Family of pilots steer Haselden Construction on approach to 50th year

Flying started as a hobby for the family, but soon became an integral part of a business on track for $400 million this year

From left, Mike, Ed, Jim and Byron Haselden stand in front of the family’s eight-seater Cessna Citation CJ4. (Lily O’Neill, BusinessDen)

The Haselden family packed into a Cessna 182 plane for vacations in the summer like most families in the 1970s would hop in a station wagon.

Flying started as a hobby for the Haselden family, but soon became an integral part of Haselden Construction, which launched almost 50 years ago and is on track for $400 million in annual revenue.

One summer, the family of five spent two days flying from Denver to Marathon, Fla., for a fishing trip, stopping at least three airports along the way to refuel and rest.

“That’s a long way to go in a small plane, but it was like our family truckster,” said Byron Haselden, the youngest of the family’s three sons and CEO of Haselden Construction.

The Haseldens have an eight-seater jet and a 7,000-square-foot private hangar at Centennial Airport. Jim Haselden was the first to get his pilot’s license in 1972. Then came sons Ed, Mike, Byron and even their mother Millie.

The family has upgraded their trips, and the larger jet means they don’t have to stop along the way as much anymore.

“It would be very hard to do some of the projects that we’ve done over the years in mountain towns and communities because the ability to get to some of those places in a two-hour timeframe just didn’t exist with commercial air travel, and you certainly couldn’t get there if you drove,” said Ed Haselden, the oldest Haselden son and CEO of Haselden Construction from 1991 to 2015.

“Private aircraft travel really became one of the ways in which we serviced projects within a two-hour geographic radius from Denver.”