ANKENY, IOWA, July 21, 2026 – After 48 years, the leader who took McClure from 12 people to 300 completes his succession and leaves the company team member-owned and built to last.
After nearly five decades with McClure, Terry Lutz retired on July 1, 2026. He leaves behind a company built to take on the future, one that no longer just designs communities but develops and invests in them through ATI, and something rarer than growth: a culture designed to outlast any single leader, including him.
It takes a particular wiring to found a company. Jon McClure had it: the conviction to start with nothing but his own name and a belief that engineering could make lives better. It takes a different set of skills entirely to scale one. That was Terry Lutz. He took the firm Jon founded and built to a dozen people, and he carried it to the next level, growing the business more than a hundredfold and doubling the size of the company roughly every six years, for four decades straight.
Few people shape a company. Fewer still shape one for 48 years and then hand it, intact and thriving, to the people who built it alongside them. That is the story of Terry Lutz at McClure.
A Career of Growth and Leadership
1978 | A young sales engineer at Fisher Controls, Terry quickly realizes he is wired too entrepreneurial for big corporate life. He joins McClure Engineering Company, drawn by the chance to build something he could someday own.
1981 | Becomes part owner of the company alongside Mike Trotter and Brent Johnson.
1982 | Earns his pilot’s license at the encouragement of Jon McClure, beginning a lifelong passion that would shape both how he led and how far the company could reach.
1985 | Purchases majority ownership and becomes President and CEO. At the time, McClure was a single-office firm based in Fort Dodge, Iowa, earning about $600,000 in annual revenue.
1986 | Opens McClure’s second office in the Des Moines metro, beginning a new era of growth.
1999-2000 | Leads the development of the new Ankeny Regional Airport, a project that would prove pivotal for McClure itself: it became home base for the corporate plane that helped power the firm’s exceptional growth.
2006 | Serves as Mayor of Fort Dodge while continuing to grow McClure and expand into Missouri.
2010 | Relocates company headquarters to the Des Moines metro.
2012 | Breaks the mold by bringing in Dennis Folden, a retired Kum & Go executive, to add a non-engineering business perspective to the leadership team.
2015-2023 | Leads transformational acquisitions that expand McClure’s services and geographic reach, including THH, JFSCO, SKW, Iron, and ATI.
2017 | Founds ATI Group alongside two McClure team members, BJ Stokesbary and Casey Schafbuch, once again creating an entrepreneurial opportunity for others, and later brings ATI into the McClure family of companies.
2023 | Completes a multi-year succession process, naming Dustin Leo CEO and stepping into the role of Chairman of the Board.
2026 | Retires from a company 300 strong, team member-owned, and positioned for its next 70 years.
It’s Always About the People
If one phrase captures Terry’s leadership philosophy, it is the one every McClure team member has heard him say. His math never added up, and that was always the point:
“Business is simple. It’s 90% people and 20% people. It’s all about people.”
For Terry, success was never measured by projects completed or offices opened. It was measured by relationships built, people developed, and communities strengthened. Many of today’s leaders across McClure were recruited, challenged, and mentored by Terry, and the culture of trust and accountability he established remains the hallmark of the company.
Two Ways to Fail
Terry often told the company there were only two things that could ever bring McClure down. The first was a catastrophic engineering failure, which he considered unlikely given the caliber of McClure’s people and the discipline of its process. The second was the loss of its culture.
His answer to that second risk was structural, not sentimental: keep the company in the hands of the people who build it. Terry championed McClure’s team member ownership, and his final act as a shareholder was to return his ownership to that structure, ensuring the company belongs to the 300 people who show up every day to make lives better. His retirement is not the end of the culture he built. It is the proof that it works.
Building Relationships for Success
Terry understood that engineering is about more than technical expertise. It is about listening, earning trust, solving problems, and helping clients achieve their goals. Terry approached every relationship with a genuine commitment to clients for life, a belief that became the foundation of McClure’s culture and its approach to serving communities.
“Every good engineer can solve an engineering problem. Terry’s gift was knowing the engineering problem was rarely the real one. The real problem was economic, or political, or some tangle of the two, and Terry could find it, solve it, and sell the solution better than anyone I have ever met. I learned this as his competitor before I ever learned it as his partner. Early in my career, I sat in plenty of lobbies waiting to interview for a project right after our competition. When a bigger, more decorated firm walked out of that room, I was excited. They had presented experience and the same old answers, and I liked our chances. When it was Terry Lutz who walked out, I was intimidated. I knew the client had just heard an idea nobody else in that lobby had. And time after time, McClure won work it had no business winning on paper. That was the brilliance of Terry Lutz.”
– Dustin Leo, P.E., CEO
Out of the Pattern
Terry is a pilot, and every pilot starts the same way: touch and goes, pattern work, the same rectangle around the same runway until the landings come smooth. Master that, and you can technically fly. But staying in the pattern was never the point of flying, and it was never Terry’s idea of leading. There is a pattern for engineering firms too… Terry never flew it. The point, in the air and in business, is to lift the nose toward the horizon and go find out what’s beyond it: new places, new people, new challenges. That is how Terry Lutz flew, it is how he led, and it is the company he built. McClure was never meant to stay in the pattern, and because of Terry, it never will.
After 48 years, the horizon is his.
About McClure
Founded in 1956, McClure has grown into a firm of more than 285 professionals across eighteen offices. McClure is driven to make lives better by turning clients’ visions into reality. The team thinks like owners, contractors, developers, leaders, and stakeholders, adding value at every stage, from securing funding to building public support. McClure’s expertise spans aviation, site development, transportation, water, wastewater, structural, survey, real estate, construction, and more.