The Mid Valley Chamber of Commerce holds its annual chamber of commerce and service club Thanksgiving lunch. 11:30 a.m. Courtyard by Marriott 15433 Ventura Blvd., Sherman Oaks (818) 989-0300 midvalleychamber.com

Mattel Inc. has filed a lawsuit against Van Nuys toymaker MGA Entertainment Inc. alleging the company stole its concept for the popular Bratz doll line. The complaint, filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Riverside, expands a lawsuit filed in 2004 in which El Segundo-based Mattel alleged one of its former doll designers sold the concept of Bratz to MGA. The new suit contends MGA hired away key Mattel personnel and used intellectual property theft to fuel the growth of the company. The popular Bratz line first hit store shelves in 2001. Calls to MGA were not immediately returned.

The Los Angeles Board of Airport Commissioners is trying a second time to get commercial air service at Palmdale Airport. The commission on Nov. 20 issued a release of a request for proposal to start air service from the 60-acre airport starting in 2007. The request invites all U.S. commercial airlines providing scheduled service to submit a proposal outlining possible service. Proposals will address aircraft type, number of daily departures, destination hub, connecting market opportunities, and marketing and promotion strategies. The deadline to submit proposals is Jan. 5. This is the second time in recent years that the airport commission has attempted to bring air service to Palmdale. Scenic Airways provided flights from the airport to North Las Vegas from late 2004 through March 2006 Airport officials provided free rent to Scenic and spent $75,000 marketing the service. This time around, a $900,000 federal grant in addition to contributions from Los Angeles World Airports, the city of Palmdale and Los Angeles County has been pooled together to fund a $2.05 million revenue guarantee agreement to mitigate the business risk an airline faces in entering a new, unproven market. Palmdale, LAWA and other partners are also providing $2.56 million in in-kind contributions, including terminal rent abatements, advertising, marketing, promotional support and staff time. The development of Palmdale will facilitate access for travelers and cargo transport and help alleviate air and vehicular traffic congestion ant Los Angeles International Airport, said airport commission Vice President Valeria Velasco in a statement. “I am confident Palmdale Regional Airport will be the gem in the northern region of Los Angeles County,” Velasco said.

A new health center has opened to serve the uninsured of the Santa Clarita Valley. Samuel Dixon Health Center remodeled its facility in Newhall to include updated clinic features and new amenities. It is located on the campus of Newhall Elementary School at 24607 Walnut St. The clinic is intended as temporary as officials fundraise and search for a suitable location for a permanent facility.

A 14-unit apartment complex in Valley Village was sold for $2.3 million. The project, The Radford Apartments located at 5400 Radford Ave., was sold to a private investor. Chris Thompson, a broker with Investment Real Estate Associates, represented the seller, also a private investor. The buyer was represented by Braemon Hanes, a broker with Hanes Investment Realty Inc.

The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors approved a plan Tuesday to design and build a $98 million ambulatory center in Lancaster to replace the High Desert Hospital that was converted to an outpatient center in 2003. The proposal calls for a 124,000-square-foot facility at Avenue I and 3rd Street East to house a new surgery center, clinic building, administration and support facility and center plant. In a statement after the vote, Supervisor Mike Antonovich said the project would help reduce overcrowding at other healthcare facilities in the Antelope Valley and improve healthcare for the region. “This project has been a priority since the closing of High Desert Hospital three years ago,” said Antonovich, whose fifth district includes Lancaster. “The new health center will be designed and constructed with the needs of the community as the primary focus.” The county is working with the city to acquire the 15-acre property. Construction is expected to finish by late 2010 with full operation slated for 2013, according to Antonovich’s office Tuesday.

Countrywide Commercial Real Estate Finance has closed a $183 million loan to Westcore Properties LLC, the company said today. The financing will be used for the acquisition of Westcore-Mack Cali Colorado portfolio, consisting of 19 office buildings representing 1.4 million square feet and 1.6 acres of land for parking. The properties are located in suburban Denver and Colorado Springs, Colo.

California Home Builders No. 5 Fastest Growing Company Overall (83.43%) Skyrocketing home prices, a dearth of affordable housing and the colossal Southern California housing boom have made the past few years good ones for the Canoga Park residential construction company California Home Builders. From 2004 to 2005, revenue for the homebuilder jumped a whopping 83.43 percent from $24.08 million to $44.17 million and as of June 30 this year is already on track to hit $45.73 million. Such an increase, fueled by a perfect storm of conditions for residential developers, has made California Home Builders the fifth fastest growing private company in the San Fernando Valley. “Every year, we’ve been growing. We’ve been growing constantly,” said company President Shawn Evenhaim. Israel-born Evenhaim founded California Home Builders in 1994 to construct custom homes and in-fill residential communities. It was the zenith of the recession and Evenhaim determined early on that his company had to focus more on the customer and the neighborhood versus the bottom line. As a result, he crafted a small, close-knit staff that worked well together and took pride in their work, he said. He also created a simple credo to tackle only a handful of projects at a time so that a construction manager could see the project from beginning to end. “We don’t want to be a machine,” he said. “We want it to work with the community.” While the “customer first” concept wasn’t new, it was something of novelty among homebuilders then, Evenhaim said. People took notice. “We have people calling us all the time asking, ‘When is our next project?'” he said. Since then, the company has tackled hundreds of detached home, custom home, tract home and low-income, market-rate and senior apartment projects mostly in Los Angeles and Ventura counties. The vast majority have been centered in the Valley from two apartment complexes with 136 units in Sylmar and 36 homes on five Winnetka tracts to 32 apartments in Van Nuys and custom homes in Granada Hills. The projects have ranged from simple entry-level homes starting at $150,000 to $3 million custom homes. DLC Inc. No. 6 Fastest Growing Company Overall (70.15%) Even though it was founded just five years ago, the Woodland Hills finance and accounting consulting firm DLC Inc. is no stranger to fast growth. Between 2003 and 2004, the company increased revenue 75.30 percent, making it the seventh fastest growing private company in the San Fernando Valley area last year. That trend has continued through 2005. The company, founded by former recruiting consultant David Lewis, boosted its 2004 revenue of $14.2 million to $24.16 last year a 70.15% increase. The increase moved DLC up one slot to No. 6 on the Business Journal’s list of fastest growing private companies for 2006. Chris Coates

L.A. Daily News parent MediaNews Group is one of seven media companies joining a partnership with Yahoo! to deliver online advertising and news content. The partnership represents newspapers in 38 states and includes major market dailies in San Francisco, Denver, Dallas, Atlanta, St. Louis and Houston. The arrangement allows advertisers already listing jobs in partner newspapers to post openings on Yahoo! HotJobs and throughout the Yahoo! network. Yahoo! and media companies will also collaborate to use Yahoo!’s technology platform to sell online advertising for the newspaper’s website; use Yahoo!’s search monetization functionality on newspaper Web sites; and offer local Yahoo! products such as listings and maps on the paper’s Web sites. William Dean Singleton, CEO of Denver-based MediaNews Group, in a statement called the deal a transformational one for the newspaper industry. “This relationship will significantly extend our local assets to a much wider audience, and gives us the technology required to fulfill the growing demands of advertisers and consumers,” Singleton said. Other companies in the partnership include Belo Corp., Cox Newspapers, Inc., Hearst Newspapers; Journal Register Co.; Lee Enterprises, Inc.; and The E.W. Scripps Co. MediaNews Group owns Woodland Hills-based Daily News through the Los Angeles Newspaper Group, which also controls the Long Beach Press Telegram, San Bernardino Sun, Inland Valley Daily Bulletin and several others. Last month, it was announced that the Daily News was cutting some staff and reducing some editions. Read about the cutbacks click here .

So let’s get this straight: 40 percent of the fastest growing private companies are businesses related to the housing and construction and technology industries, sectors that had stellar, if not record growth in 2005. How hard can it have been for these firms to report a great year? The answer, in a nutshell, is that it’s not as easy as it may first appear. While rising tides usually do lift all ships, how high each one rises is another matter entirely. “You have to have a ship that floats,” said Bob Sommers, chairman and co-CEO of Symark Software, developers of security software. “You have to start off with good products that people want and all the stuff that goes along with that.” The executives of some of these fast growing companies point out that merely providing a product or service in an industry or an economy that is growing isn’t enough to surpass the competition, keep customers happy or, perhaps most important, stay afloat once the climate shifts. As many will tell you, luck and the economy favors those who are prepared. That is especially true in the real estate sector where it takes several years to bring properties to market and those may be years where there is little evidence of the coming demand. “It takes sometimes two to three years to bring a property to market,” said Denis Cullumber, president and CEO of Larwin Co., a homebuilder based in Encino. “That’s where the smarts come in. First I have to go out and buy the land and by the time I build it the cycle may be going the wrong way.” Even those companies whose businesses do not depend upon lengthy periods to bring products to market spend a great deal of time thinking about the future and anticipating what can happen. At Key Information Systems Inc., which saw its sales jump by nearly 40 percent last year, President Lief Morin said he has his eye on two trends that could significantly change the business model for the Woodland Hills computer company, and he’s not sitting idly by. The company has been adding products and services, increasing its sales team and exploring other ways to change its business model. “We have to take a look at those trends quite seriously and make sure we are adapting to handle that change,” said Morin. “We have to make sure that we are changing our business model to adapt.” Anticipating demand and change is just one part of the equation. These businesses also have to have the systems in place to meet the increased demand and perform effectively. “There are two ways to fail,” said Lewis H. Stanton, managing partner at Stanton Associates LLC, a Studio City-based firm that works with high-growth companies. “One is slow or negative growth and the other is very rapid growth. Hyper growth can kill you. You can lose control of working capital, your product or your service quality.” Case in point: Back around 2000 when business communications were shifting to the Internet, companies like ISWest that supplied DSL and web hosting services found themselves inundated with business opportunities without breaking a sweat. “We just had to pick up the phone and send a quote,” said Drew Kaplan, CEO and CFO of the Agoura Hills company. “But it was the funniest thing. I would turn around the quote in a day, and I would talk to these people a week later and they’d say, ‘I asked three other companies and I’m still waiting for them.’ ” Particularly where new technologies are concerned, the more critical they become to a business, the more scrutiny suppliers say they face. Events ranging from the 9/11 attacks to Sarbanes-Oxley legislation which holds company CEOs personally responsible for the security of their data, have helped to catapult demand for Symark’s security software, for example. But as privacy and security stakes have gotten higher, Symark is finding that their business has become more difficult. “They have a problem to solve and a time frame to solve it in,” said Sommers. “There’s more competition, but I would say that’s not our big threat. It’s more of finding the right fit and making sure we do the proper selling of the product. They’re looking at the software as strategic to their overall security as opposed to oh my gosh, we need security software.” The other problem that comes with a very healthy environment is that it doesn’t last forever. Cycles shift and change, and these company executives point out that complacency can be their downfall, even in the best of times. “Our biggest problem as a real estate company is not letting the positive environment carry us away,” said Sandy Sigal, CEO and president of NewMark Merrill Cos., which specializes in shopping center management. “On the one hand, the environment has carried us along pretty nicely, and we’ve done better than we probably should have. On the other hand, we’re always looking over our shoulder so if the market does turn we don’t put our business plan at risk.” More than a few company executives say they set their business clocks to their own internal standards, often ignoring outside forces, both positive and negative. “I’m in a heavy growth period in that I’m pushing for growth,” said Kaplan, noting that the DSL portion of the business has matured, making those sales more challenging, and the company is building a second tier offering co-location services for corporate accounts. “I want to get us to a goal, and so I find myself working harder now than I ever worked.”