There are companies that serve the public, and there are companies that also serve other businesses. This issue is filled with stories from the latter. 

The Biz + Giving article is one I especially enjoyed this round. I talked to Brenda Christensen, whose family has owned Thermo-King for many years. They provide tractor-trailers for places such as Amazon, but they retain one special rig for a worthy cause—the Junior League of Omaha. It’s a business expense of $8,000-$12,000 per year, but one they absorb gladly.

Business expenses add up, and one cost many owners are interested in reducing is waste. That is where Omaha startup Retail Aware can help. Entrepreneur Keith Fix has created a way to track when a company’s products are being wasted, or not being used efficiently. How this works is the subject of our omAHA! article.

The end of a year is often a time when employers look at their employee benefits, especially those relating to health insurance. As 2020 was a year of upheaval, business owners have a lot to think about with benefits in 2021 and beyond. B2B brings readers some insight on this often stressful task in one of the features.

There was a lot of news about the downfall of commercial real estate through 2020, but not  a lot of news about the flip side—that Omaha, overall, is weathering the commercial real estate downturn well. Omaha has three new hotels either open or in the works, and as of October, the city boasted nearly 1.3 million square feet of office space under construction. Readers can learn more about that in our main article.

There’s a lot of great articles in this issue. I hope you enjoy them all.

This letter was in the February/March 2021 issue of B2B.