New superintendent joins CANCO field team

2 hours, 16 minutes ago

The latest addition to Carl A. Nelson & Company’s team of field supervisors brings almost 15 years of career experience to the role, on top of the years he spent as a boy working for his father’s residential construction company in his native Nebraska.

“I am super pumped,” new Carl A. Nelson & Company (CANCO) Project Superintendent Evan Franzen said of joining the firm. His orientation with the firm will be working on renovation of the former Maytag plant in Galesburg, Illinois, for use as a meat snack production plant by Western Smokehouse Partners.

Franzen grew up in Kearney, Nebraska, and lived there until he was 14 and moved to southeast Iowa, graduating from Mount Pleasant High School in 2010. It wasn’t until about a year later, with a baby on the way and after deciding college wasn’t the path for him, that he decided to jump into construction.

“I tried a factory job for about a month,” Franzen said, adding that was when he decided to follow the adage about using what you know.

“I was just helping my dad,” he said, citing his boyhood on the job site. “I didn’t know that what he was teaching me, I could really use that.”

His career began with a commercial construction company in Cleveland, Ohio, that assigned him to a job just 30 minutes from home, remodeling a large low- and moderate-income apartment complex in Burlington, Iowa, where CANCO is based. From that, he moved into an assistant project manager role on jobs in St. Louis, Missouri.

A growing family brought him back to Iowa, starting as a carpenter but quickly moving up to foreman. After about five years, that company gave him his first opportunity as a superintendent.

His move to CANCO, Franzen said, was prompted by a desire to shed some of the extra hats that kept him from being able to focus on all the responsibilities that go directly with being a superintendent. Exposure to how CANCO organizes its job sites and project leadership appealed to him.

Franzen and his wife, Kimberly, have two daughters: Keelynn, 13; and Kinsley, 11. Away from work, he enjoys shooting sports, video games and disc golf.