Accent breaks ground on new building

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About the new facility

The 34,000 square-foot center will be located at 4550 Town Center Blvd., in Jeffersonville. An expected completion date is February 2012.

About Accent

Accent, founded in 1993, is a performance marketing company that provides customer engagement solutions across phone, online and social media channels on behalf of Fortune 1000 clients in industries including telecommunications, cable, manufacturing, retail, and insurance, among others.

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Accent Marketing Services CEO Tim Searcy speaks at the ground breaking ceremony for a new customer contact center in the Jeffersonville Marketplace. Accent will hire 175 new employees by 2013 and retain 400 current employees. Staff photo by C.E. Branham

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April 29, 2011

175 new jobs coming to Jeffersonville

By BRADEN LAMMERS Braden.Lammers@newsandtribune.com The News and Tribune Fri Apr 29, 2011, 06:52 PM EDT

JEFFERSONVILLE — A fixture for the Jeffersonville Marketplace and the city’s economic development plans broke ground on Friday.

Accent Marketing Services is constructing a new 34,000 square-foot facility that will be an anchor in Jeffersonville’s Town Center development off of Veterans Parkway.

Although the project will be located within Jeffersonville, Matt Hall, vice president of economic development for One Southern Indiana, said the project was a cooperative regional effort.

“This is not a Jeffersonville project, this is a Southern Indiana project,” he said.

Accent, a marketing firm, was formerly located in New Albany. However, the company was asked to relocate, in part because the move would allow Kemper Foods International to expand into the adjoining space that it would vacate and it also allowed Accent to expand, Hall said.

The move is also likely to prompt additional development at the city’s proposed town center.

“It’ll just be the catalyst to get it started,” said Jeffersonville Mayor Tom Galligan.

A comment buoyed by Jack Koetter, CEO of the Koetter Group, the building contractor for the development.

“We do have some announcements that will be coming later,” he said of additional businesses that will be locating in the town center.

Koetter did not elaborate on plans for other businesses to locate within the development.

City Redevelopment Director Paul Wheatley said in a previous report that Accent’s facility will add about $17 million in local payroll and the company is investing more than $2.8 million to lease and relocate its existing New Albany operation to Jeffersonville.

Jeffersonville also plans to extend the road leading to the facility, Town Center Boulevard, to accommodate the development that has an estimated price tag of about $2.2 million, Wheatley said.

“With 550 people being here, there’s a lot of needs here,” Galligan said. “It also shows this area is starting to make a move. We think the economic upturn has started in Jeffersonville. We think it’ll be the thing that tips the scale in our favor.”

Accent CEO Tim Searcy said the company’s expansion plans include adding 175 new jobs over the next three years.

But adding jobs to the region was not the only economic impact to the region that was pointed out.

“This is not always about new jobs it’s also about the retention of existing jobs,” Hall said.

Galligan echoed the point.

“What it means is, for the area [is] we save 400 jobs; for Jeffersonville, we gain [175 jobs],” he said.

And bringing more than 500 jobs to a new facility, but keeping the location near New Albany was a key component for Searcy.

“It’s really about our employees,” he said. “We have to be thinking about them first. The proximity to our current facility allows us to take the 400 employees that we already have and give them convenient access. You move it too much farther than that and it starts to become a hardship.”

With a new location and state-of-the-art building Searcy said Accent will be able to create automatic traffic for potential surrounding developments.

“This will be our showcase,” he said. “Every client we have we’ll start by bringing them here.”

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