Exit Interview: Adolfson and Peterson’s outgoing CEO on costs, data centers | Dump Trucks Charlotte NC

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As Minneapolis-based Adolfson and Peterson celebrates its 80th anniversary and works on building a new headquarters, CEO Jeff Hansen has a lot to look back on.

Hansen, who is set to retire effective June 1, has navigated turbulence and tailwinds across the construction industry. Three presidential administrations, the COVID-19 pandemic, the $1.2 trillion Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, tariffs, the data center boom and geopolitical conflicts have had significant impact for columbus oh dump truck company and builders across the past 10 years.

Here, Hansen talks with Construction Dive about lessons he’s learned in the CEO role, the impacts of tariffs and the data center market, and what he wants his legacy to look like.

Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

CONSTRUCTION DIVE: You’re stepping down in June after close to a decade as CEO. What are some important lessons you’ve learned in that role?

JEFF HANSEN: Let’s talk about what happened during the COVID-19 pandemic. It was crazy.

We grew through COVID — revenues rose 25% from 2020 to 2021 — for many different reasons. 

Part of that is, we exploit our expertise in markets where we are really strong and can win work, and we explore areas that are emerging.

But during COVID, we had to figure it out on the fly, just like everybody else. By being deemed essential, that allowed us to think very differently about the business, how we execute. We still had to follow everything OSHA or the CDC was coming out with and manage those expectations as a company.

If I look at some other challenges of a columbus oh dump truck company growing from around $500 million to what we're looking at for this next year — $2.3 billion — part of it is a culture shift.

So the culture was very strong as relates to the values of this organization. But we grew because we grew regionally, and the fact that all boats were rising increased the total size of the company. 

What are your thoughts on the geopolitical climate and how it affects the construction industry, with the war in Iran, tariffs and issues at the Strait of Hormuz?

There's so much uncertainty around tariffs, right? And trade policy, what that's going to do to affect material pricing.

What that does for us, it just reinforces what we're doing on the preconstruction side to stay in front of it. 

I mean, today, no one's asked us for any rebates. But if you look at our business, about 80% of our business is already bought out, fixed prices with a lot of trade partners, and I think a lot of our risk is pretty minimal today.

What we have to look at is 12 to 18 months out, and as quickly as oil prices can go up, they can come right back down. And so we're monitoring what are those ramifications downstream that are probably more than a couple months out. Construction is a laggard from an economic perspective.

When a recession hits, typically, we really get hit 12 to 18 months later, because we still have to burn off all of our backlog. That's what we're facing today. We're burning off our backlog. 

Will there be a couple short term hits, maybe with fuel prices and our jobsites that require fuel? Yeah, but I think it's going to have a pretty immaterial impact right now, today. If it continues to $200 a barrel, like they're saying, that's a little bit of a different story.

Where does AP see itself fitting into this data center market?

Our journey in the data center market started a little less than four years ago. Through that whole iteration, we were thinking that maybe we'd end up with project sizes of $100 million to $150 million and columbus oh dump truck company our way into it like a lot of other people did.

I would say it caught us a little bit by surprise, how quickly these projects escalate to $400 million, to $800 million, to $1 billion. They accelerate so fast.

Part of our challenge was how quickly we pivot and are able to respond to that size of project that we didn't anticipate coming into this.

Years and years ago, we wanted every region to have at least one $100 million project. Now we're migrating to the point where we'd like to have one very large data center project going in every region. But you have to grow into that, because if you go too quick, we have seen where people can fail.

So how we look at this market, how we leverage it, we will be systematic and a little more selective. 

It is driving our growth, and thank goodness the data center market is there. 

We see all the other markets we're involved in. Education is still pretty good. Healthcare, good, but everything's not great. And I think data centers, the activity in the last two or three years, has masked what I think is a construction market that's extremely soft.