. Every carrier, the increase, and the approved premium average in dollars.

The gap between the cheapest and the most expensive approved average is $191. These read as monthly per-person figures, which puts the spread near $2,300 a year per covered person. On fifty covered lives that is six figures.

The state also notes medical trend “ranges up to 13.6%,” varying by network and by each carrier’s experience.

One carrier is leaving small group. The same document says “Integon National Insurance Company will not offer ACA Small Group plans for Policy Year 2027.” If Integon writes your group, you are shopping whether you planned to or not. The CareSource and Cigna exits in the news are both individual-market moves and do not touch a group plan.

What to do

Take your carrier’s approved average into the renewal conversation and ask for the carrier-specific projection for your group, plus one alternative network or plan design. The state published these numbers. A quote well above them is worth a conversation.

All five are ACA-compliant small-group plans written off the Marketplace, and the premium averages blend plan tiers, so your own number moves with plan selection. Self-funded and level-funded arrangements are different math again. The source document

Most AI talk aimed at owners is about writing emails faster. The Indiana version is more interesting.

Matt Truty’s BT Pro Solutions is embedding AI into off-highway equipment with HeavyTech. The machines, not the back office. He is in Fort Wayne Thursday, which is a good excuse to ask what is working versus what is a demo.

The pattern worth copying is narrow. Start where you already collect data and already have a costly failure. Quality inspection is the usual entry point: you have images or measurements, you know what a defect costs, and the payback is arithmetic. Purdue MEP runs exactly this session three times this fall. Dates below.

The test before you spend anything. Name the decision a person makes today that you want made faster or more consistently. If you cannot name the decision, you do not have an AI project. You have a budget line.

into a new building

square feet

contracts a year

Shylla Busche runs GovParts in Fort Wayne, founded there in 2017. The company fulfills more than 2,000 government contracts a year, and last week it announced it is putting more than $3.4 million into a 55,000 square foot building on just over eight acres by the airport, with state incentives behind it. Roughly five times the interior space they have now. They move in the first quarter of 2027, and the plan adds up to 20 jobs by the end of 2029 paying about 20% above the Allen County average.

Federal contracting is miserable. Registration, compliance, sourcing, kitting, and the paperwork that makes most shops walk away from government work entirely. GovParts took all of it, then subcontracts the actual making to small shops across northern Indiana.

They own the part everybody else avoids, and the shops in that network get government revenue without touching a federal form.

Two things follow if you run a shop. They are actively building that supplier network, which is a call worth making. And the ugliest step in your industry’s supply chain is usually the one with the least competition.

The $17 million 2026 revenue figure in the coverage is a projection from the Governor’s office, not an audited number. Details

A tax bill as a down payment. Adam Whelchel went on Acquiring Minds September‌ 10 with an episode called “Buy a Business with Your Tax Bill.” He put $35,000 down on an escape room doing $365,000, paying himself instead of the IRS. Q4 is when this either happens or does not. The episode

The state is working the other side. Keep IN, out of the Office of Entrepreneurship and Innovation under Brian Schutt, exists so Indiana businesses change hands instead of closing. The useful piece is a free valuation and transition-planning tool at smb.co/indiana. If you are five or ten years out and have never put a number on your company, start there.

A Tier-1 supplier is closing in Columbus. PMG Indiana filed a WARN notice on September‌ 2. One hundred fifty people, effective December‌ 31. Automotive components, in Bartholomew County since 1987. It is the only WARN filing in the state for the first half of September. The list

A hundred years of chorizo. El Popular in East Chicago is a 2026 Governor’s Century Award honoree. Vicente F. Garza started it in 1925, selling homemade chorizo off a Model T on Chicago street corners. Family-owned ever since, now in more than 10,000 locations nationally. The move that made the century possible was unglamorous: a USDA-certified plant in Valparaiso that turned a recipe business into a regulated manufacturer.

The Federal Reserve published its September Beige Book on the 2nd, and the squeeze is now on the record.

Input price pressures were “notably elevated in manufacturing and construction across multiple Districts,” with widespread increases in energy, transportation and raw materials, particularly metals and petrochemicals. None of that is news to anyone running a plant.

Consumer-facing contacts in a few Districts reported that “heightened price sensitivity among customers was putting a limit on their ability to pass through input price increases.” Costs up, pass-through capped. That gap comes out of margin.

What to do with it

If your last increase went through clean, you have room you have not tested. If it cost you volume, that is happening nationally and is not your sales team’s fault. Either way: find out which customer segments tolerate an increase before you move on all of them at once.

Auburn on October‌ 1 is half an hour up the road from Thursday’s room in Fort Wayne.

Ed Mysogland published Done Deal on September‌ 9.

Ed has spent his career at Indiana Business Advisors sitting between owners and the people buying their companies, so he has watched a lot of people reach the table unprepared and find out what it costs. Also on Audible.

Nobody asked us and nobody paid us. An Indiana operator wrote something useful and we would rather you knew.

If your payroll provider gave you a blank look about Box 12, your renewal came in above the approved average, or you want a research partner for a Voucher, reply and tell us what you need. We will point you at somebody we would use ourselves, and say so if we are connected to them.

Host an OWN night between now and 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.

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