Category Archives: Weekly Recap

Just another Friday at ABG

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We were unable to get our Just another Friday at ABG Capital post out last week, but today we have some great updates for you. I first want to report on our office build-out that is moving along nicely. Our “fish bowl” like conference room is almost complete and has already been in use. Our Communications Specialist, Natalie DeCario, was signed up for a 3-day Social Media Boot Camp sponsored by ASPE-ROI. Since they were unable to host the course at their facility, due to a low enrollment, we held it in the new conference room so it wouldn’t get canceled. Our visitors enjoyed the new space!

Speaking of social media, we want to give a shout out to Natalie on her first podcast. It revolved around “Social Media Tips and Faux Pas.” She was interviewed by Suzanne Bowen who is blogger for TMCNet on their Monetizing IP Communications channel.

100 Fastest Growing Companies

From left to right: Barry Yancosek, Tim Linn, Randy Stegner, Jason Tapolci, Jeff Tapolci

We have to give a huge congratulations to our portfolio company, VoIP Innovations, for their recent achievements. They were named 13th overall in the Pittsburgh Business Times 100 Fastest Growing Companies. In their technology category, they ranked number 1! What a great accomplishment everyone, it’s well deserved! Follow these links to see photos from the event along with a video of Jason Tapolci, President of VoIP Innovations, who talks about the company’s success.

Not only did they receive that accolade, but they were also notified last week that they ranked 1207 in the Inc. 500/5000 Fastest Growing Company list. This is the second year in a row that VoIP Innovations has ranked in both of these lists. Again, we congratulate everyone at VoIP Innovations for their hard work!

Paul Frye - Employee of the Month

Paul Frye – Employee of the Month

Lastly, we want to give you some updates from our month end company meeting that was held today. Paul Frye was nominated as the ABG Capital Employees of the Month for July. We also want to recognize Dustin Campbell and Jake Crisman who were our Honorable mentions for July. Keep up the great work, you guys rock!

As we wrap up this week’s Just another Friday post, we want to tell everyone to have a fantastic weekend celebrating Labor Day!

Just another Friday at ABG

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Who’s happy it’s Friday? We are! We just have a few things to cover and then it’s time for the weekend. We’ll start with the outings that Jeff Tapolci, ABG Capital CEO, and Ron Eggert, ABG Capital President, attended on Tuesday. They first went to the PVCA 2013 Outstanding Entrepreneur of the Year Luncheon. Later on in the day they attended a Client and Colleague Reception hosted by Clark Hill Thorp Reed. They were celebrating their new identity and thanking everyone who supported them in the process. To read more about these events, take a look at the Around Town with Jeff blog post!

As you remember from last week, we started Tend to You at 10 and 2 breaks as part of a new wellness program. So far it’s been going pretty well! Everyone can get away from their desk and go outside to blow off some steam. We’ve seen people using footballs, Frisbees and a hockey net even showed up. Check out the GlobalPOPs Facebook page if you want to see pictures from the pick-up hockey game.

ABG Capital Tend to You

A great action shot of Nate!

We want to give a shout out to our lunch committee this week for cooking up some great stuff for lunch today. Barry Yancosek, Sally Stewart, Joe Golubski and Jenn Williams have come up with a BBQ menu that includes BBQ chipped ham, BBQ pulled pork, vegan linguini salad, and a vegan bean bake. Doesn’t that sound delicious? They also brought watermelon and chips and for dessert they had ice cream and fruit bars. Thanks for the fantastic lunch!

Next I want to talk a little about the 12 Chimes of Life. While our Executive Team was at the Gazelles Leadership Summit a few weeks ago they got a book called Live a Thousand Years by Giovanni Livera. The book examines how measuring your time and success by moments and experiences can be very powerful. If you take these strategies to heart and apply them to your life you’ll experience 12 times the life experiences of the average person. If you want more information on each chime, we’ll be posting them individually on our social media sites every Monday. Here is the list of the 12 Chimes of Life:

  1. Time for yourself
  2. Time to be positive
  3. Time to give
  4. Time for relationships
  5. Time to learn
  6. Time in the moment
  7. Time to dream
  8. Time to play
  9. Time to work
  10. Time to forgive
  11. Time to be brave
  12. Time to reset

Lastly, I want to share a video that’s been floating around our office. It highlights the proper procedures that need to be taken when trying to get something fixed by our IT Department. Employees who DON’T follow the correct steps will face the consequences. Watch the video here!

Just another Friday at ABG Capital

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We had a pretty calm week here at ABG Capital. The most exciting news we have is that our triangle logo has official been trademarked! We’ve been waiting for months for this to get approved and it finally happened. To read more about our trademark and trademarks in general, check out our blog post about us getting our official trademark.

ABG Capital Volunteering TeamOn Monday this week we also posted a recap blog article about our volunteering experience at the National Cemetery of the Alleghenies. We had such a great time there and it was a great opportunity to give back to our community. We even got a special thanks from some veterans who stopped by.

As I wrap this post up, I just want to remind everyone that it’s a three day weekend (like you need reminding :)) I hope the weather is nice and you have a great Memorial Day!

Just another Friday at ABG

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Who’s happy it’s Friday? I know I am! If you’ve been keeping up with ABG Capital this week, you probably saw that we had a ton going on. Before I get into that though, I’d like to mention a little something about our Giving Back initiatives. Throughout the year we are always looking for ways that we can give back to our community. There are a few things we do every year and there are always new things we’re trying out as well. So far this year we’ve already sold roses and carnations for Valentine’s Day, potted flowers for Mother’s Day, and raffle tickets for a Cinco de Mayo basket as a way to raise funds for Make-A-Wish. Next week we are heading to the National Cemeteries of the Alleghenies to clean headstones in order to help them prepare for their Memorial Day ceremonies.

I want to look a little further to an event where YOU can get involved in too. July 19-21 the Greater Pittsburgh Community Food Bank will be hosting their annual Blues Festival at Hartwood Acres. There will be volunteers from our entire organization who attend this event as a way to donate their time to a cause. If you are interested in joining over 700 other volunteers for this great event, you can visit www.pghblues.com starting on Monday, May 13th to sigh up.

While we’re talking about our ABG Capital Giving Back initiatives, do you remember earlier this week when we wrote about Eric Butler? He’s a VoIP Innovations employee who is growing his beard for a cause! The Pittsburgh Penguins are in the Stanley Cup playoffs and are currently holding a Beard-a-Thon challenge that raises money for the Mario Lemieux Foundation. Please check out the blog post we wrote about him that covers all of the information and rules of the Beard-a-Thon.

ABG Capital Executive Team

From left to right: Nick Medina, Ron Eggert, Jeff Tapolci, Jason Tapolci, Lowell Smith

The last piece I want to mention is that our ABG Capital Executive Team is at the Gazelles in Orlando this week. They are attending a two-day leadership summit that features a number of fantastic speakers. I’ve been getting pictures from their trip and uploading them to our Facebook page! Don’t forget to check them out!

I hope everyone had a great week and has a great weekend 🙂

Just another Friday at ABG Capital

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What a beautiful Friday we are having in Pittsburgh! It’s also been a great week for us at ABG Capital as well. We started off the week with our Quarterly Board Meeting and our Annual Shareholders meeting. Our board members are Jeff Tapolci, John Nemcek, Santo Laquatra, Jason Tapolci, Dan Ravenstahl, and our shareholders are Jeff, Jason, Dan, and Adam Scott. During this meeting the top executives issued a state of the union for their respective companies as well as a status report, and they reviewed the 1st Quarter to ensure everything was going according to plan. Their ultimate purpose is to serve as an entity that establishes accountability and offers problem solving guidance to ABG and its portfolio companies.   They closed these meetings by having a relaxing dinner with a few drinks and cigars at Cadillac Ranch. If you want to read more about how their ‘after meeting’ went, check out our newest blog series called Around Town with Jeff. This series follows the ABG Capital CEO, Jeff Tapolci, as he makes his way to many different events around Pittsburgh each week.

This week was also an exciting time for Inspira! Lowell Smith, Ron Eggert, Jeff Linkowski, Joe Golubski, and Pete Littlejohn all attended the 2013 NIPA Annual Forum and Expo in Las Vegas. Jeff even did an educational presentation where he discussed how TPA’s Record-keepers and Advisors can provide a valuable service to their clients by educating them on the benefits of mandatory distribution and helping them set up a routine process for sweeping out small accounts. Jeff did an awesome job with his presentation!

Dan - ABG Capital

Dan Ravenstahl… The lucky winner!

Next we have to mention our Cinco de Mayo celebrations. First, we had a fantastic pot-luck lunch where we had everything from tacos, walking-tacos, dips, chips, and toppings galore! It was by far one of the best lunches we’ve had! After lunch we moved on to pulling the winner of our Cinco de Mayo basket filled with all of the necessary things for a celebration. The winner was Dan Ravenstahl and he was such a great winner because he shared his winnings with the staff! We can’t forget to mention the most important part of the basket raffle. As you’re probably aware, we place a high value on our giving back initiatives and the Make-A-Wish Foundation is an organization that we do most of our fundraisers for. After all of the ticket money was calculated  we ended up raising $650 for Make-A-Wish! It’s always a great feeling to give back to well-deserved organizations.

That wraps up this week’s Just another Friday at ABG Capital. Thanks for reading and enjoy your weekend 🙂

Just another Friday at ABG

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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

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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 🙂

Just Another Friday at ABG

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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

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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

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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!