Q & A With Incoming COO Travis Taylor
FEATURING Travis Taylor
Chief Operating Officer
You may have heard about our upcoming leadership transition. This fall, Travis Taylor will assume the role of our new Chief Operating Officer, while Kent Peterson will transition from operations to focus on ensuring technical quality, engineering excellence, and innovation as Chief Technical Officer( CTO). We recently met with Travis to ask some questions about these moves and what they mean for the company and, most importantly, for our clients.
Travis, could you begin by telling us a bit about your background and leadership experience for those clients who may not be familiar with you yet?
To start, I want to say I have always enjoyed working with teams of people, and when given the opportunity, I like the challenge of leading groups and teams. My first taste of leadership came with sports teams and college organizations, and later grew into leadership positions with community groups and, of course, leadership opportunities at work.
A bit of background. I grew up in Long Beach, 10 minutes from our P2S HQ. I received my bachelor’ s from U. C. Santa Barbara and got my MBA at SDSU. From there, I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and started working in the civil and environmental engineering field with small consulting firms. Then, in the late 1990s, our small firm applied for an EPA grant, and I was able to start and manage an office in Buenos Aires, Argentina, which was a fantastic experience. After Argentina, I moved back to LB and worked for a large, publicly traded global engineering firm, slowly advancing to eventually manage the Southern California operations of one of their Business Units. Lastly, ten years ago, I joined P2S as a Senior Project Manager and Director of Project Management, and I have thoroughly enjoyed my time here at P2S.
So why is this transition happening? And why at this moment?
So, I like to think of P2S as a River that continually flows for generations, as opposed to a puddle that grows, shrinks, and then dries up. To achieve this metaphorical example, we need to constantly think about succession planning, and this succession process should be intentional, planned, and thought through so that there is sufficient overlap with the predecessor( in this case, Kent Peterson).
Now, P2S is undergoing an exciting evolution, with P2S joining the Legence family and our company going public on the NASDAQ just a few weeks ago. With this positive change, it is a good time to work through some of these transitions, including the COO position, so we have adequate overlap as we transfer responsibilities.
Kent Peterson is transitioning into the new role of Chief Technical Officer, a position for which he is particularly well-suited, given his renowned technical knowledge and experience. This means he’ ll be even more involved in project design for clients, right?
After more than 30 years in this industry and working with thousands of engineers, in my opinion, Kent is right at the top of the list when it comes to Real Engineers. His passion and enthusiasm for engineering excellence, innovation, and developing the next generation of engineers are impressive.
8 P2S MAGAZINE FALL 2025