AEC SERVICES · TEAM DIRECTORY
Ron Fair, PE
Founder & President
Ron Fair founded AEC Services in 1996 to do something the industry was not set up to do: take a project from a concept through a sketch, a plan and a permit all the way to a finished, operating site, without handing it between firms along the way.
A union kid who came up around craftsmen and entered the trades at fifteen, Ron spent years watching jobs sequenced wrong and buildings designed in ways they could not actually be built. The question nobody in the field could answer was how those problems might have been caught in the planning stage. Building the firm that could answer it took the long route rather than the shortcut, and design-build was the result.
Ron is an ASCE Fellow and a 1988 civil engineering graduate of the University of Virginia, with 38 years as an engineer, contractor and construction manager. He is a licensed professional engineer in 18 states: Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Tennessee, Texas, Arizona and Nevada.
Today AEC Services runs engineering and permitting, general construction, fuel systems, plumbing and an in-house electrical group serving fuel work, with 53 people under one roof. Ron also leads The Friendly Plumber LLC, RAF Land Development LLC and RFG Development LLC. Growth has been deliberately paced rather than chased, on the view that a company built on a solid foundation should still be standing in another thirty-five years.
He holds the same line on every project: quality and performance are not negotiable, the budget has to be real before anyone breaks ground, and the goal is to be friends at the end of the job rather than to get a signature at the start. In thirty years the firm has lost three clients. Two of them came back.
Ron mentors the next generation of engineers and integrates faith, charity, experience and passion into the business. Ask him about a project and he will usually start with the people on it. What he wants for AEC Services is not the next five years but the next thirty-five, and he wants the people who built it to get the credit.
