The Geese of ABG Capital

ABG Capital GeorgeIn one of our Just another Friday at ABG blog posts, we talked a little bit about the geese we have living in the front pond outside our office. This is the start of many posts that will walk you through the past, present and future of the Geese of ABG Capital.

When we moved to this building in July 2007, there was only a single goose living in the pond that we named George. We all thought he was a pretty cool guy, too! He never seemed to have a care in the world and just walked around looking for some attention. He reminded us of the kind of friend that everyone has who always wants to hang out and do nothing, while eating your food and drinking your beer. George stuck with us all through the summer and fall, but after he left for the winter, we never saw him again. We did, however, have a new set of geese grace our pond. Those two geese laid 6 eggs that spring and when they came back after winter, they had brought their mates back with them. That meant that we had 12 geese in our pond. When it came time for those 6 sets to have babies, it seemed as if they would take turns laying eggs because there was always just one nest. From this point on, their goose family grew just as much as our ABG Capital family did.

Now that you know a little bit of the history of these geese, we need to tell you about what it’s like when the babies start exploring their new home. It’s really an incredible site to see right outside our windows! You may know what to expect from watching it on the Discovery Channel or Animal Planet, but trust us when we say it’s a completely different experience watching it in person. They would all line up, the mother in the front, the father bringing up the end, and walk around the pond, the parking lot and the building. The parents were training them to stay within the parameters of their home and you could tell the babies were understanding their training. Every now and again we’d see a little one testing his boundaries and then retract when the mother started to notice.ABG Capital Baby Geese

Once the baby geese became familiar with their surroundings, it was time for them to start learning how to fly. This may be our favorite part of having the geese around the building. Seeing them learn to fly is just like you can imagine it; jump a little, *fall*, jump a little and flap the wings, *fall*, jump a little higher and flap a little harder, *SOAR*. Hopefully this year we can get videos of this to share with you!

Another adorable story that comes with watching these baby geese grow up is when they first see their reflections. It’s much like watching a baby look at himself in a mirror for the first time except instead of a mirror, the baby geese would use windows or bumpers. Once they saw their reflections they went a little crazy and even tried fighting with it!

We don’t want to share all of our stories with in you in one day, so check back next week for another post! We’ll tell you about the not so cute times we’ve had with these geese and some of these some of those stories are not pretty…

Just another Friday at ABG

This was a pretty good week for those of us at ABG Capital and we have some great things to share with you today. Let’s dive in!

Coffee is the staple of most people’s days, would you agree? It’s the first thing some people think of when they get up in the morning and some people can’t even function at work until they get their first cup. If someone messes with that routine, the rest of the world better watch out because it’s bound to get ugly. We take our coffee very seriously here at ABG and our routine was messed with… Can you imagine the kind of turmoil that caused? There were broken coffee cups, shattered computers, brawls, and there may have even been a few desk fires… All because we weren’t able to get our coffee in the morning.

Okay, so maybe that didn’t happen. We still had to go about half a day without coffee, but we warned people ahead of time so they could prepare themselves. The lack of morning coffee happened only because we switched our services from Laurel Food Systems to Old Time Coffee. We have a very specific way that we like our coffee; it’s bold, but not bitter and Old Time Coffee can deliver just that!

Today was also our Month End Meeting where we talked about our 1st quarter, welcomed new employees, and congratulated other employees. April 1st was the start of our 2nd quarter and we’ve officially closed our books. Things ended up looking pretty good for us and our portfolio companies and next week you can expect to see a press release and a blog post that go into detail about financials, products, and an overall review. We also welcomed our newest employee Jennifer William to the Inspira Family. Click here to read more her and her new position. As for the congratulations, we celebrated the 5 year anniversaries of Jerry Eddy and Nate Rupp. We hope to see you both stick with us for many more years to come!

Jerry Eddy and Jason Tapolci

Jerry Eddy and Jeff Tapolci

 

Nate Rupp and Jeff Tapolci

Nate Rupp and Jeff Tapolci

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Also this week, Jeff Tapolci and Ron Eggert attended the Pittsburgh Enterprise Forum. This event featured a discussion panel with influential people and some of their executives. They shared some great stuff with Jeff and Ron!

Up next, we have new developments with our build-out project to share with you. We’ve been hearing the sounds of expansion this week! And by those sounds, we mean hammering, drilling and all of those other great construction sounds.  Unfortunately, the Inspira folks who are in the temporary space are getting the most of that noise. They can handle it though! Here are some pictures of what was accomplished this week!

ABG Capital Build out 1

ABG Capital Build out 2

ABG Capital Build out 3

Lately you’ve been hearing about our growth and about all of the new employees we’ve been hiring. One of the newest projects we’re starting to work on, is a new employee onboarding video. This is going to be a welcome video with a few key people in the company talking about who they are and what do at ABG Capital. We’ve started the recordings and it’s going great so far. We can’t wait until it’s all finished!

That’s all we have for you today, have a great weekend 🙂

Just another Friday at ABG

Well isn’t today just a rainy day in Pittsburgh? Despite this weather today, we’ve had a beautiful and sunny week! It’s also been a week full of excitement for us here at ABG Capital.

The first piece of exciting news we have to share with you is that we have another new employee to welcome to the ABG Capital family! Her name is Jenn and she is Inspira’s newest Customer Service Representative. If you missed the post we wrote about her this week, click here and get to know her better.

This week Jeff Tapolci, CEO of ABG Capital and Jason Tapolci, President of VoIP Innovations took Tyler Weimerskirch and Natalie Decario to lunch at the Rivers Club. They do this for every new hire at ABG Capital because it’s a great way to get

Natalie and Tyler from ABG Capital

to know the new employees on a more personal basis. Here’s a picture of Tyler and Natalie before they left!

We also need to address our lunch from today. All employees at ABG Capital are assigned to a lunch committee. Once a month a different committee has to prepare a lunch for the entire office. For April, we had Dan Ravenstahl, Mark Fleckenstein, Justin Cornish, and Tyler Weimerskirch. These guys did a great job ordering Chinese for everyone. We had a great variety of food and it was all delicious. Thanks for arranging that today guys! Chinese at ABG

The last newsworthy piece of info we want to share with you today is about the geese we have in the front of our office. These geese have a long standing history with ABG Capital and we feel it’s important that we share it with you. These geese have been in this complex just about as long as we have and they have surely made it their home. Look for a blog post next week that talks more about these geese and their history with us.

As always, thanks for reading and have a great weekend 🙂

Another New Employee for Inspira!

Jenn WIlliam, InspiraWe’d like to give a warm welcome to our newest employee Jennifer Williams! Jenn is joining us from Equifax in Moon Township where she worked as a Vendor Manager of appraisals. Jenn also has experience from working as an appraisal representative for Lenders Services. She is the newest addition to the Inspira team and will be taking on the role of a Customer Service Representative.  She will be working with Collin and Kathy who just joined the team not too long ago themselves.

Let’s get to know Jenn a little better! She is the mother of a 12 year old son who will be celebrating his 13th birthday on May 5th, Cinco de Mayo! Her son is a seventh grade honor student and athlete who loves baseball. Jenn is an outdoors enthusiast who loves to take bike rides and walks. She also enjoys being with friends and watching movies on a rainy day. When she’s not busy with these other activities, she’s scouring the Food Network channel for great baking tips. She says cupcakes are her specialty… Maybe we’ll get to try some one day!

As a new addition to the Inspira team, Jenn will be working in our temporary office space while the renovations continue to move along. Everyone, please offer Jenn a warm welcome to the ABG Capital family!

Just Another Friday at ABG

Welcome back to the Just another Friday at ABG Capital post! We just have a few updates for you and then you can enjoy the weekend knowing that you’re all caught up with your ABG news.

This week we had a few people attend the 3 Rivers Venture Fair at PNC Park. The Featured Keynote Speaker was Josh Linkner, the Chairman and former CEO of ePrize and New York Time Best-Selling Author. It was a great event and gave us the opportunity to network with other people in our industry.

ABG Capital Cinco de Mayo basketCinco de Mayo is coming up on May 5 and to celebrate that day at ABG Capital, we are having a pot luck lunch and selling raffle tickets for a Cinco de Mayo themed basket. If you are interested in purchasing a $5 ticket, please send an email to natalied@abgcapital.com. The last day to buy them is Friday, May 3 and we will be pulling the winner that same day at 1pm. The only thing is we ask is that those interested in purchasing a ticket be in the Pittsburgh area so there are no issues with picking up your tickets or the basket if you’re the lucky winner.

As you’ve read about in our other blog posts, our build-out is well underway. With more construction coming our way next week, we needed to start moving some things around. We had some employees working this morning to get get things moved quicker. Today we were moving files Moving boxes to a new homefrom the old room to their new location in the old office of our HR manager. The next step will be to move the rest of the things in the old storage room to a locker out in the parking lot.

We can’t spend too much time moving today though, because around 12:30 we’ll be leaving to go play an ABG Capital kickball game! It’s always a fun time to get everyone together, outside of the office, to just have some fun. To any of our customers, there will still be support staff on duty waiting to assist you with any questions! Make sure you’re checking our Facebook page on Monday for pictures from today’s game!

Have a great weekend everyone!

Just another Friday at ABG

Welcome back, it’s good to see that everyone has survived another work week 🙂 It seems as though everyone at ABG Capital has had a pretty good week and we even have some congratulations to give out today!

First off, we have officially migrated off of our old email systems and are now up and running with the new system. With that migration, we also got a new portal site for our employees. It’s a great way to share information and keep everyone up-to-date. **If you are an employee who is still having trouble with this migration, please send an email to Steve or Jacob at the Help Desk and they’ll address your issue.**

Denise Breide, Employee of the Month

Denise Breide, Employee of the Month

We want to give a shout out to our Employee of the Month, Denise Breide and our Spotlight of the of the Month, Natalie DeCario. Denise works for VoIP Innovations as the Project Provisioning Specialist and Natalie is the Communications Specialist for ABG Capital. Congratulations to you both!

Since it’s the start of the month, we want to share all our April birthdays and anniversaries with you. Dustin Campbell, a VoIP innovations Technical Services Coordinator, will celebrate his birthday on April 10.  Dan Ravenstahl, President of GlobalPOPs and End User Services, will celebrate his on April 18 and Heather Halpern, a Provisioning Coordinator for VoIP Innovations, will celebrate hers on April 29th. Help us wish these folks a happy birthday!

As for our Anniversaries this month, we want to congratulate Mark Fleckenstein, the Marketing Director at InspiraFS, for making it to 3 years at ABG Capital. We also have two employees who will be receiving their 5 Year Service Awards! Congratulations to Nathan Rupp, the Platform Manager for Inspira, and Jerry Eddy, the Director of Development and IT Services for ABG Capital, for making it to 5 years!

KICKBALL2-1529373In other news, next Friday we’re going to be playing some kickball! The teams are made and everyone is ready for the game. Those who can make it to the game will be leaving the office around 1 and we’ll be able to play until 5. As we mentioned when we went bowling, there will still be members of our support staff who stay in the office and continue to solve any customer issues.

To wrap this post up, let’s talk about some upcoming events. As you know, our Friday lunches are a big part of life at ABG Capital. In May, everyone is looking forward having a Cinco de Mayo Pot Luck Luncheon  Also in May, we will be taking employees to volunteer at the National Cemetery of the Alleghenies to clean off headstones. There will be more information to come!

If you’re going to be in the Pittsburgh area this weekend, make sure you go outside and enjoy the nice weather we’re supposed to have. Have a great weekend everyone!

Just another Friday at ABG

Welcome back to our blog, it’s time for Just another Friday at ABG Capital!  We want to start off by recognizing some more new employees who joined us this week. We’d like for you to welcome Collin Ballantine and Kathy Scheidlmeier to the ABG family. They will both be working as Customer Service Representatives for Inspira. If you want to get to know them better, check out their blog post from earlier this week.

Today was the ABG Capital Month/Quarter End Meeting where we discussed what has been going on in each of our companies. At ABG Capital we talked about how much growth we’ve been seeing throughout the organization, the new training our managers have been receiving, the build-out and all of the fun and exciting things that are coming with that expansion. We also had the chance to recognize our Employee of the Month for February which is Sara Warhold, our Office Administrator. Here’s just one of the comments made about her:

“I voted for Sara as she has been a huge asset to helping out Erica and myself. Since she started, we were able to move some tasks that I was doing, over to her and she has handled those like a ROCK STAR. She was able to adapt to a new situation and she welcomed the extra tasks given to her with open arms.”

During this meeting we also got to hear how great of a job all of our Portfolio Companies have been doing. Inspira has been exploding with new accounts and relationships, GlobalPOPs is expecting to see more and more growth in the coming quarters, and VoIP Innovations is moving and developing way faster than expected.

Easter 2As we wrap this post up for the day, we want to say have a great weekend and a Happy Easter!