Our Story
In 2018, a group of colleagues came together with an idea for a new kind of engineering company. Time and again, they had witnessed companies lose sight of their most valuable resource – their People – and saw the inevitable erosion of culture that followed. These colleagues sought to build a foundation for a company that celebrated their People as the reason for success. The Arion team is built around former Alliance and Mustang personnel with significant EPCM experience in the upstream, midstream, and downstream industry sectors who simply wondered…
…what if?
What if we take the lessons learned and the best practices from our past lives, and use those as a foundation for something better? How can we advance our industry by placing innovation at the forefront? What would our foundational principles look like? What would our values look like? What would happen if we took that leap?
Our Pillars
Three foundational pillars are beneath everything we do.
People:
At Arion, People are the heart of our business. The relationships we build and nurture with the A-Team and our clients allow us to access their full creative potential. We are not just a group of individuals working in silos, but rather a fully supportive, collaborative space where people can use their experience, knowledge, and imagination to make a difference not only for themselves but for Arion and our clients.
Performance:
When People know they are being cared for, they are free to produce their best work. Quality project execution is paramount at Arion. We are committed to excellence in word and deed, and our results speak for themselves. We know that when our Clients trust us with their projects, we become an extension of their organization. When we deliver well for them, they experience success. We are always looking for ways to help Clients bring their products to market faster. It’s exhilarating when our approach changes the economics and helps bring shelved or abandoned projects back to life.
Innovation:
We believe in building in work process efficiencies from the beginning, using existing and emerging technologies, and focusing on data-centric execution and deliverables. We believe in these things, not just because innovation is a buzzword, but because it does two things: 1) creates a path to improved project performance; and 2) leads to better and more secure long-term results for our Clients. Arion believes that by incorporating the best existing and emerging technologies into both our work processes and designs, Arion will be able to provide compelling alternatives to the current EPC options. The innovations developed by Arion will re-establish the value engineering and design bring to EPC projects of all sizes.
Our Purpose
We deliver successful projects every time by revolutionizing the process through Respect, Trust, Accountability, and Innovation.
Our Values
Respect
Respect means that we see and value the skills, experience, and perspective that each person brings to the team. A healthy respect for each other and our differences lead to opportunities for real connection. This is a critical component of teamwork, bringing real openness and communication. It means colleagues will speak up with ideas or concerns and aren’t intimidated by title or position. This kind of environment means people don’t bury problems, hoping they’ll go away or that they can be fixed before anyone picks up on them. It means we listen, we’re honest with each other, and we proactively challenge each other to create the best solutions for our Clients, and it means we don’t waste time – and that translates into real dollars at the end of the day. Meanwhile, inherent to this value is a focus on safety. When we respect ourselves and each other, we look out for each other’s safety as well.
Trust
Each new A-Teamer we bring on is treated with inherent trust. We don’t want to create an environment of transactional trust or quid-pro-quo. We don’t require a waiting period to prove yourself; we start from a place of trust. We have confidence that people want to do a good job, we facilitate the environment for them to do so, and typically people will thrive in this. This doesn’t mean we turn a blind eye to issues; when working in concert with respect and accountability, Trust looks like candid conversations that are rooted in a desire to get better, not to be punitive.
Accountability
Accountability is more about individual commitment and self-management than doling out rewards and consequences to others. It means we actively choose to “own” the outcome of our commitments. An environment built on respect and trust means that people are free to focus on doing whatever it takes to achieve the goal: challenging themselves, asking for help, and giving 100%. It means that when something goes wrong, people speak up, take responsibility, and focus on what to learn from the experience. It means you don’t have to know the answer before you commit to something; you just have to be committed to the outcome and trust that together, we’ll figure it out.
Innovation
Innovation is a founding pillar and one of our highest values. When we talk about the pillar, it’s often the tools, technology, and work processes that we’ll always be challenging and improving. As a value, we mean to say that we place a high priority on the kind of thinking and actions that lead to changes of any kind that improves the value of our work. It’s about bringing learnings from different parts of life and business to everything we do here. It assumes all the other values we cherish are in place – because when respect and trust are thriving, and people are holding themselves accountable by taking responsibility for their contributions, there’s much more in the reserves that people can devote to improving everything. And that’s the heart of innovation.
