Allan MacIntosh, President of MARCO Group, built Atlantic Canada's largest general contractor from a $25M regional firm to $250M in revenue with $500M in backlog. His approach to P3 bidding, delivery-model diversification, and profit-sharing culture is a field manual for any GC trying to grow past the ceiling of the founder's own hours.
In 2003, Allan MacIntosh flew into Halifax to interview for a job with a small Newfoundland GC that had opened an office there. The company had just crossed $28M in revenue. The meeting went well enough that the deal was closed at the airport before he could leave.
That company was MARCO Group — named, as MacIntosh tells it, for the wife of founder Tom Hickman. Tom had handed the reins to his son Christopher around 2001. The firm was nimble, relationship-driven, and hungry. MacIntosh had an aggressive growth agenda and the construction credentials to back it: Architectural Technologist, Professional Quantity Surveyor, Gold Seal Construction Professional.
Two decades later, MARCO is Atlantic Canada's largest general contractor, confirmed by independent reporting, with roughly $250M in annual revenue and $500M in backlog at the time of recording. They go toe-to-toe with EllisDon, PCL, and Bird Construction on jobs north of $100M. Here is what the conversation reveals about how that happened.
Follow the market cycle — don't impose one
Most mid-size GCs define themselves by sector: healthcare, education, institutional. MacIntosh's philosophy is the opposite. MARCO tracks whatever is funded. When retail was moving, they built box stores. When public money flowed toward rec centres, they built rec centres. When P3 schools appeared, they trained for P3s. The pattern is deliberate.
As MacIntosh puts it: “my vision this year might have been different than my vision last year or my vision five years ago.” That sentence is almost deceptively simple. What it describes is an organization that treats market timing as a core competency — not a weakness, not opportunism, but a studied skill. The GC who insists on one sector in a down year for that sector is the GC who cuts staff.
The discipline that makes it work is bidding only what you can execute. MARCO's advantage over nationals on sub-$100M work is local relationships, local subcontractors, and the ability to move faster. On a struggling sub who needed cash mid-project, MacIntosh describes a decision that cost real money upfront: “we paid him a hundred thousand dollars of stuff that i never knew if we were going to get back.” The sub stayed. The relationship compounded for years. That is the local advantage that EllisDon's Calgary office cannot replicate.
A portfolio of delivery models is risk management
P3, construction management, design-build, lump sum — most GC conversations treat these as a menu, not a strategy. MacIntosh frames them as a diversified financial portfolio: “you want to have some construction management you want to have some design build you want to have some lump sum.” Each behaves differently under different market conditions and each has a different risk/return profile.
CM carries lower margins but transfers most design and schedule risk to the owner. Lump sum offers upside if you estimate well and downside if you don't. Design-build collapses the designer/contractor interface risk into a single contract. P3 is the outlier: highest margin potential, year-long procurement, and liquidated damages that can ruin you.
On the New Adult Mental Health and Addictions (NAMHA) Facility P3 in St. John's — a 240,000-square-foot, 102-bed hospital built under a 30-year DBFM arrangement with Plenary Group — the financial exposure was explicit: “liquidated damage penalties on that just for financial penalties are fifty thousand dollars a day for every day we turn this building over late.” That is not a rounding error. A two-month delay is over $3M in penalties before you count disruption costs or reputational damage. LEED Gold on that same P3 required a $2M bond and 19 trained professionals inside MARCO's own organization: “we certainly have about 19 lead professionals in our organization that we've got trained.”
MARCO's P3 record — “out of the five triple p's that we bid we won four out of five which is an outstanding track record” — is what allows them to absorb the bid cost of a year-long RFQ/RFP process. Stipends cover only a fraction of the real cost. A 4-for-5 win rate justifies the investment. A 2-for-5 rate breaks the business.
The $243M MUN Core Science Facility, a 475,000-square-foot research building at Memorial University of Newfoundland, illustrated a different kind of risk: overhead structure at scale. Three and a half months of estimating, won by $1.6M. The execution lesson MacIntosh draws is unglamorous but real: “that was probably the biggest piece for us — just trying to get the overheads and the manpower right.” Too few project coordinators and the schedule slips. The margin was already thin.
IPD is coming — the question is who prepares
Integrated Project Delivery is the next delivery model MacIntosh believes will arrive in Atlantic Canada. In IPD, subcontractors are not just vendors — they are risk partners sharing a profit pool. The Nova Scotia government was already experimenting at the time of recording; MARCO had begun attending seminars and training staff.
His assessment of the contractors who disagree: “i think anybody doesn't believe it's coming i think they're naive because i do think it's coming.” That is a direct statement from someone with a 4-for-5 P3 record who has already ridden delivery-model transitions before. If he is right, first movers in IPD relationships and governance frameworks will have a structural advantage that late adopters cannot buy.
On the technology side, MARCO adopted StructionSite — a platform that maps 360-degree photo documentation onto floor plans — to build a time-stamped visual record of wall assemblies. It is the kind of tool that matters most on LEED-governed P3 jobs where materials tracking is contractual, not optional.
Shift from bonus to profit-sharing and watch the culture change
For most of MARCO's growth years, staff received discretionary bonuses. The problem with discretionary bonuses is that no one can predict them, which means no one can plan around them, and the link between individual performance and company outcome stays invisible. About 18 months before the recording, MARCO restructured: “we've gone from a bonus structure with our staff to a pure profit sharing with all of our staff.”
The change MacIntosh describes in engagement and retention is the kind that shows up in who applies and who stays. Profit-sharing makes the math visible. Every staff member can see what company performance means for their own income. It also changes the calculus on bid pricing: when the people estimating a job share in the margin, the incentive to bid accurately — not to buy work — increases.
Building the right team for that model required MacIntosh to confront the founder trap: “you can either work in the business or work on the business — you're never going to grow a business if you work in the business.” MARCO's senior leadership — Rod Ackerman, Jeremy Stewart, Corey Taylor, Don Allen — are long-tenured because the operational delegation is real, not nominal.
Learn from GCs who cannot be your competition
MARCO belongs to two external peer-learning programs. The Family Business Institute pairs MARCO with GCs of similar size in non-competing markets — Winnipeg, Texas, California. The explicit purpose is to surface blind spots that your own organization cannot see. The result was concrete: “they pointed out our blind spots that we didn't know we had and we were able to add staff to fill those blind spots.” The gaps turned out to be in HR and legal — departments a construction-first founder rarely builds early enough.
The Velocity Advisory Group provides personality profiling and executive coaching, including the bird-archetype framework used to improve how MARCO's leadership team communicates internally. Neither program is cheap. Both are cheaper than the organizational failures they prevent.
Negotiation discipline is the third edge MacIntosh names. His principle: find what the other party needs to win before you set your own position. “what's important to them may not be what's important to me and what's important to me may not be important to them.” Construction negotiations that look like zero-sum problems often aren't — the parties' priorities rarely overlap perfectly, and the deal is easier than it looks once each side names what they actually need.
The Calgary lesson: ride a client, don't prospect blind
In November 2019, MARCO opened a Calgary office. The move worked because it followed an existing client. Casino operator Mike Novak — who had worked with MARCO on the Casino New Brunswick project in Moncton — came back: “mike novak said look we want to put an edition on the casino very much like we did in moncton would you be interested.” MARCO said yes, added a Germain Hotels project, and built a beachhead.
Then COVID arrived, oil prices collapsed, and the Calgary construction market stalled. The office is paused. The lesson MacIntosh draws is about sequencing: entering a new geography through a trusted repeat client is a lower-risk path than cold prospecting a new market. When the client's market stalls, so does your reason for being there. It is not a failure; it is what limited risk-taking looks like in practice.
MARCO Group: the Atlantic contractor built for this market
Atlantic Canada's construction market runs differently from Ontario or Alberta. The procurement relationships are tighter, the subcontractor pool is shallower, and the P3 market is smaller but growing. MARCO Group has operated in that environment since the mid-1990s, and the organization MacIntosh describes is built specifically for it: multi-delivery-model capable, LEED-certified internally, IPD-ready in training, and structured so the president is not also the project manager on the job.
They also give money to more than 30 charities across the region. MacIntosh's note on how they do it: “you'll never see marco patting ourselves on the back in the social media circles for that — we do it very very quietly.” It is a choice about what kind of company they want to be — not a marketing tactic.
MARCO Group is Atlantic Canada's largest general contractor, delivering commercial, healthcare, education, multi-residential, and industrial projects as GC, construction manager, design-builder, and P3 partner. Find them at marcogroup.ca and on LinkedIn, Instagram, and X.
Guest: Allan MacIntosh, President, MARCO Group Limited. Featured on Episode 13 of the Atlantic Construction Podcast. Watch the full episode. Projects referenced: Memorial University Core Science Facility, New Adult Mental Health and Addictions Facility (Plenary Group). Technology: StructionSite. Peer programs: Family Business Institute, Velocity Advisory Group. MARCO revenue/scale confirmed: Acadia Broadcasting.