The Puzzle Solver
With a lifelong instinct for solving complex issues, Dan Stokes is helping position McCarthy’s Industrial team for its most ambitious chapter yet.
As a kid, Dan Stokes loved watching his father, hunched over a drafting table drawing intricate engineering plans by hand.
His dad was a structural steel drafter with a knack for calculating complex trigonometry and rendering every precise line in pencil. To a kid who devoured puzzle books and excelled in math, those drawings were magnetic—a code waiting to be cracked. “It was like unfolding a puzzle, and puzzles have always excited me,” Stokes recalls.
That instinct pointed him toward a career in heavy industrial construction. “I knew I wanted to do something engineering-related, but I really didn’t decide on civil engineering until high school; that’s when I became fascinated with bridges and large-scale infrastructure,” he says. “Big cranes and heavy haul equipment just excited me.”
Since joining McCarthy as a project manager in 2024, Stokes has brought his field-tested rigor to the company’s growing Industrial team, which specializes in large-scale facilities within the power, manufacturing and process industrial sectors.
It's a role purpose-built for the way his mind works.
I’ve always been able to naturally recognize bottlenecks in a system. I’m constantly looking for the most efficient use of time—without ever taking shortcuts in safety or quality.
Project Manager
Stokes is currently managing two active projects for the Metropolitan Sewer District of St. Louis, where McCarthy is upgrading outdated wastewater infrastructure at separate treatment facilities. The work involves installing Fluidized Bed Incinerators to process biosolids—a complex undertaking requiring heavy boilermaker expertise, large crane picks and precise welding.
“The systems we’re installing are not common, providing the perfect training ground for our core team to sharpen their skills before we transition into even larger projects,” he says.
Beyond his site-specific responsibilities, Stokes is also involved in McCarthy’s self-perform planning group, focused on standardizing how the company executes industrial projects.
Forged in the Field
A St. Louis native, Stokes spent the better part of his childhood on the move. Between the ages of 5 and 14, his family moved seven times, uprooting him from his schools and friends along the way.
I learned how to be comfortable with being uncomfortable, which has helped me immensely in my career.
Project Manager
Raised with a strict, hard-working mentality, he spent summers doing manual labor at his grandfather’s house, gaining an early respect for working with his hands.
Stokes earned a civil engineering degree at Missouri University of Science and Technology (Missouri S&T) in Rolla, where he also played soccer as a starting sweeper for two seasons.
Following graduation, he secured a position as a field engineer with a large industrial contractor and headed to Los Angeles to tackle his first combined-cycle power plant project. This early opportunity began a decade-long journey across the U.S. managing power generation projects and refinery turnarounds—high-stakes planned outages where facilities temporarily cease operations to overhaul and rebuild critical process equipment.
During a particularly busy period, he worked 40 consecutive days and logged 48 round trips in a 12-month period shuttling between Minnesota and St. Louis, where his wife and infant son lived. “It was a brutal stretch,” he acknowledges, “but it really set me up well in my career. I also gained a whole new respect for the traveling craft workers with children at home.”
Stokes joined McCarthy after a former colleague reached out about the industrial group's ambitious growth plans. Having grown up in St. Louis, he was familiar with McCarthy's legacy and came in with a clear sense of the firm—and what it is was building toward—he was joining.
A lot of companies say they have good culture, but here, there’s an undertone of genuineness that is just there—both in the office and in the field. With 100 percent employee ownership, you can tell everybody is truly bought-in. That makes a difference.
Project Manager
Stokes channels his passion for developing people into an added role as a project engineer peer group champion, helping design curriculum, coordinate in-person training events and connect project engineers across the Central Region. Twice a year, engineers from St. Louis, Kansas City, Nebraska and Colorado come together for a day and a half of classroom sessions and site visits.
For Ameren Audrain, Stokes was an Advanced Planner focused on Piping and Equipment. He supported the early buyout of the critical equipment and trade partners and facilitated the transition between McCarthy's preconstruction and operations teams.
Ameren Audrain Dual Fuel Conversion project site
Mining for Data
As McCarthy’s Industrial group continues to scale its expertise and take on larger, more demanding projects, Stokes believes the key to success lies in the reliability of its field data.
“Capturing historical data is going to become like gold for us,” he explains. “The integrity of the data we collect in the field is paramount so our estimators can trust it to inform the next pursuit.”
With McCarthy’s industrial work moving into a new realm of complexity, high-fidelity tracking has become an absolute necessity.
We’re tracking a volume of material and data that simply can’t be managed with old-school spreadsheets. That’s why we have robust systems for project controls, material tracking and quality assurance.
Project Manager
Get to Know Dan Stokes
- Dan and his wife, Lauren, live in Wildwood, MO with their three children: TJ (7), Grace (5) and Zoey (2). The newest family member is Josie, a 14-week-old mini golden doodle.
- Lauren is a registered nurse who manages Clinical Health Services Team for Aetna, a CVS Health Company.
- An avid golfer, Dan is using his son's budding interest in the game as a convenient excuse to spend more time on the links. Away from the golf course, he and TJ have also taken up geocaching, which TJ likes to call “treasure hunting.”
- He also keeps busy with DIY home projects, mountain biking and exploring trails.
