In The News

Best of Biz

Flake & Kelley Commercial would like to thank the readers of Arkansas Business for voting us as this year’s:

Best Commercial Property Developer – Winner
Best Commercial Property Management Firm – Finalist

Go To Arkansas Business download the complete Best of Biz list from.

The Three Amigos

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.

Fayetteville Professional Night Out – Park Centre in Fayetteville

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 of Flake & Kelley Commercial (Small Private Company Category Winner)

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.

Can’t top Gigi’s Cupcakes

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.