Judge Villines, Former Mayor Dailey, Former Mayor Hays… Often called The Three Amigos… Worked together for over a decade to build an Arena, expand a Convention Center, bring life back to downtowns and initiate many other examples of Regional Cooperation.
Join us Thursday evening, December 13th from 5:30 to 7:00pm at the Park Centre Office Building located at 4375 North Vantage Drive in Fayetteville… Fayetteville Professionals Night Out!
Come enjoy live music, plenty of food and beverages and get ready for the upcoming Holiday Season!
Judy Shelley’s 30 years as a CPA have led her around the South and finally to Flake & Kelley Commercial as CFO.
Shelley, 57, grew up in Decatur, Texas, and received her undergraduate degree in accounting from the University of North Texas in Denton. Her degree led her to Peat Marwick Mitchell & Co., the company that is now the “P” in KPMG. “I was with KPMG for a number of years in their tax department,” she said.
Shelley went on to operate her own CPA and consulting firm in Austin, Texas, and Charlotte, N.C. Then she kept books for Alabama, the country music group from Fort Payne in the eponymous state.
“After that, we moved back to Houston, where my husband was with another bank,” Shelley said.
Her time there was spent as a volunteer with the American Red Cross and her church, West University Baptist. “I ran the financial services section of the Little Rock Katrina service center for the Red Cross to aid refugees,” she said.
Finally, Flake & Kelley contacted her in 2006, and the couple moved to Arkansas.
Shelley said being female in a business leadership role had always been part of the challenge of her jobs. “I was one of the first female managers at KPMG,” she said. “I enjoyed bringing in more business than most of my male counterparts.”
The executive team at Flake & Kelley, she said, makes the company strong. “We are a tight-knit team,” she said. “We meet monthly and take the pulse and heartbeat of the company, making sure it’s [going] in the right direction.”
She said the firm prides itself on keeping accurate books, especially for the firm’s managed properties. The company recently transferred to a cloud-based accounting system, and it helps accounting for the firm’s properties.
“We went from a smaller to a larger Web-based accounting program where the owners have access to their records,” Shelley said. Building owners can check their accounting records on any computer with access to the company’s cloud-stored data, she added.
“So we strive to stay abreast of the current technology and make certain to do the best we can to present timely financials.”
Shelley said technological innovations also helped the firm withstand the recession. “We started noticing a lot of tenants were having hard times. We started noticing [non-sufficient fund] fees and NSF checks bouncing,” she said. “It was our job to ensure the collection of rents on behalf of owners.”
The firm implemented check scanners that moved funds from tenant accounts to owner accounts faster. “We’ve found a lot less NSF as a result of that,” she said.
While not at Flake & Kelley, Shelley is still active with the Red Cross, where she recently left the local board of directors after a five-year tenure. She also co-chaired the American Heart Association’s 2011 Heart Ball with her husband.
LITTLE ROCK — Oh em gee! We have a Gigi’s Cupcakes location!
Cupcake aficionados in central Arkansas have drooled for the day that we’d have a bakery specializing in cupcakes.
Uh, well another bakery specializing in cupcakes. We already have several (and at the rate they’re opening, they could one day hope to outnumber frozen yogurt outlets).
But can there be such a thing as too many cupcakes? Gee whiz, no! (Now, there might be such a thing as too much icing. More on that to come.)
The Little Rock Gigi’s Cupcakes, open now in the Park Avenue shopping center (the Target center — between Radio Shack and the Carter’s kids clothing store), is part of the country’s largest cupcake chain founded by Gigi Butler in Nashville, Tenn., which has expanded to 23 states. And more stores are planned, including one expected to open within the next month at 12800 Chenal Parkway.
What’s on the menu: cupcakes. More cupcakes. And drinks (coffee, milk, apple juice, soda and bottled water). And a few mini cheesecakes. And still more cupcakes.
Some 30 cupcake flavors appear on the full fall/winter 2012-13 menu, with about a dozen available each day. Cost is $3.25 each, $2.75 each per dozen.
One can have a seat at a few outdoor tables, two indoor tables (dressed with faux pink gerbera daisies) or at a counter lining the front windows. But most people get their treasures to go — in girlie greenbrown-and-pink packages that resemble gift boxes and matching shopping bags.
These are no box-of-cakemix-and-can-of-frosting cupcakes. Baked, iced and blinged-out on-site (Miss Princess cupcake: “white cake with fresh strawberries baked in, topped with a cream cheese frosting, pink sugar crystals and a pink fondant crown,” available on Fridays), these are works of edible sculpture.
They’re also big. And rich. And sweet. Really sweet.
A couple forkfuls (there’s really no eating these frosting-full, top-heavy desserts with your hands) into a Chocolate Covered Strawberry cupcake — featuring a dark chocolate cake, a puffy pink fluff of icing then capped with even more chocolate that didn’t have a lot of strawberry flavor, but certainly had a lot of sugar — I knew I’d have to have some help with this assignment.
To read the full article from the Arkansas Democrat Gazette.
www.flake-kelley.com to view the Verizon Property Presentation presented by Hank Kelley, Bill Pendergist and London Grandison with Flake & Kelley Commercial.
www.flake-kelley.com to view the Village Shopping Center Property Presentation presented by Hank Kelley, Buckley O’Mell and London Grandison with Flake & Kelley Commercial.
A low construction cost, proximity to the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, an already constructed building and the potential pull of a former U.S. president were among the competing selling points offered Wednesday by representatives of four sites being considered for a planned Little Rock technology park.
The potential influence of former President Bill Clinton to attract companies was part of the pitch by Skip Rutherford, dean of the Clinton School of Public Service, to locate the park on a site near the school and the Clinton Presidential Center.
“There is a big advantage to being in Bill Clinton’s neighborhood,” Rutherford said at a meeting of the Little Rock Technology Park Authority Board.
The board is planning a technology park that backers hope will provide a home to companies willing to partner in developing research resulting from the city’s medical and educational institutions.
In addition to the 10-acre site east of Interstate 30, the other sites under consideration are a 12-story building that was once part of Alltel Corp.’s headquarters, the Village Shopping Center at Asher and University avenues, and a tract of vacant land on John Barrow Road near Interstate 630.
The sites were chosen by the board in October from among 23 proposals, most of them submitted by commercial developers.
Representatives of each of the four sites made 15-minute presentations to the board Wednesday at a meeting at the Jack Stephens Center on the UALR campus.
Afterward, the board voted to spend up to $10,000 on engineering studies of each site. Chairman Mary Good also asked the site representatives to submit information on the potential selling prices for the properties. The board also agreed that it would tour each site.
The site advocated by the Clinton School is owned by World Services for the Blind. It is bounded by East Sixth Street, East Eighth Street, College Street and Collins Street.
The site is currently occupied by a few stores and businesses that lease space on a month-to-month basis, developer Rett Tucker said.
Rutherford said Heifer International, Acxiom Corp. and the Clinton School are among entities in the area that could help attract businesses to a technology park.
The area’s restaurants and hotels as well as the eStem Charter Schools would also be a draw, he said.
“The renaissance area for Little Rock is downtown,” Rutherford said.
Representatives of the Alltel and Barrow Road sites also cited the restaurants and other businesses surrounding their favored locations.
Proponents of the Village Shopping Center site noted that it would be within walking distance of UALR. If it located there, said Hank Kelley, chief executive of Flake & Kelley Commercial, the technology park could eventually acquire a total of about 30 acres for development, which would include the shopping center.
The site is also near 53 acres of wetlands at the former Coleman Dairy, which Kelley said could also be an asset.
Kelley’s firm also pitched the former Alltel building, which includes 212,000 square feet of space that the authority could lease or buy.
The building includes six high-speed elevators, and equipment could also be included in a purchase, he said.
“The finishes in these buildings are second to none,” he said.
Kelley said, however, that any space for chemical laboratories would have to be added to the building.
Good noted that it would likely to be expensive to add such space to a high-rise building. Representatives of Kelley’s firm also said the building’s occupant would have to add a new heating and cooling system at a cost of about $1.3 million.
Kelley said the 14-acre Village Shopping Center property is worth about $4 million, and space in the former Alltel building, which is owned by Verizon Wireless, is worth about $65 per square foot. Space in the building could also be leased for about $19.75 per square foot annually, he said.
Representatives of the other sites did not have price estimates Wednesday.
Pam Brown Courtney, owner of the site on John Barrow Road, said the price for her property would be “something you can afford, I promise you that.”
Proponents of the John Barrow site noted that the authority would not have to demolish any buildings before starting construction on the 37.5-acre tract of vacant land.
They also touted the site’s location near the McMath Library, a planned community center, and medical institutions such as Baptist Health Medical Center and the Arkansas Heart Hospital.
City Director Doris Wright, whose ward includes the site, touted another benefit.
“You’ll have me as your champion, and I can get a lot of things done,” she said.