Not many people can still say they came to the US via Ellis Island. But in 1951, Sergio “Satch” Pecori’s family made the journey from Trieste, Italy, arriving through that iconic entry point in search of opportunity when Pecori was just 14 months old. And more than 70 years later, it’s creating opportunities for many others.
Today, Pecori is president and CEO of Hanson Professional Services Inc. He became Hanson’s chairman in 1998, CEO in 1999 and chairman in 2016, guiding the company through both a recession and a pandemic, along with seven strategic mergers and acquisitions. Hanson’s revenue has grown to $160 million from $33.6 million under Pecori’s leadership, and today the company has nearly 600 employees in 28 offices nationwide.
“He speaks with the same humility and the same care, whether he’s talking to a person on a flight or a bartender over gin and tonic, an Uber driver, a CEO or an elected official. He makes you feel like a million bucks,” says Manish Kothari, president and CEO of Sheladia Associates Inc., who has worked closely with Pecori on multiple endeavors. “He’s one of those ‘Don’t follow me, let’s walk together and make the world a better place’ types.”
Pecori signs a memorandum of understanding with China’s aviation representatives.
Photo courtesy of Hanson Professional Services Inc.
Basic work
Pecori says the way he became interested in engineering was very serendipitous. “What happened was that my brother was working at Hanson as a geotechnical lab technician,” Pecori recalls. “The company was founded in 1954 by a University of Illinois professor, Walt Hanson, and that’s why we’re based in Springfield.”
Between his middle and high school years, he began working at the company part-time.
“I had no idea what an engineer did, but my father was a terrazzo tile construction worker. We immigrated to this country and I started to see what these guys were doing because of the specialization and the connections they had,” says Pecori. “That’s what interested me.”
He earned a bachelor’s and master’s degree in civil engineering from the University of Illinois, returning to work during summers and vacations. Pecori officially joined Hanson in 1974 as a resident geotechnical engineer and was the company’s 50th employee at its first Springfield office.
“I was thinking of coming to work in the office, but I ended up being a resident geotechnical engineer at a power plant in southern Illinois,” Pecori recalls. “Then I went to northern Indiana at a power plant, went back to the office for about five months. And then I was asked to be the resident engineer for the construction of about six miles of interstate highway around Atlanta, Illinois. At first, it was all field work. And then I came back and started working on a variety of things.”
Pecori is shown, fourth from left, at the Schahfer NIPSCO plant in northwest Indiana, one of his first assignments at Hanson.
Photo courtesy of Hanson Professional Services Inc.
Projects with impact
In the following decades, Pecori tackled projects in the United States and abroad, including other road and highway projects, along with bridges and dams, as well as various Department of Defense projects. It also undertook environmental remediation and low-level nuclear waste (LLRW) projects, including the LLRW disposal facility for the Central Midwest Low-Level Waste Compact in Illinois and Kentucky and the Sheffield LLRW Disposal Site in Sheffield, Illinois.
In the early 1990s, Pecori served as the lead manager and technical advisor for the Ground Wave Emergency Network program at US Air Force installations across the country.
“There’s not a more optimistic person in the whole world. This is a guy who doesn’t see the glass half full. He sees the glass overflowing all the time.”
—Jeff Ball, President, Hanson Professional Services Inc.
“I also worked on railroads for probably 15 years, and I’m still working on them,” Pecori says. “Right now, we’re finishing up this big project in Springfield that we’ve been working on for over 15 years.”
This is the $550 million Springfield rail improvements project, for which Hanson’s scope is design engineering, program management and construction observation services. By upgrading, relocating and consolidating the rail lines from 3rd Street to 10th Street, the project will increase passenger and freight train capacity on Springfield’s rail corridors.
“It’s going to open up Springfield and connect underserved areas with the main part of the city. We ended up installing about seven underpasses, so connectivity between east and west is greatly improved,” he says. “The first underpass we did — at one point, it took 15 to 20 minutes to get from there to the nearest underpass to get to a medical facility. With this new underpass, you can get there in 5 minutes or less.”
During the construction of one segment of the project, crews discovered the remains of a 1908 Springfield race riot site, which led to an extensive archaeological dig. President Biden designated the site as a National Monument in 2024. An exhibit space at the new transportation center will display some of the artifacts discovered.
“This project has paved the way for some major transformative action in the community,” says Kenneth Wm. Smith, CEO of engineering firm T. Baker Smith. “Satch’s leadership, influence and commitment to the Springfield community have been crucial to these efforts [to improve] infrastructure and quality of life for Springfield residents.”
A $544 million project that consolidated rail lines in Springfield, Illinois, is expected to increase rail traffic capacity.
Photo courtesy of Hanson Professional Services Inc.
But there are not only historical and traffic-related advantages at stake. There are also educational opportunities through an initiative that Pecori was instrumental in launching called the We Grow Our Own Minority Engagement Program.
“We’re mentoring minority youth in this program that’s jointly funded by Hanson, the city of Springfield and Sangamon County. It’s been going on for 13 years, but what it does is give high school kids and early college students an opportunity to see what engineering is all about in the projects that we’re working on here in Springfield,” says Pecori. “And you can see the excitement and enthusiasm in these young people.”
Students also have access to education, job training and internships through the program, which continues to foster STEAM careers throughout the area.
Pecori is always thinking about how it can help people get to where they need to be to succeed, says Jeff Ball, president of Hanson.
“When I started at Hanson, Satch was the head of our business development group, so I didn’t really interact with him,” he says. After Pecori was named president, their interactions were brief.
“In the early 2000s, Satch called me into his office and wanted to promote me to market director, which leads one of the six business units that make up the organization. And I was just a project manager, so I would be beating out a lot of people,” says Ball. “We had long conversations for a few days because I didn’t say yes right away. And that was really my first exposure to Satch, when he came to me and said, ‘I’d like you to take on this role.’ I was really amazed at how much Satch knew about what I did and what I’d been doing and the successes I’d had and that he’d been watching. I liked being under the radar and I always thought I had been.”
It comes down to focusing on encouraging people and helping them be the best they can be, Pecori says.
“The idea of going a little bit beyond your comfort zone so that this relatively uncomfortable new feeling becomes your comfort zone. And by doing that, you’re going to grow. That’s what we try to tell everyone. You just have to step out of your comfort zone a little bit,” he says.
At 3,300 feet long, the Tanana River Bridge, designed by Hanson Professional Services, is the longest bridge in Alaska.
Photo courtesy of Hanson Professional Services Inc.
coming back
The Grow Our Own program is just one example of the Hanson and Pecori philosophy of giving back to the community.
“Satch does a fundraiser every year at Lincoln Land Community College for their culinary arts program, where he goes in and is the celebrity chef,” says Ball. “They do it every year as a big fundraiser for the culinary arts program because he’s so passionate about food, cooking and wine.”
Some of his other professional and volunteer roles include serving on the boards of the Institute for Sustainable Infrastructure and the Lincoln Presidential Foundation. He also teaches engineering mechanics courses at local colleges and serves as a mentor to engineering students at his alma mater.
“I worked on railroads for probably 15 years, and I’m still working on them.”
—Sergio Pecori, President and CEO of Hanson Professional Services Inc.
“There’s not a more optimistic person in the whole world. This is a guy who doesn’t see the glass half full. He sees the glass overflowing all the time. It’s always overflowing,” says Ball. “That’s who he is, and it shows in everything he does.”
Pecori has received several awards, including the 2015 Boy Scouts of America Abraham Lincoln Council Trailblazer Award, the 2020 ASCE Outstanding Leaders and Projects Award in the management category, and the 2019 Ellis Island Medal of Honor.
Professionally, Pecori is actively involved with the American Council of Engineering Firms, the American Society of Civil Engineers, and the Illinois Society of Professional Engineers, among others, serving in local and national roles.
“If anyone knows Satch, he’s been talking about value pricing for many decades,” says Kothari. “And he was visionary in terms of seeing where the industry was going and the way governments worked.”
As efficiencies increase, Pecori notes that the same responsibility falls on the shoulders of companies regardless of how quickly construction is completed. “So getting paid less for what you do and having the same responsibility doesn’t go hand-in-hand. I think at the end of the day, the industry should look at paying by the result rather than by the hour,” he says. Pecori was “bold enough to swim upstream when he raised this issue. Now everyone looks at him and says Satch was ahead of his time. So, to me, that’s a great legacy that he’s going to leave behind, making our profession more relevant, resilient and sustainable in the future,” says Kothari.
