Higher-Minded
High Finance
High Finance
It's no secret that Iowa has been targeting the financial services sector with considerable success, headlined by last year's Wells Fargo expansion in Des Moines. That same city welcomed newly hatched insurer Assurant to West Des Moines in February 2005, where it will operate a 25-person shared business services facility. The New York-based company was spun off from Dutch insurer Fortis in 2004. Economic development officials credited the Iowa move to the state's 2002 law lowering Iowa's insurance premium tax to one percent over a five-year period.
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But the sector is investing beyond the Des Moines metro. In Fairfield, independent financial services dealer/broker Cambridge Investment Research is investing $6 million in a 40,000-sq.-ft. (3,716-sq.-m.) facility on a 40-acre (16-hectare) parcel that will have the capacity to hold more than 300 employees. The parcel was approved for enterprise zone status in February 2005 and will enable the company to move from two buildings that its 135 employees currently occupy in downtown Fairfield. The expansion, expected to be complete by January 2006, will create 93 jobs.
In addition to $150,000 in CEBA aid and enterprise zone benefits from the state, the project will see a one-year, $26,000 break on property taxes from Jefferson County. It will also get assistance from the Fairfield Economic Development Association amounting to more than $13,000 to help the company pay down the interest on a $125,000 loan from the Area 15 Regional Planning Commission.
Cambridge Investment Research's founder Eric Schwartz, who originally brought his company to Fairfield from Maryland in 1992 because he was a Transcendental Meditation practitioner, was the city's 2003 Entrepreneur of the Year. From 1996-2002, his company experienced revenue growth of over 1,300 percent, driven at least in part by lower overhead.
In an interview published in The Washington Post in August 2004, Schwarz gave credit to TM for letting customers see that he's about more than pure profit. Similar sentiments abound in the city of 10,000 and its newly incorporated neighbor Vedic City, where it is estimated that approximately one-quarter of the residents also practice TM.
Apparently, serenity breeds success: A full $250 million in venture capital has flowed to area companies since 1991, according to city officials, tripling per-capita income and breeding an average of $8 million in residential and commercial real estate development per year.
In 2003, Fairfield earned the inaugural Grass Root Entrepreneurship Award from the National Council of Small Communities. And the latest project in Vedic City is a huge greenhouse that will employ, among others, 500 people coming from India.
But such a town, TM or no, also fits right in with domestic lifestyle trends that see companies and individuals alike flocking inland from both coasts, and seeking out low-density, low-stress communities.
"Vedic" is Sanskrit for "totality of knowledge." That's as good a slogan as any for a state looking to expand its human potential at the same time it expands its corporate roster.
