Greenwood entices e-commerce company to stay

A homegrown e-commerce company could receive as much as $831,000 in incentives to stay in Greenwood.

The Greenwood Redevelopment Commission on Tuesday evening approved an agreement with One Click Ventures LLC, which plans to buy a former M&I Bank call center at 1300 Windhorst Way to house its growing business.

The deal includes $495,000 in up-front cash, plus as much as $336,000 in additional hiring incentives.

“It really is the jobs that’s driving this,” said Stephen Watson, attorney for the redevelopment commission.

The company plans to hire 109 people over the next five years at an average wage of $17 per hour and make a capital investment of $3.2 million.

The deal will be the second in which the redevelopment commission tied incentives not only to hiring, but hiring Greenwood or Johnson County residents. One Click could receive $6,500 per new employee residing within Greenwood, Clark or Pleasant townships.

The company would receive $4,000 for employees residing outside that area, but still in Johnson County, and $3,000 for employees living outside the county.

Not all of the deal is tied to hiring. One Click gets $200,000 in cash for its down payment to buy the call center. The money will be in the form of a forgivable loan, which need not be repaid as long as the company stays in Greenwood for 10 years, Watson said.

The remaining up-front cash, which is tied to meeting hiring targets, would go toward relocation and build-out expenses. Then, over the next five years, the company will get $48,000 each year for maintenance, operating and other costs associated with the building.

One Click could get an additional two years of maintenance expenses if it exceeds its hiring target at the end of five years.

Angie and Randy Stocklin started One Click out of their house in 2005 and turned it into one of the fastest-growing firms in the Indianapolis area. They acquire and operate e-commerce sites and apply their own internet marketing tools to make them more profitable.

The Stocklins started with Sunglasswarehouse.com and have added a number of fashion accessory stores. The latest acquisition is a fedora store, Angie Stocklin said.

One Click’s sales grew from $80,000 in 2006 to a projected $3.3 million in 2010. The company says it has been profitable and debt-free since 2007.

One Click currently has 45 people working out of 12,000 square feet in a building off Emerson Avenue south of the Super Walmart at County Line Road. The company began the hunt for new offices with adjoining warehouse space a year ago and strongly considered space in Plainfield, Angie Stocklin said.

“Now we have a lot of people that call Greenwood home,” Stocklin said. “We didn’t feel we wanted to move away from that.”

The $831,000 incentive package represents the difference in cost between renting space elsewhere for seven years and buying the old M&I building, Watson said. One Click wasn’t eligible for a tax abatement because buying an existing building doesn’t add to the tax base.

Greenwood’s east-side tax-increment financing, or TIF, district encompasses 2,000 acres along both sides of Interstate 65 from County Line Road to Main Street. The district threw off $6 million in revenue in 2011, Watson said.

Although the redevelopment commission has about $10 million in the bank, its obligations are growing. In 2010, it struck an $8.4 million deal with Elona Biotechnologies, in which TIF revenue will back bonds to build an insulin factory.

The city must also contribute $11 million to a new interchange at Interstate 65 and Worthsville Road. The Indiana Department of Transportation recently agreed to build the interchange.