Construction materials e-commerce company RenoRun has established an Omaha sales and marketing headquarters to support the Montreal-based startup’s continued growth into the U.S. The new office, opened last fall, is expected to grow to employ 100 over the next 12-18 months per Paul Wurth, chief revenue officer.

“Starting in October 2020, we opened our first U.S. location in Boston,” Wurth said. “We now have three other locations in the U.S.—Chicago, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. All of our outbound sales and marketing to these locations will happen from [Omaha].”

He continued, “Omaha is a great place to build a sales organization. There’s a high work ethic here. There’s a great group of young talent. The cost of living is low compared to these other major metros. It’s a great space to build an outbound sales and marketing team.”

Launched five years ago, RenoRun (as in “renovation run”) solves an age-old problem in construction: losing time to repeated trips to stores to buy materials. RenoRun’s e-commerce platform allows a customer to order supplies through an app with the materials delivered as directed, avoiding work interruptions at the jobsite. 

Wurth said the expansion of delivery services during the pandemic has helped spur adoption of the company’s offerings, along with customer service that outpaces competitors.

“We’re building the world’s most contractor-centric brand,” he said. “Contractors have always been sort of dismissed, especially small-to-medium-sized companies. We believe they should get the exact same attention everybody else gets. We hire highly trained, highly skilled people to do all of our delivery fulfillment; people with a ton of construction knowledge who are picking materials as if the contractors themselves were in the store looking at 2x4s. We want to provide the highest-level experience to our contractors, therefore we own the entire experience.”

Seth Lamb, owner of Bull Construction in Philadelphia, attested to the company’s service, which reflects an innate understanding of the needs of a typical contractor. 

“If my framer has to leave the job, go to Home Depot, buy 2x4s, stand in line, it’s like an hour of wasted time. An hour and a half, sometimes, of wasted time,” he said. “I don’t have to deal with any of that anymore, I can just get on the app.

I try to put my orders in the day before; I just do it all online and it gets delivered the next day. But there have been many times where they’ve helped me out of a jam. There’s been times I’ve had my framer on site and he’s like, ‘Hey, I gave you a bad count. We need 50 more 2x4s.’ No problem. Two hours later, they’re getting dropped off and the guys continue working.”

In February, RenoRun announced it had landed $142 million in Series B funding for its e-commerce platform, ensuring more locations are on the way, including in the U.S. While not divulging specifics, Wurth confirmed the company’s desire to grow rapidly in the coming months.

“Being a startup and being under the radar for a long time has really worked well for us,” he said. “Large corporations, much like freightliners, are very hard to change direction. Whereas us, being a small company, we are attacking this problem 100% of the time and we’re doing it from a place of technology first.”

“We have some runway to get into new cities and metro areas, but we’ve also got some big competition with big pockets. So, our ability to execute and our ability to move fast—not only fast with actual delivery but moving fast with business strategy—has to serve us well.”

Visit renorun.ca for more information.

This article originally appeared in the June/July 2022  issue of B2B Magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.