As he joined Tom Bracken, CEO of the New Jersey Chamber of Commerce, on stage to provide the welcoming remarks to the ReNew Jersey Business Summit & Expo Tuesday morning in Atlantic City, Control Point Associates CEO Richard Butkus was aware of two key points:
- Many of the approximately 1,000 attendees at the Summit were unfamiliar with him and Control Point;
- Control Point, a leading land surveying and geospatial firm founded in Warren in 1992, has been helping many of them for decades.
Both facts explain why Control Point signed on to be the presenting sponsor of the biggest business networking event in the state.
For Managing partner Rich Butkus, the event is both a visibility play and a natural extension of how the firm already powers growth, investment and redevelopment across the region.
“It’s a perfect chance to get our name out there and explain what we do,” he told BINJE.
Butkus and Control Point do plenty.
If you’ve driven past a construction site, walked through a shopping center or watched a new warehouse or apartment complex rise from a once-empty lot in New Jersey, there’s a good chance you’ve seen their massive impact in the state.
The company, known as CPA, already has a big presence. It has more than 250 employees in the U.S. and more than 400 globally.
Butkus said Control Point has grown because helps answer a deceptively simple but essential question: What exactly is on the ground, where is it, and how does it relate to property lines, utilities, and approvals?
“We contribute in so many ways,” he said.
Here’s a fact Butkus likes to point out: Almost nothing in the physical world happens without a professional land surveyor being involved at the beginning and the end of a project.
When property changes hands, boundary and title surveys confirm what is being bought and sold. When a developer wants to build, topographic and existing-conditions surveys define the canvas: where the slopes are, where buildings and pavement sit, how water flows, where rights-of-way and easements cut across a site.
Then there’s what you can’t see.
A major and growing part of CPA’s business is subsurface utility engineering — locating and mapping underground utilities using ground-penetrating radar and other techniques. Water lines, sewer mains, electric and gas lines, telecom conduits: If you hit them during construction, schedules and budgets explode. If you design around them intelligently, projects move forward smoothly.
Butkus said CPA’s maps pull all of that together — what’s above ground, what’s below, and how it all fits within the constraints of local zoning and state regulations.
In New Jersey in particular, where space is at a premium and redevelopment often means reimagining already-developed sites, knowing “exactly what you have and where you have it” is non‑negotiable, Butkus said.
Of course, you can’t get that business if other firms and companies do not know who to call.
Butkus, who has been driving business development at Control Point for nearly two decades, said joining the New Jersey Chamber of Commerce in late 2023 was a natural progression in that aim.
Butkus and CPA quickly moved beyond passive membership. The company became a cornerstone board member specifically because he wanted to have “high impact” and insight into what the chamber was doing and whom it connected.
Butkus saw the ReNew Summit as a perfect opportunity to do all that and more.
“Relationships drive business,” he said. “And visibility creates relationships.”
