As shared in Columbus Underground:
Believe it or not, a fire truck is not a simple purchase. Neither is an industrial door, a custom sofa, or a piece of farm equipment built to spec. Figuring out how to sell complicated products, in a way that actually makes sense, is the business behind a Dublin company called RenaissanceTech.
Benjamin Karam, Partner and Owner, explained it this way:
“We build product configurators, so like if you go to a car manufacturer’s website, you can select their make and model and you follow their build-your-own process,” he said. “That’s the kind of system we make, but usually for more complex products. So things like fire trucks, windows and doors, industrial products. We do a lot in furniture and ag.”
It’s a niche most people have never heard of, called “configure, price, quote” software … or CPQ for short. But it’s the invisible workings behind how manufacturers with very complicated products actually sell them.
RenaissanceTech’s story starts at the Dublin Entrepreneurial Center, the local incubator that’s launched more than a few Columbus-area companies. That’s still where the company calls home today.
Karam and his co-founder didn’t stumble into CPQ by accident.
“Both myself and the other co-founder have a lot of experience in this field,” Karam said. “And we came from another software company that went through some major changes and identified a time where we could step out and focus on this world of CPQ in our own way.”
That bet has paid off.
In just the last two years, RenaissanceTech has doubled both its revenue and its team size, a growth spurt that’s rare for a company that’s been around this long.
Tiffany Jasnikowski, the company’s Talent Operations Manager, has watched that growth up close.
“We’ve been around for 13 years, and in the last two years, we’ve doubled in revenue and in size with our people,” Jasnikowski said. “It’s extremely rewarding to be part of something that is growing and growing at such a rapid pace, to be able to kind of support our customer bases and also continue to build our culture.”
The name itself is a mission statement.
“RenaissanceTech comes from this idea of the Renaissance man, someone who has to be good at a lot of different disciplines,” Karam said. “That’s really what’s needed in this industry. We have to be good at lots of things in order to help lift these solutions for our customers.”
Every client RenaissanceTech takes on comes with a completely different set of problems. A fire truck maker’s configuration needs look nothing like a furniture company’s, which look nothing like an agricultural equipment maker’s, and so on.
Building software flexible enough to handle all of it requires people who can wear a lot of hats.
Some companies lose their earliest clients as they grow and change. RenaissanceTech has kept theirs. Their very first customer was Sutphen, the fire truck manufacturer also based in Dublin, and that relationship is still active today, more than a decade later.
While custom configurators remain the core of the business, RenaissanceTech has also spent the last six years building out SWIFTSELL, a proprietary product that’s picked up major momentum.
Cora Huffstedler, the company’s Digital Marketing Specialist, has led that charge.
“We recently launched a dedicated website for SWIFTSELL this year,” Huffstedler said. “That’s been a huge lift. It’s something that’s just continued to grow.”
For Huffstedler, the company’s growth spurt has made the day-to-day work feel personal in a way it might not at a bigger, more established company.
“I feel like there’s been so much growth over the last couple of years or so,” Huffstedler said. “It’s definitely really easy to be incredibly personally invested in the work that you’re doing every day.”
Ask anyone at RenaissanceTech what they’re proudest of, and the conversation doesn’t stay on the software for long.
“I’m most proud of the team that we have built,” Karam said. “When we first started this, we wanted to make it about building a team, building a company, building expertise, you know? So I think, by far, the biggest lift is assembling and growing this team.”
That focus on culture shows up in some pretty tangible ways. The company runs on a hybrid schedule, in the office Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and remote Tuesdays and Thursdays.
And here’s the point in sharing that: Jasnikowski said the office doesn’t really empty out on the remote days anyway.
“We genuinely have a great group of people here,” Jasnikowski said. “But oftentimes people are still coming into the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays just because they love our work environment and they truly love interacting with other team members.”
Then there are the perks that are hard to find elsewhere: paid birthdays off, and a dedicated volunteer day for every employee to spend however they choose.
“One of our company values is giving back to the community,” Jasnikowski said. “So as an organization, we elect to have all of our employees have a dedicated volunteer day so they can choose any volunteer effort that they want.”
Earlier this year, the company ran an anonymous survey to check in on how employees actually felt about the culture they’d built. The word that kept coming back was “collaborative.”
The company partners with the Dublin Chamber of Commerce, takes part in corporate charity field days, and works with Dublin City Schools and the district’s Business Advisory Council.
That relationship with the schools has grown into something more structured: a 10-week summer internship program, born out of local high school career fairs, where high school and college students team up on real development capstone projects.
For Karam, the decision to build the company in Dublin was never really in question.
“Dublin is really supportive of their business community and has a big vision for it,” he said.
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