Connie Wimer: A lifetime of defying – and disrupting – expectations

For much of Connie Wimer’s life, the founder and owner of Business Publications Corp. has taken the road less traveled. Usually, it worked out, but even when it didn’t, her failures kept things interesting and memorable.

“Connie” is how most people refer to this stylish, 91-year-old woman who, like Madonna, Cher and Dolly, is a single-name identity.

“She’s just about the smartest woman I know,” Des Moines City Councilwoman Marie Wilson once said. “She pays attention. She can smell out good information.”

 A presentation Wimer made years ago at a Des Moines Chamber of Commerce gathering helps frame her life. Each month, a different community leader was featured at chamber lunches. Wimer followed appearances by John Ruan and Gary Kirke. Rather than tout her successes, Wimer said, “I gave a speech about all the things I tried that didn’t work. I believe if you aren’t making mistakes, you aren’t trying hard enough.”

One of her failures involved a bridal business centered on an invisible connector that joined tops and skirts, giving brides more flexibility in selecting wedding gowns. 

“It was a brilliant idea” but the creator had no business abilities and didn’t seem able to learn, said Wimer. After much frustration, she called it a day and took her loss as an investor.

A fact that often gets glossed over is how Wimer built one of the most successful local publishing operations in the country. Today, BPC not only publishes a weekly newspaper focused on local business and an assortment of digital newsletters, it also produces lifestyle magazines about Des Moines and Iowa and publishes books and custom magazines, including an annual, 150-plus page “Book of Lists” that is a who’s who of local businesses. In addition, it tackles niche topics in its digital and print publications ranging from innovation to philanthropy and mental health, among others.

She also created, almost by accident, a much-envied event business that promotes and celebrates new issues of her magazines and other publications at unveiling parties and content-driven panels and award programs, which bring community leaders together periodically to review the economy, seek solutions to common problems and celebrate leaders in the community.

Wimer didn’t set out to do any of that.

“Nobody talked about college,” she said of when she graduated in a high school class of 13 in Merrill, Iowa, a small town northeast of Sioux City. Her father, Horace Horton, was a mechanic who could fix anything from watches to tractors; her mother, Irene, was a homemaker.

 “I went to work at age 12 at the drug store, not because I had to but because I wanted to, and I worked there until I graduated high school,” Wimer said. 

At the urging of a teacher, she attended Morningside College in Sioux City for one year, working part time for 35 cents an hour, before moving on. 

She was attracted to the legal profession because it “sounded interesting and I would continue to learn.” Also, she had created her own shorthand, which meant she could take dictation. 

Connie Horton initially focused on a career as a legal secretary and got a job with a Sioux City lawyer. When her boss was elected to the Iowa Legislature, she followed him to Des Moines and never looked back. Her first Des Moines residence was a dormitory-style house with curfews on Woodland Avenue that was created for young women who worked for insurance companies.

Connie attracted the attention of the Iowa Legislature and the Des Moines Register, which in 1953 asked the 20-year-old secretary to model for a Sunday feature on proper behavior for legislative assistants.

The full-page article featured six “do and don’t” photos. 

“I got a lot of calls after that piece ran,” Wimer said, and one of the people she met was a handsome young lawyer named Bill Wimer. In 1954, Connie Horton and Bill Wimer were married and started a family. Daughter Amy was born in 1955; daughter Carey in 1959; and daughter Annabel in 1962.

The Wimers were a fun couple and partied with Bill’s clients and Connie’s admirers, which included Des Moines Register publisher David Kruidenier and Register editor Kenneth MacDonald.

Connie Wimer appeared in more Register photos focused on dinner parties and political events after she became involved in politics. She helped manage the Iowa staff of Republican Nelson Rockefeller when he ran for president in the 1960s. She later switched sides and worked on the presidential campaign staff of Democrat Harold Hughes in 1971. 

She was involved in Planned Parenthood, where she helped host a visit to Iowa by Nobel Peace Prize winner Norman Borlaug. And she worked as an interior designer for architect Jack Bloodgood, a creative job that she very much enjoyed. 

But as her daughters grew older, Wimer realized there was no savings to send the girls to college. “I thought, ‘I’ve made money for everybody I’ve ever worked for, why can’t I do it for myself?’”

She started thinking about businesses where she knew people. “I narrowed that down to three categories: lawyers, Realtors, (because her husband knew a lot of people in real estate and Bill Knapp was a close friend of both Connie and Bill Wimer) and bankers. 

That effort steered her to the real estate title business. “I didn’t know anything about it, and it sounded boring,” so she set it aside and kept looking. About a year later, she came back and did a deeper dive into each of four local title companies. The only one she could maybe afford to buy was Iowa Title, the smallest and least successful of the group. 

In 1976, she borrowed $75,000 and bought Iowa Title on a 20-year contract, putting $50,000 down and keeping $25,000 for cash flow for the operation, which was losing money. Two years later, she bought an IBM System/34 computer and digitized the business, a move that led to Iowa Title going from the smallest to the largest title company in Des Moines.

Wimer realized the Daily Business Record, the official Polk County legal publication, would be a good fit for her title business. The newspaper’s 900 subscribers were mostly lawyers and real estate professionals who were also customers of Iowa Title. In 1981, she bought the small newspaper. 

The newspaper was not making money, and Wimer realized that a key source of revenue was fees paid by the Polk County Clerk of Court to list lawsuits and legal actions. The $1-per-item fee had not been updated in decades; nor had other legal fees charged by the clerk. Wimer joined a lobbying effort to increase clerk-of-court fees, which was approved by lawmakers in 1983, boosting her fee to $5 per item and filing fees for lawsuits from $28 to $60.

When the increase occurred, local judges balked and decided to drop the long-standing requirement that legal actions be publicized. Privately, lawyers told Wimer the judges objected to a woman owning the business that benefited from the increase. 

There was nothing Wimer could do, except come up with a different business plan, which she did. She took a giant step and decided to make the daily newspaper into a weekly publication and focus on something she knew more about than any other media executive in the Des Moines area: small businesses. 

In October 1983, she launched the Business Record, a weekly publication that focused on covering small business. It was an idea the Des Moines Register had discussed internally for some time, but which the large daily would not get around to doing for two more years, by which time the Business Record would have captured the attention and support of local business leaders. 

“I didn’t understand anything about publishing and made a lot of mistakes at first,” she said.

But she learned quickly. She applied for membership in a business news trade association, but was told, “Your publication does not meet our standards.” She asked to attend a meeting and was again denied because “non-members were not allowed.” She asked again and was finally allowed to attend after explaining it was the only way to learn how to produce a good product. 

“It’s amazing what you can learn in three days,” she said. “I picked up copies of all their publications, made a lot of changes, and six months later, I reapplied and got admitted. Four years later, I was the first female chair of the organization.” 

By 1987, after chairing the first small business committee of the Greater Des Moines Chamber of Commerce Federation, she rose to become the Des Moines Chamber’s first chairwoman; in 1990, she was one of three women in the Des Moines Register’s list of the 25 most influential people in Des Moines. 

The inspiration for “dsm Magazine” was a city magazine she saw in Sarasota, Fla. “It was beautiful,” Wimer said. “I thought Des Moines deserved a magazine like this.”

But, she added, “magazine publishing is very different from newspapers, and there was a learning curve. I lost money for a couple of years, but there was such a great response to it. People loved it. … I would hear over and over again, ‘It makes me proud to be from Des Moines.’”

Another thing she learned from the magazine was that people love to party. This should not have come as a surprise to a woman who had been the life of parties throughout her life, but the way it happened was.

“A couple of weeks before we were to get the first issue back from the printer, I thought: ‘I’ve heard about New York launch parties. I need to have a launch party.’ So, I casually invited everybody I ran into and good friends” to a launch party at the ArtHouse, which was a trendy restaurant and art gallery on Ingersoll Avenue, where Star Bar is today. 

About 75 people showed up, including George Mills, the retired Register political reporter, who was writing books about Des Moines history. Business Record photographer Duane Tinkey “caught the crowd when everybody was holding it [the magazine] up, and I thought, ‘We’ve got to have this for every issue.’”

“Two weeks later, I got the bills for wine and food from the ArtHouse, and I thought, ‘There’s no way I can build that into the business plan.’’’ That’s when she came up with the idea of having advertisers have magazine launches at their businesses and have them pay for the food and wine. Her sales staff sold out the entire year (four issues) immediately. 

The events, which can attract as many as 700 people on a weeknight, are now a part of Des Moines culture. There is a waiting line of more than a year for sponsorships.

Separately, Business Record and dsm host paid-attendance events that celebrate annual selections of community leaders – Forty Under 40, Women of Influence, and Sages Over 70. It also hosts periodic Power Breakfasts that explore timely topics.

Although it is not always obvious, family is what drives Wimer. It’s why she got into business in the first place – to fund her daughters’ educations – and it’s why she considered leaving it.

“The company was my greatest asset and none of my daughters wanted to come into it,” Wimer said. By 2007, each daughter had her own career: Amy was involved in media in California; Carey was a physician in Des Moines; and Annabel owned a Des Moines-based design business.

Although her daughters were successful, “they would not have known how to market the business and sell it for what it was worth if I died,” she said. “For estate planning, I needed to sell it and get my cash out of it,” said Wimer, who was 75 at the time.

When she was approached by an Ohio company that owned small newspapers and wanted to get into business publications, Wimer listened and agreed on a price for the entire operation. The sale contract called for her to continue as a consultant until at least 2010.

But the Great Recession hit in 2008, and the Ohio company, which had also purchased other properties, wound up in bankruptcy court, where everything was going to be put up for sale.

Before that happened, Wimer approached the bankruptcy trustee and reached an agreement to buy back everything she had sold three years earlier. By 2010, however, the recession had knocked a lot of value out of all the properties, and while BPC remained strong and profitable through the recession, Wimer was able to buy back Business Publications Corp. at a bargain price.

Once Wimer had the properties back, she did a gradual restructuring to make up for changes that had occurred as a result of the recession. She also created a plan that gives ownership to top employees: Suzanna de Baca, a financial services executive with management and writing skills, who was brought in as president and CEO of Business Publications Corp.; editor Chris Conetzkey, who was promoted to group publisher; and operations manager Jason Swanson, who was promoted to vice president of operations and publisher support.

By now it’s clear that, while many of the roads Wimer chose were less traveled, her enthusiasm, optimism and insight widened those paths and continue to bring in new people who every day make Des Moines a better place to live and work.

About Dave Elbert: For the past 11 years, Dave Elbert has written the Business Record’s Elbert Files column. Before that, he was a writer, editor and columnist for the Des Moines Register for 37 years covering local politics, business and culture.