Now hiring, engineers

One of Cleveland’s fastest growing engineering firms, Nexus Engineering Group, has gotten good at creating jobs while raising Ohio’s stature in the oil and gas industry. The 180-employee company, co-founded by Jeff Herzog ’79, MBA ’86, was awarded a $1 million Ohio Job Creation Tax Credit in June as the state recognized its potential.

Headquartered in Playhouse Square, Nexus plans to about double in size over the next five years and has committed to create 65 full-time jobs in Cleveland and Maumee, Ohio, where it recently opened an office.

The firm offers engineering services to oil refining, petroleum midstream, chemical, energy and manufacturing industries.

It employs structural, civil, electrical, mechanical and process engineers, as well as professionals with instrumentation, design and construction management skills.

Herzog, the company president, started his career at the Standard Oil Co. as a project engineer. He launched Nexus in 2005 with a former SOHIO colleague, Marianna Corrao, who earned her chemical engineering degree at Cleveland State University. The pair built an engineering dynamo.

Nexus reported 20 percent growth each of the past two years and was credited by Crain’s Cleveland Business with helping to make Ohio a larger player in oil and gas refining.

Herzog, the former president of the Case Alumni Association, credits the company’s success to its innovative approaches to engineering projects and an enthusiastic staff.

“We have a lot of really smart people and if you give them a mission, they’re going to deliver,” he told Crain’s. “Every day we’ve got to figure out a way to get better or we’ll be left behind.”

So far, that has not been a problem.