|
BenefitFocus leaving Mount Pleasant location
By Matthew French
Staff Writer
BenefitFocus.com, one of the crown jewels of Mount Pleasant’s business community, will be leaving the town for larger digs on Daniel Island, the company recently announced.
The five-year-old software company that allows companies to enroll employees in benefits online is one of the fastest growing companies in the Lowcountry. But company executives say that is just the beginning.
“We will be building a corporate headquarters on Daniel Island and adding in excess of 200 new jobs over the next few years,” says Mason Holland, the company’s chairman of the board of directors. “We are growing in the community and want to be the employer of choice.”
BenefitFocus will build two new office buildings and an access road off of Fairchild Street, adjacent to the SunCom building. It will occupy one of the buildings in October 2006 and will lease out the other to business tenants. The access road will be appropriately named BenefitFocus Parkway and has already received approval from the city of Charleston and the citizens of Daniel Island.
“We will have a two-building campus and will be the anchor tenant in a 65,000-square-foot executive office building,” Holland says. “We will also build a 78,000-square foot building that can handle future expansion and will be immediately available to tenants.”
The company plans to break ground on the $15 million project in the fourth quarter of this year.
“BenefitFocus is one of the top three companies in the Charleston area, in my opinion, and we’re honored they would consider Daniel Island as a home,” says Matt Sloan, Daniel Island Associates’ chief operating officer. “We offer them a great lifestyle scenario and a great corporate culture.”
Too little, too late
Mount Pleasant economic development leaders did their best to hang on to the company, but Holland says the offers simply came too late.
“We had already decided to move because we’d been renting this space,” he says of their current home in a vacated Wal-Mart on Johnnie Dodds Boulevard. “Mount Pleasant worked hard to keep us; they changed business ordinances and gave land concessions to rezone. Unfortunately, the offers came after we had made the decision to move. Hopefully, those changes Mount Pleasant made will make it better for further economic development down the road.”
The company did not limit its search to the Charleston area.
“We looked at 20 sites in all, including some in North Carolina,” President and Chief Executive Shawn Jenkins says. “But we all live here, and it would take a lot to relocate.”
Rapid Growth
Building a new headquarters isn’t ambitious enough for the company’s management. The employee roster will more than double over the next three years, and the company will be one of the largest technology employers in the region.
In five years, the company has gone from 18 people to 185. The company now has more than 2,000 clients, including Blue Cross/Blue Shield of South Carolina, Publix, Michelin, Kawasaki and the Kansas City Royals baseball team, and is expanding that list at a rate of about 100 per week.
“I was gone for a week, and I come back and these are all new clients,” says Jenkins, as he pulls out a stack of paper three inches thick. “What other company in the area is growing this fast?”
BenefitFocus had more than 230% growth in 2004 and could surpass that figure this year at its current rate of expansion, the company says.
“We’re debt-free, profitable and all our investment comes locally,” says Holland. “We’ll bring on new employees just as fast as we take on new clients.”
Matthew French is a staff writer for the Business Journal. E-mail him at mfrench@crbj.com.
|
E-Mail This Article
Printer-Friendly Version