When Dan Crane’s father, Mike Crane, had work to do on the weekends, young Dan would often tag along.
“My brother and I were like, ‘This is so cool, we can run around the office and do whatever,’” Dan says. He even conquered learning to ride his bike in the parking lot of the Crane Plastics plant off Fairwood Avenue.
Now Dan, 42, has taken over as president and CEO of the family-owned company. He made the official transition Jan. 1, after a year’s worth of succession planning with his cousin, Tanny Crane. Tanny served as president and CEO of Crane Group for 22 of her 38 years there, overseeing major structural and strategic changes more than once at the former plastics maker turned holding company.
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During a January conversation at the company’s Arena District offices in the Belmont Building, Dan Crane says he wants to hone in on Crane Group’s identity as a holding company and doesn’t plan on pivots, at least major ones, anytime soon.
“I want to lean into our values, and lean into, really, business fundamentals,” he says. “We’ve been around businesses for a long time, but we’re still shifting and learning how to go from … running businesses that we grew and we started, to running businesses that other people have grown and started, and we’re now partnering with them to take them to the next level. That requires a little bit of a different skill set.”
Crane Group Remains Rooted in Plastics
The current Crane Group investment portfolio consists of three companies: Crane Renovation Group, an exterior home renovations company; Pet Paradise, which offers veterinary and boarding services; and the newest, Fairwood Brands, a luxury estate management business that Dan created in 2022. Crane Group holds controlling stakes in all three.
It’s a far cry from the company’s earliest days, which stretch back almost 80 years.
That history is memorialized in a mini-museum of sorts, which lines a hallway in the recently renovated second-floor corporate offices off Spring Street with views of the city skyline. The placards and photos, in green and white like the Crane Group logo, give readers a decade-by-decade rundown of the business, which has held and divested numerous companies over the years.
After his lighting business went under in the 1929 stock market crash, Robert Crane Sr. went to work in plastics. In 1947, Robert, then 58, formed his own company, Taytec Corp., later renamed Crane Plastics. It was then, and remained for decades after, a plastics manufacturer. His son, Robert “Bob” Crane Jr., joined him a short time after, folding the second generation of Cranes into the mix.
They began manufacturing plastics for others. But in the 1950s, the Cranes started producing vinyl siding, and by the end of the decade, something more colorful: hula hoops. Those hula hoops turned a profit in an otherwise bleak financial year.
In the 1960s, Bob became CEO, succeeded after his death in the early 1990s by his brother, Jameson “Jim” Crane Sr. By then, Crane Plastics had begun acquiring other building materials businesses, from roofing, to decking, to steel.
Amid all of that, Tanny says, an anti-nepotism policy took root, for years prohibiting third-generation Cranes from joining the company. But she doesn’t look back on the policy with any ill will. “The luxury of that decision that our fathers made allowed each of us to really pursue our passions,” she says.
By the 1980s, Tanny had moved to Chicago and was working for Quaker Oats. But as Crane Plastics got bigger and diversified, the rule was no longer needed, she says. As the second generation aged, the question of what came next for Crane Plastics became unavoidable.
Neither her dad, Bob, nor her uncle, Jim, wanted to sell the company. And their leadership team wanted them to keep it private within the family, she says. “My dad turned to me and started the three-year drip, drip, drip campaign of every Sunday night calling me, saying, ‘Yeah, come back to Columbus,’” she says. Tanny joined the company in 1987.
Even among family businesses, anti-nepotism policies are somewhat common, says Conway Center for Family Business President Kelly Jasin. “A lot of family businesses will have family entrance requirements that talk about how family members are brought into the business, that there needs to be a role for which they are qualified,” Jasin says.
With the policy eliminated, Bob and Jim also brought in Mike and his brother, Jay (Jim’s sons); Tanny’s husband, John Wolff; and her brother-in-law, Tim Miller.
In 1999, four years before Tanny took on the CEO title, the company underwent a major restructuring, splitting off its brands into nine individual limited liability companies. A decade later, Crane Group sold off its legacy plastics business, cementing its current status as a holding company with more than 2,000 employees.
Why Dan Crane Joined the Family Business
Dan knew he wanted to work for the family company one day, but the details would take some time to iron out.
“I wanted to be able to kind of find my own way and make sure that it was the right move for me before I did that,” Dan says.
So, the Columbus Academy graduate left the city to study mathematics at Harvard University, where his dad is an alumnus. After getting his bachelor’s degree, he came back, moved to the Short North, and took a job in 2006 as a consultant doing financial management with Nationwide Financial.
He says he “was out there learning as much as I could” at Nationwide. And with his office a short distance from Crane Group, Tanny and his dad started courting him. The three met frequently for lunch, sometimes at the Flatiron Tavern, where Tanny tried the “drip, drip, drip” on him, she says.
“Just talking about what his goals were, and talking about the future direction of Crane and how incredibly exciting it was to be a part of it and what Crane meant to the community, and I think really touching a nerve for him,” she says. “I think he, like I did decades before, kind of analyzed where he was in his trajectory.”
Mike, who retired as executive vice president of Crane Group in 2023 after decades with the company, says he wanted his son to feel comfortable joining the ranks. When Mike started in 1989, he wanted to be treated like everybody else working there. “But I had the last name Crane and sometimes felt self-conscious about that,” Mike says.
Dan remembers those lunches as welcoming, not forceful. And they did obviously, work. After several years at Nationwide Financial, he took a job as a financial director at Crane Group in 2012. He says it was “a very informative way to learn about the guts of a business. … and how to be efficiently working with our information, and then my interest just continued to grow,” Dan says.
He shifted into general management, then to leadership, and was a senior vice president before being named president and CEO.
“At first, Tanny wanted to understand if I was all in or not, and if this is what I really wanted,” Dan says. “And that was a great question, because I needed to figure that out for myself.”
Some soul searching and conversations with those closest to him led him to a “yes.”
Tanny “couldn’t be more excited” about the future of Crane Group under her cousin’s leadership, she says. She will continue to serve as board chair. “We’re starkly different, which is the beauty of it,” she says. “I am a very strong extrovert, I think he would categorize himself as an introvert. I’m action oriented, and I think that he’s more pensive, more thoughtful and makes decisions differently than I do.”
The Cranes’ Commitment to the Community
Crane Group’s philanthropic efforts are core to its identity. The family’s name is found on multiple buildings in town, including the Ohio State Jameson Crane Sports Medicine Institute, the Bob Crane Community Center, and Columbus College of Art & Design’s Loanne Crane Center for Design, named for Tanny’s mother. In 2024, Tanny rode her bike with about two dozen other riders from California to Massachusetts for Pelotonia, raising more than $273,000 that year, according to the nonprofit.
United Way of Central Ohio President and CEO Lisa Courtice remembers how excited she was to have Dan join the United Way board in 2017, shortly after she took the reins at the nonprofit. “He would bring a different perspective around the next generation of philanthropists,” Courtice says. “Since the internet, giving has changed so much.”
The Cranes all volunteer their time similarly, she says: consistently, thoughtfully and with humility. “I don’t know if it’s genetics or role models or a combination of it,” Courtice says.
Crane Group’s 40 or so corporate employees volunteered an average of 25 hours in 2025, totaling more than 1,000 hours.
“Columbus and the Central Ohio community have been so good to us. We owe so much of our success to what this community is,” Dan says. “When I think about how I want to be viewed in the community, it is as a leader of other great leaders. It’s not just the volunteering but it’s serving on boards.”
As of January, half the company’s corporate employees served on nonprofit boards, many through an internal program encouraging nonprofit involvement.
Dan Crane Looks to the Future
For now, Dan is the only member of the fourth generation working at Crane Group.
Even getting to that point is a relatively rare feat, Jasin says. “Only 3 or 4 percent of family businesses get to the fourth generation, so that’s a true testament to them,” she says.
Still, Dan says it matters to him that family members remain aware of what’s going on. Annually, 60 or so of his relatives get together for what they call “family council,” which has been hosted everywhere from the corporate headquarters to Ohio State University to the Columbus Foundation.
“We get together every year, we talk about the business. It’s almost like a little bit of a family reunion,” Dan says. “It’s a really great way to get all of us connected and then to kind of work toward bringing the next generation into engaging with the business.”
They also use that weekend to volunteer, eat together and maybe go to a sporting event.
Those dynamics aren’t easy for everybody, Jasin says. “You’re trying to balance the family dynamics along with the business dynamics, and … those aren’t always congruent,” Jasin says. “Being able to put on your founder hat or your business hat and deal with a family member in the business setting versus being able to talk to them at a family table is very different.”
But making the business work is all the more vital because it is the family legacy, says Dan, who grew up in Bexley and moved back recently after buying his grandfather’s home.
As CEO, he aims to set the right workplace tone. One day in January, he squeezes his daughter’s birthday lunch in between meetings and wants company employees to find the balance, too. Crane Group asks corporate employees to be in-office three times each week. “Everybody knows how to get their work done and do what they need to do,” he says.
Short term, he’s thinking about the immediate goals every business has each year: hitting budgets, growing revenues.
The company also is working to resolve a lawsuit filed last year by Pet Paradise board members and former executives alleging Crane Group engaged in self-dealing that negatively impacted the business. “We’ve got more locations, more employees, more happy customers than ever before. We’re completely confident that the decisions we’ve made in regard to Pet Paradise have been appropriate, ethical and in the best interest of the business and its employees and customers,” Dan says.
Though he has barely had time to settle into his new office, let alone his new role, Dan says he is not immune to thinking about what will come next, years down the line.
“When I worry about things in the business, it’s those long-term questions. It’s, ‘What is the legacy that I’ll leave behind?’ And I want it to be of stability and growth,” he says. “Whether there be another family member that is up to the task and is interested in [taking over], we will find out.”
About Dan Crane
President and CEO, Crane Group
Age: 42
Previous: Senior vice president and other Crane Group roles, Nationwide Financial
Education: Bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics, Harvard University
Involvement: Boards of United Way of Central Ohio and CelebrateOne, formerly Ohio CASA
Family: Wife Christie Crane and daughters Nora and Josie Crane
Sarah Donaldson is a reporter/producer with the Ohio Public Media Statehouse News Bureau and a freelance writer.
This story appeared in the May 2026 issue of Columbus Monthly. Subscribe here.
This article originally appeared on Columbus Monthly: New CEO Dan Crane Builds on His Family’s Business and Civic Legacy
Reporting by Sarah Donaldson, Columbus Monthly / Columbus Monthly
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