Outstanding Directors 2024: Kent Larson

For board service to Adolfson & Peterson Construction (2019–present)

By Gene Rebeck

| August 30, 2024

The last four years have brought numerous challenges and changes for large construction firms like Golden Valley-based Adolfson & Peterson Construction (AP), which has 11 offices across the Midwest and three other regions. Helping AP management navigate these significant shifts is Kent Larson, a longtime executive at Minneapolis-based Xcel Energy. He joined AP’s board in 2019.

“My long-term strategic ability to refocus a business was of particular interest to AP,” Larson says. “From a board perspective, you’re always looking at how to set the direction for the company that provides the most success going forward.”

Larson knew a great deal about how to change directions and manage transitions. During the last several years of his 38-year Xcel career, Larson played a leadership role at the utility in its shift from coal to clean energy sources.

Larson joined AP’s board just as it was starting to put together its five-year strategic plan, which has helped guide its own transitions. “It was very good to have him on board because he was very much involved with Xcel Energy and its long-term strategic plan,” AP CEO Jeff Hansen says, specifically noting Larson’s experience in boosting operational efficiency and productivity. “Because he’s so much involved on the operations side, he brings a high level of business acumen to the table.”

AP’s five-year plan, which was put in place in 2021, has six key elements. One is expansion into new markets, in terms of both geography and types of construction projects. This was crucial to AP’s future, since its longtime bread-and-butter, commercial construction, has been declining since 2020. “We had to change our focus,” Hansen says. Over the past few years, AP has shifted more to light industrial, data centers, and wastewater treatment facilities.

Hansen notes that Larson had experience with managing successful expansions: At Xcel Energy, “we had about 50 power plants across the country,” Larson recalls. “They were operated like 50 little utilities.” Larson helped put together an “operational excellence plan” that established common practices and procedures for all the plants. According to Larson, this plan significantly boosted reliability and safety while reducing carbon emissions. And because of the common procedures, “the costs kept coming down.”

Since AP operates across several states, “you want to leverage the size of the company,” Larson says. AP has “implemented many common practices across the company. These have led to better service, lower costs, better safety, and increased profits.”

When it comes to market expansion and management, “you want to do it in the right areas and to manage the risks properly,” Larson says. As a board member, he has helped AP identify and manage the potential risks of new markets and services. Board members with expertise like Larson “can ask questions that we may not have thought of,” Hansen says.

The top objective of AP’s strategic plan is safety. “The No. 1 asset we have is not on our books—it’s our people,” Hansen says. “Kent comes from a utility background, and that’s an environment that absolutely values safety.”

Transformations like those AP has undertaken “are not easy,” Larson says. “It’s not just about putting together the work plan. You have to get the employees engaged.” (An objective of AP’s five-year plan is establishing what Hansen calls “world-class employee engagement.”)

Larson also has led development of a long-term succession plan at AP. Succession planning has been extremely important throughout his whole career, says Larson, who chairs the AP board’s nomination and governance committee. One of the primary objectives of the board is to hire the CEO. “If you hire the right person, you get great results,” Larson says.

The AP succession plan, which has been revamped over the past two years, covers the entire leadership team, not solely the CEO. The board monitors each leader’s progress. Larson says that the succession plan is critical to strong performance, because the company needs to have the right people in place to develop and carry out the plan and meet financial and other goals.

Larson says what he enjoys most about board service is “making a difference.”

“If all you do is sit there and just attend the meetings, it’s not much fun. And I enjoy helping other people be successful.”