Businesses that invest in their local community and economy are nothing new, but Medpace has embraced that notion more than ever before, thanks in part to a recent incentive package from the city of Cincinnati. The international contract research organization has been headquartered in Madisonville since 2012, relocating there after a stint in Norwood. Medpace will utilize the incentive package to invest another $327 million at the intersection of Madison and Red Bank roads and continue to carve a home in Madisonville for themselves and their employees.
“We need more space, but we need people to have easy access in person to each other,” says Steve Ewald, the company’s general counsel, chief compliance officer, and corporate secretary. “That’s why we did a campus, but that’s also why we have amenities on campus like the food hall.”
Medpace is located on roughly 30 acres of land that currently hosts five office and retail buildings, the Summit Hotel, and Element Eatery. It’s also properly known as Madison Square, something Ewald wants to make clear.
“We rebranded it to Madison Square because we wanted it to have its own identity,” he says. “Element Eatery is not on the Medpace campus, it’s at Madison Square. Medpace’s offices are at Madison Square. The Summit Hotel sits at Madison Square. We don’t want people to think this is captive land that isn’t open to the public, so we’ve created a nice hospitality destination here that not only services Medpace but is an important asset to the community and the city of Cincinnati.”
August Troendle, M.D., who serves as CEO and board chairman, founded Medpace in 1992 as Medical Research Studies. As the region’s largest contract research organization, Medpace manages the development of drug and device medical testing for submission to the FDA within the U.S. or the CMA outside of the country. The company partners with a drug or device developer, assists with development of the trial, and then runs with it.
“We manage all aspects of that trial,” says Amy Callow, vice president of human relations and assistant general counsel. “Setting up the contracts, finding the locations, finding the patients. Monitoring and making sure the data are correct and accurate. Taking the samples. We have in-house labs at various locations inside and outside the U.S., so sometimes we’ll also do the laboratory side of it, where we’ll collect samples and do testing. Then we also have a data side that does all the analysis and draws conclusions for the test going forward.”
Medpace also has a regulatory function, working with its partner companies to get FDA approval. The five buildings at Madison Square include two offices, a lab building, a logistics building, and a clinical pharmacology unit, or CPU. “We have a Phase 1 clinic that we refer to as CPU, which is when a drug or device is used for the first time in humans,” says Callow. “We also have our Medpace Reference Laboratory, MRL, and that does the sample testing. We also have a Biological Lab, MBL, here in Cincinnati.”
The company has grown to almost 6,000 employees worldwide, with a total of 2,317 locally. The city’s incentive package, the largest in Cincinnati history, will help fund a new office tower to hold an additional 1,500 workers, which Medpace will spread across all company functions.
“Our growth is organic, and that’s important to us because we pride ourselves on our employees and how we train them,” says Callow. “We do believe that we’ve built a better widget here and we have the most effective and seamless way of running a clinical trial.”
The new tower will rearrange some of the existing campus footprint, as the CPU building is moving to another piece of property Medpace purchased on Hetzell Avenue, the street behind Madison Square, and the current CPU building will be repurposed into the new tower.
“We wanted to keep that centrally located in the campus because what’s important around the Medpace operations is that we have good flow between the buildings,” says Ewald. “We’re big enough now that we can’t house everybody in one building, but we have a lot of necessary interaction among all our different functional units. That’s why we remain office-based.”
The company is adamant about face-time and real-life interactions for its employees. During the peak of COVID-19, most employees worked on staggered schedules. Medpace now offers some built-in schedule flexibility to work from home, but being physically present at Madison Square is vital for operations.
“It is really, really important, given the nature of what we do, that people have plenty of facetime,” Ewald says. “We do a lot of training of new people. We’re a highly regulated industry when it comes to executing on clinical trials, and it’s very precise work. We’re dealing with the safety of testing products on humans, and we take that very seriously. It’s important that people are well-trained and have great mentorship. Maintaining our culture of quality is enhanced significantly by being in person.”
Callow agrees. “It’s important to us to be working together and to collaborate strongly,” she says. “Employees are allowed to work from home about half the month and the other half they’re required to be in the office. We hire a lot of people fresh out of universities, and since they’re just starting their careers being in the office, in my opinion, is the best way to learn how to work in the corporate world.”
Medpace’s office buildings themselves are designed for maximum collaborative opportunities. The new main headquarters building was completed in 2021, with seven floors, retail storefronts on the ground level, and a free parking garage attached at the back. A light installation in the stairwell atrium of the headquarters building is by Erwin Redl, whose work also lights up the Contemporary Arts Center. Ewald has procured artwork from a variety of artists—including local artists such as Priya Rama—that hangs on walls and in conference rooms, which are named for Greek gods and mathematicians, among others.
“Every floor is different,” he says. “This floor’s Greek. We have rivers of the world, which are rivers in cities where we have offices. We have a superheroes floor, really a Marvel floor. We also have a musician floor. It’s a lot of fun.”
Of course, a company that wants its employees to interface as much as possible would invest in a top-of-the-line office setting for them. Bringing in amenities and creature comforts to keep them satisfied is paramount. “We want these offices to be a place that people enjoy coming to,” says Callow. “We’ve worked hard to put beautiful, inviting workspaces together, and with that comes on-campus amenities and Element Eatery. It’s a gathering spot for not just our employees, of course, but we have people from all over the city coming in to enjoy the food and the bar.”
From the beginning, Madisonville presented an attractive opportunity for Medpace to move to from Norwood when its lease expired. “It really was an opportunity to consolidate,” says Ewald. “We looked at Northern Kentucky and at this site, and we saw a real opportunity to make a difference here. Not only was there enough land to consolidate and prep for growth at this location, but it was in the city of Cincinnati, which was important to us. Moving to Madisonville actually was an opportunity to make a difference and do something different from typical suburban sprawl locations. The fact that it was a brownfield provided us with an opportunity to turn underutilized property into something that would enhance not only the Madisonville community but also the entire city of Cincinnati.”
In 2009, the Madison Road corridor was identified in the city’s GO Cincinnati (Growth and Opportunities) Study as a “new growth opportunity area.” “The Madison Road Corridor as ideally located to be a prime location for a complex office/retail/high density housing concentration,” the study said, and “can provide the ‘drivable suburban’ office location that the city is currently lacking and mix it in with a walkable redevelopment of historic Madisonville. Due to its proximity to I-71, the CBD (downtown), and large swaths of excellent demographics, this corridor has a strong opportunity to capture growth in office and supporting retail demand.”
That same year, city leaders approved an ordinance to apply to the Clean Ohio Revitalization Fund on behalf of RBM Development, an entity owned by Troendle. The fund was granted and applied to remediation of the former NuTone manufacturing site, which encompassed almost 30 acres.
Medpace moved operations to Madisonville in 2010 and became deeply enmeshed in the neighborhood when it joined the Madisonville Community Council. “We kept hearing that the community council had a primary focus of the residents and no one was necessarily paying attention to what the business needs were, and it was a distraction for community leaders,” says Ewald. “So we said, We’ll organize the businesses and create a platform for them to address the small business growth and opportunities here in Madisonville. There’s a lot of stuff we’ve done to really be a responsible member of the community that you don’t normally see big companies do, because we don’t view ourselves as a big company. I know we are, but we didn’t start that way. We don’t carry ourselves that way. We really are individuals and part of the community in which we live, and you see that in the personality and disposition of folks here.”
Medpace has expanded its undeveloped land with the procurement of properties on the other side of Hetzell Avenue behind Madison Square. Other potential sites for the office tower construction included company locations in Denver and in Irving, Texas.
“At each step, we reevaluate whether we want to continue to invest here and do what’s most efficient not only for our business operations but for our capital deployment,” Ewald says. “Fortunately, we’ve been able to align those things in Madisonville. We’re not adverse to expanding elsewhere, and certainly for hiring that could be beneficial. But we see value in having as many people as possible at headquarters, and thankfully the city and the state have partnered with us to help facilitate that.”
Seeking inspiration for how to expand Madison Square, the company looked at the redevelopment of Summit Park in Blue Ash from an airfield to retail and restaurant public spaces. “We think having an attractive park-like environment for our employees shouldn’t exclude the community,” says Ewald. “What you’ll see with the next phase of what we’re doing with this new tower is a massive public green space nearby.”
Both Summit Hotel and Element Eatery are operated separately from Medpace, though they’re managed by AJT Management, an umbrella company of Troendle’s. Originally envisioned as a conference hotel, Summit opened in 2018 and features a single-loaded corridor layout with an impressive atrium; six conferences can run concurrently with a central nourishment hub for the main and breakout rooms. A huge rooftop deck and patio are suitable for business or pleasure. Notable hotel guests have included participants in the Western & Southern Open (now Cincinnati Open) and members of area sports teams such as the Cincinnati Bengals, Cincinnati Reds, and FC Cincinnati.
Element Eatery launched in 2022, with nine restaurants and RJ’s Taproom anchoring the food hall space. “We were open to starting a new location,” says Jack O’Reilly-Tanner, assistant general manager with RJ Brands, which owns RJ’s Taproom. “There was a quick transition to a craft cocktail and taproom experience. It’s a really good relationship. They support us, we support them. Every Tuesday we do a specific Medpace discount for a couple bucks off beer, something like that, which is very much aligned with keeping the employees here.”
Madison Square itself has increased opportunities to extend the experience for employees and patrons alike. The Placebo bar opened in 2022 at the base of Medpace’s HQ building next to the parking garage, and high-end restaurant Alara opened on the opposite side of the building earlier this year. First Financial Bank is on the ground level, and two more ground-level occupants to be announced later this year.
An outdoor stage is positioned directly across from Element Eatery, with live music and performance programming on Fridays and Saturdays six months of the year. Monday nights are trivia nights, Tuesday nights are for Bingo, and JonJon from Q102 hosts a once-monthly event on Thursdays. A little further north on Madison Square, heading toward Red Bank Expressway, are newly opened bocce ball courts.
“Our growth is nicely aligned and the growth of Cincinnati,” Ewald says. “Our desire is to present Cincinnati as a great place for particularly young professionals to move to or, if they’ve come here for school, to stay. We’ve seen an amazing renaissance in Cincinnati over the last decade. We’re a member of this community, and so we want to be a part of what happens positively in Cincinnati and we want what happens positively in our company to benefit the city.”