A Career-Defining Question

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My name is Mike McMahon, founder of EncompassEPC and developer of Beacon. With more than 45 years of experience in project management, construction, business development, consulting, and senior executive leadership, I have contributed to the EPC industry through positions with Fluor Corporation, Jacobs Engineering, CRSS Sirrine, and my own project-management consulting firm. My experience includes project turnarounds, key-account management, project controls, process improvement, facility startups, joint ventures, mergers and acquisitions, and profit-improvement initiatives.

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In 1981, during a Fluor training program, the facilitator asked two questions: “How do you want to be remembered as a person?” and “How do you want to be remembered in your profession?” I do not remember my answer to the first question, but the second never left me. Ultimately, I wanted my professional epitaph to read: “The engineering and construction industry is better off because Mike was here.” The challenge was determining how to make that happen.

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Recognizing the Knowledge Gap

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I entered the EPC industry with an economics degree from the University of Cincinnati. Surrounded by experienced architects, engineers, project professionals, supervisors, and craftspersons, I wondered what I could contribute. The answer began to emerge in 1985 during a roofing subcontractor meeting. Questions came from across the room, but no comprehensive list confirmed that all the important issues had been addressed. The roofing program’s success depended almost entirely on the experience and memories of the people attending the meeting, with no consistent way to capture their knowledge, transfer it from one project to another, or make it available to the next project team.

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After the meeting, I asked each participant how they remembered the right questions from one project to the next. Some relied on experience, others reviewed the specifications or previous contracts, and some searched through notes scattered among several notebooks. Their methods reflected valuable knowledge—but that knowledge was fragmented, personal, and easily lost.

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From 23 Questions to 148 Issues

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The meeting addressed 23 questions. My follow-up conversations uncovered four additional questions that should have been discussed. I then went into the field and asked the roofing superintendent what concerned him about the project. He identified another 17 issues, and 19 more emerged as I continued following the contractor throughout the project. The meeting began with 23 questions; by the end of the project, we had identified 63. Today, Beacon’s roofing checklists address 104 roofing-quality issues and 44 additional safety, contractual, and administrative considerations.

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That experience demonstrated a fundamental principle: Individual memories are valuable, but capturing, organizing, and transferring that knowledge creates a lasting strategic asset.

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The Beginning of Beacon

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For the remainder of the project, I spoke with anyone willing to share what they knew about their responsibilities, challenges, and lessons learned. By project completion, I had developed a checklist containing more than 3,000 questions, contributed by 37 people representing nearly 750 years of combined EPC experience. That first checklist became the foundation of Beacon. The concept was simple but powerful: gather practical knowledge from the people who plan and execute projects, organize it into actionable questions, and preserve it so every project doesn't have to start from scratch.

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Built From Real Project Experience

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Beacon was not created solely by engineers, architects, or executives—although all have made important contributions. I also learned from the people who dug the trenches, set the steel, installed the process piping, pulled the electrical cable, operated the equipment, and solved problems under real project conditions. I learned from owners frustrated by cost overruns and missed schedules; vendors who received incomplete information or arrived before the site was ready; and project managers, designers, contractors, supervisors, administrative professionals, and craftspersons who understood where projects succeed—and where they fail. Beacon was built from the practical knowledge of people who know what they are talking about because they have done the work. More than 3,000 industry professionals and craftspersons have now contributed to or reviewed the system.

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Four Decades of Knowledge—Available Today

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After more than 40 years of continuous development, Beacon now contains more than 35,000 detailed checklists, more than 3.1 million specific, proactive, actionable questions, and hundreds of educational documents, procedures, forms, management resources, and safety topics. It transforms decades of accumulated experience into an organized, practical system that can be used across projects, companies, industries, and generations.  Beacon’s value is not simply the volume of information it contains. Its value lies in helping project teams ask the right questions while there is still time to influence the outcome.

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Our Mission

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EncompassEPC’s mission is to preserve and apply the EPC industry’s accumulated knowledge to help organizations plan more effectively, execute more consistently, transfer knowledge more successfully, and significantly reduce risks affecting safety, quality, cost, schedule, and contractual performance throughout the project lifecycle. That mission fulfills the question I was asked in 1981:

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To leave the engineering and construction industry better than I found it.