Airport Business

APR 2017

The airport professional's source for airport industry news, articles, events, and careers.

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CONSTRUCTION MATTERS April 2017 airportbusiness 33 AIRFIELD OPERATIONS CONFERENCE & EQUIPMENT EXPO September 18-21, 2017 Halifax, Nova Scotia swif tconference.org JOIN US INNOVATION & LEADERSHIP IN AIRFIELD OPERATIONS His dad Jim Severson founded Centrex Construction 40 years ago in the San Fernando Valley in California, then moved it to the Portland, Ore., area in the late 1970s. Though Jimmy Severson was surrounded by construction as a kid, he was bitten by the aviation bug. "I had a career path set to become a pilot. That's what I dreamed of when I was a kid," he said. "I worked on my private pilot's licenses and I got it on my 16th birthday. I went to college and wanted to design airplanes and do engineering, but I always had construction in the back of my mind." While Severson eventually got his aviation career off the ground, an opportunity arose to come back and lead his father's company. When he made that decision, it grew a chance to build a unique opportunity in the aviation realm. Severson said he was working as a pilot for Skywest Airlines when his younger brother contacted him with an opportunity. Their dad was contemplating retirement and they wanted Jimmy to take over the company. While he loved his job, Severson said he quit Skywest after five years of being a pilot and decided it was time to come lead Centrex. "I loved flying for the airlines, but doing that and having a family can be a bit rough," he said. When Severson came to the company, he found plenty of aviation connections. While Centrex had done aviation projects amongst others, his dad had worked on getting a pilot's license, his brother-in-law Steve Leasure was joining the company and had worked as an engineer at Boeing, and his brother Tom Severson also pursued a pilot's license for some time. "He was one of my first students when I was a flight instructor," Jimmy Severson said. "I got him through his solo, but after that he had decided it just wasn't for him." The trio took over the company in 2008 when the Great Recession was taking hold. Work was light, but there were a few hangar jobs available at the time. But given each of them had experience in aviation, it gave them a chance to show clients they were hiring a competent company during the hardest economic time of the century. "Frankly, we understand both sides of the equation from the end-user and the construction side," Jimmy Severson W hen Jimmy Severson was growing up in Oregon, construction was in his back- ground, but it wasn't on his mind. said. "I think our clients see a lot of value in that." Leasure, who is currently vice president of planning and estimating for Centrex, began working at the company while in college before he got a job as a design engineer at Boeing at its Everett, Wash., facility. "I worked there for about five years and I actually got to work on the Dreamliner project," he said. "I got hired a few months after they launched the A77 project, so I got to see it from the ground up. "It really developed my love for aviation and for aircraft, just how pure flight is in its TION

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