The Design Knowledge Company
Location: 3100 Presidential Drive, Suite 103, Fairborn
Founded: 1999
Employees: 70
Top executive: President Dan Schiavone
Revenue: Not available
Web site: www.tdkc.com
The Design Knowledge Co. makes it difficult for its employees to find better opportunities elsewhere. The Fairborn-based defense contractor’s benefits include paying 100 percent of health care premiums and deductibles, and annual retirement contributions up to 15 percent of an employee’s salary.
“We don’t hire, we adopt,” said Jim McCracken, the company’s founder, vice president and chief scientist.
The company’s philosophy is to make employees feel like they come first, and its retention rate is well above industry average, officials said.
Founded in 1999, The Design Knowledge Co. develops software that can help quickly alert the military to attacks on U.S. defense satellites.
“Right now we are helping to protect every U.S. space asset,” said Dan Schiavone, the company’s president.
The Design Knowledge Co.’s customers include Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, the Army, Navy, Office of the Secretary of Defense, and Air Force Space Command. Schiavone declined to disclose company revenues.
The company has 70 employees in six states, including 60 locally. The staff includes hard-to-find engineers, physicists and mathematicians.
Supporting U.S. space situational awareness and military service personnel is a point of pride for employees, said Eric Loomis, a company vice president.
“It is one thing to develop software for the sake of developing software, but to know it saves lives and supports guys that are out there in harm’s way is something that is appealing to a lot of our folks and they take it very seriously,” Loomis said.
The company often pursues projects “based on the passion of our people,” Schiavone said. The executives will determine what projects employees want to work on and then attempt to win those contracts, he said.
Loomis said the intent is to keep employees focused on their work.
“So many people get caught up in worrying about where their next opportunity or next employer might be. So we keep them head’s down on their work and not looking over their shoulder, so to speak,” Loomis said.
The Design Knowledge Co. has enjoyed “stellar growth” in recent years and expects to further expand in 2013, Schiavone said. This year he anticipates signing the biggest contract in the company’s history, and hiring 12 to 15 new employees.
The company also has an active internship program that has led to the hiring of a number of Wright State and Ohio State University graduates, he said.
“We are very conservative in our hiring practices … in the sense that once we hire somebody we want them to be able to retire from here, just like us,” Schiavone said. “The concept is you hire people when you know you have enough work to keep them busy for an extended period of time, if not forever.”
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