In the 2019 American economy, the big are getting bigger. Mergers are everywhere — the number of mergers and acquisitions exceeded 15,000 in 2017, a record for a single year, with 2018 a close second.

A momentous Supreme Court decision. A presidential candidate weighing in. A noisy late-August demonstration outside the Capitol. Not Washington, but Sacramento. Not abortion or guns — Dynamex.

Statewide, the number of people getting into teaching via a county office of education or school district internship doubled in the last five years.

If you’re looking for advice on whether winter is coming, you might do no better than an architect.

Industries around the Capital Region are feeling the pinch of trying to find qualified, skilled workers needed to fill various positions. Some companies are starting to reach out to trade programs to help fill those gaps.

Luke and Eliza Maroney want to bring more buzz to Sacramento, and not just the kind they sell. They’re spouses and partners in Lucky Box Club, a subscription service delivering curated cannabis products to customers monthly. But they’re out to fuse weed and other concepts too.

Bitcoin’s value in the real world derives in part from the fact that it runs on a blockchain, a distributed and transparent online accounting register

Cash is king in the cannabis world, and no one likes it that way. Because marijuana remains illegal at the federal level, only a handful of banks will do business with those in the industry in states where cannabis is legal.

Last August’s law, SB 826, was in part the product of frustration. In 2013, one of its sponsors, Sen. Hannah-Beth Jackson, authored a resolution that urged all publicly held California corporations to ensure one-fifth of their board directors were women by the end of 2016. While adopted by both legislative chambers, the resolution carried no consequences. When the deadline rolled around, fewer than 20 percent of companies had actually hit the target, according to a Senate analysis.

A new California law is forcing publicly-traded for-profit businesses to get women on their boards. Yet getting tapped for a directorship is no easy feat.

For proponents of legal cannabis, Prop. 64 will forever be a landmark. But another ballot measure — Prop. 65, passed 30 years earlier in 1986 — gets almost no attention, although it also affects state government’s approach to cannabis.

One area health system is among a small group of providers nationwide trying something different. In September 2014, Dignity Health implemented a system in four Sacramento-area hospitals designed to bring more satisfaction to patients and families after adverse medical events while boosting patient safety.

Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be medical malpractice lawyers. That may lack the ring of Waylon Jennings’ original, but area attorneys say it’s a reality given the money-losing proposition of bringing malpractice cases in California.

The underground market is flourishing in Sacramento and across the state. The BCC and city have promised a crackdown. But there’s disagreement in the industry about whether that’s the right move.

Fees and permitting are a vital tool for municipalities looking to address the housing shortage on a local level. We take a look at different strategies being employed in the region. 

For landlords with the right commercial space, the green premium would seem to be cash-flow heaven.

Eleven months after recreational marijuana use became legal in California and six years on from legalization in Colorado and Washington state, legal pot growers and dealers still can’t use banks the same way other businesses can.

Local edtech innovators aren’t trying to blow up traditional educational models. At a time when edtech funding models are on the decline, local founders are bootstrapping solutions to existing classroom needs. 

Community choice aggregators are the latest test of whether local, publicly run ventures can deliver cheaper and cleaner power than their investor-owned counterparts. But electricity procurement can be a fickle industry.

Do business advisers practice what they preach? We look at how accounting firm BFBA handles its own succession planning, as its first generation partners approach retirement.

Delayed college graduation is costly to students, schools and local economies. Both Sac State and Los Rios implemented measures to help students graduate faster. Can they move grads through without diminishing the quality of education? Results look promising. 

Employee classification is already murky territory for many business owners, and recent changes have further tightened requirements. Yet, with huge penalties attached to mistakes, the laws are critical to understand.

With interest in MBAs flat or falling across the nation, can modernization help programs keep up with student interest? We take a look at how the region’s education programs are innovating their offerings.

Giving ex-offenders a better chance at reintegration is behind the California Fair Chance Act, which took effect in January. With exceptions for a few types of jobs, the new law forbids businesses with five or more employees from asking applicants about criminal history until late in the hiring process — which could mean big changes in how many employers hire.

Picture 350 square feet. That’s 11 queen-sized beds. It’s the inside of a school bus with an extra row or two of seats. It’s a little smaller than the average two-car garage. And it’s the size of 25-year-old Rachel Vaney’s apartment in Midtown Sacramento.

Studies suggest that diversity and profit aren’t two sides of a coin,
but more like the symbiotic relationship between bees and flowers.
So what does diversity actually look like, why does it seem to have
financial implications and how can businesses work toward more
inclusive hiring practices?

Tech transfer at publically-funded universities isn’t just about generating revenue from IP — it’s about the public good. But is the UC’s strategy for negotiating licenses making this double-barrelled mission even more complex?

Each year, small and mid-sized organizations, including small businesses, lose the most to employee theft. We talked to financial advisors about the lessons they learned about how to prevent fraud from damaging your business. 

Back in 1998, two family businesses —Holt Bros. and Tenco Tractors — merged into one, for a total of three families now under one business roof at Holt of California. Twenty years later, they rely on a long history of leadership transitions to select the next in line for succession.

The departure of long-established but undocumented Mexicans from California is a signal — along with other government data from the southwest border — that the flow of unauthorized immigration is shifting direction, perhaps dramatically.

From texts to photos to emails, every modern law case involves some sort of e-discovery — so why are lawyers still failing to do it?

In the last 50 years, higher education’s customer base has become decidedly more female. In 1967, 40 percent of college students were women. By 2014, it was 56 percent. The U.S. Department of Education projects that will climb to 59 percent by 2025.

But the people responsible for delivering those educations are still overwhelmingly male.

The day that Jenny and Bob had their son Justin in 1994, they set foot in a new world. Jenny went into labor four weeks early, and her baby presented in the wrong direction — feet first. So he was delivered through emergency C-section. Once he was born, his heart rate dropped instead of rising, as it should have. For weeks it wasn’t clear whether he’d survive.

Now that millennials are older and starting to have kids, the economics of schools and space are driving many of them to the suburbs, just as it did their parents.

Seven years after passage of the Affordable Care Act created a new world order in health insurance, it all may be upended. With a new administration in Washington, all or parts of Obamacare could be repealed and replaced. All the while, premium increases have continued apace: 

Venture Catalyst is one part of a multipronged effort at the school that its leaders say is helping turn university research into companies that produce world-changing technologies. The school has facilitated a total of 49 startups in the last four fiscal years, up from 18 in the four years prior.

For a sense of how fungible the label “financial adviser” has become, talk to Mike Chamberlain of Chamberlain Financial Planning & Wealth Management, which has an office in Sacramento. “’Financial services industry’ is a very broad term,” he says, “and I don’t like being included in it.

There are good reasons to focus on the special challenges posed by family businesses, like how to keep family resentments from turning to business rivalries and avoid nepotism that results in the wrong people working in key positions. But for some Sacramento immigrant family businesses, blood ties have been the key to survival.

When Oleg Kaganovich was growing up in Michigan in the 1980s and early ’90s, his city of Grand Rapids was suffering the doughnut effect then typical of downtowns everywhere: Shoppers and residents were fleeing for the suburbs. By 1990, fewer than one in 10 residents shopped regularly downtown, a drop from about one in three in the early 1960s, according to a local newspaper.

Among private law firms, a dam is about to break. According to research by two Los Angeles legal marketing experts, 96 percent of leaders at the country’s biggest 100 private practices are baby boomers or older. But many of their clients are younger. 

Cal-ISO is one of 38 system operators for the geographic area that covers everything west of the eastern boundaries of Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico. That compares with six system operators responsible for most of the rest of the country. “The divided operation of the western grid is not unlike having a bus with 38 drivers.”

An African-American employee is told that he “doesn’t sound black,” a Jewish employee hears that she “doesn’t look Jewish” and a gay staffer’s supervisor tells him he “doesn’t act gay.”

Those are real-life stories, according to several experts on workplace discrimination. 

When Chris Treiber left the Navy in 2011, he set sail on uncharted waters. His 10 years of service offered no natural path into a good job. He’d spent his last five of those guarding prisoners and had no civilian job experience. He had a GED, having dropped out of high school in 10th grade. And at age 32, he had a wife and five kids to provide for.

Greta Gerwig, a Sacramento native and award-winning filmmaker and actress, won’t share many details about her upcoming project, a full-length independent film called “Lady Bird.” Except for one — where it’s being shot.

Call it the tale of two turfs. In summer 2014, 27-year-old Benjamin Triffo wanted to do something about his dry, unattractive yard. He owns a four-bedroom, four-bath duplex in Elk Grove that he’d bought in 2011, and his sprinkler lines were broken. But with the state passing rules last July that would allow fines for overwatering, Triffo quickly figured out that replacing his system and re-sodding would be like attaching a drain line to his checkbook.

Douglas Stricker of Folsom, 58, knows all about the need for skilled laborers. In 1992, he launched Golden Development, a company that built storage tanks and other structures for refineries and chemical companies. He had a crew of between 20 and 40 workers but never could find enough reliable welders — even in jobs that paid up to $30 an hour.

Giving customers price incentives to use less energy during peak periods is a key feature of SMUD’s smart grid. That new metering system is designed to let both the utility and customers better monitor energy use in homes. Now SMUD is hoping to take its grid to the next level. It’s partnering with entrepreneurs who can give customers technology that lets them use SMUD’s price incentives to save money

Pauline Marx, 63, had been a pretty conventional investor in stocks and bonds until April 2014. But to her, the rock-bottom interest rates on fixed-income tools like Treasury bills and CDs felt like stuffing money under the mattress.Then a friend told her about Fundrise, a website that lets investors buy small shares of real estate ventures around the country.

Richard Wydick has spent much of his professional life trying to change how lawyers write. In 1978, he led an article for the California Law Review with this broadside: “We lawyers cannot write plain English.” That piece created such a positive response that he turned it into a foundational book on legal writing that’s now in its fifth edition.