Justin Thibaut, 31

Justin Thibaut is a near-perfect example of an economic development official’s dream come true: someone who grew up in Southwest Florida, worked all over the world and returned home. It’s reverse brain drain — where in other cases, the region loses its homegrown talent. 

Of course, Thibaut had a good reason to come back to Fort Myers in the summer of 2016: to work at the prominent commercial real estate firm LSI Cos., run by his dad, Randy Thibaut. “I never thought I would get into this business; I wanted to do my own thing,” says the younger Thibaut. “I wanted to travel. I wanted to see the world. I wanted to work on complicated stuff.”

Justin Thibaut accomplished that by working for a trio of energy and nuclear power companies soon after he earned a degree in construction management from the University of Florida. One stop was with Bechtel Power Corp., where he was a project controls engineer on the Turkey Point Nuclear Generating Station in Miami-Dade County. After that he did a stint with BP, as a project manager for the firm’s massive Thunder Horse oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, 150 miles southeast of New Orleans. One last energy gig was three years with Chevron, working both in Houston and Angola on multiple projects.