SME Consulting / The Firm
A partner on the job, not a consultant passing through.
SME Consulting is a Bay Area inspection and construction-consulting practice built around one idea: the owner should never be alone in a regulated build. Led by Shane G. Curran, Class A Inspector of Record, License A20701.
02 — Shane G. Curran
The person who signs the record.
Shane G. Curran is a Class A Inspector of Record, one of roughly 324 in the state of California, and has held the licence for 22 of his 26 years in construction. Twenty-six years in the field, twenty-two of them licensed.
His work sits almost entirely inside the hardest category of construction in the state: occupied acute-care hospitals. Marin Health, UCSF, Stanford and Lucile Packard Children's, Providence, Genentech. Buildings that cannot close, on campuses that cannot stop.
He works out of San Anselmo and serves the San Francisco Bay Area.
"An Inspector of Record should be more than a code expert. They should be a trusted advisor — someone who identifies solutions and keeps quality moving."
— Shane G. Curran · Lead IOR
Waiting on you, Shane: your pitch — who you are, the business model, the partnership language. Send it in whatever rough form you like and this section gets rebuilt around your own words. Everything above is drafted from our calls so the page is not empty while you write.
03 — Credentials
What the licence actually means.
California licenses a small number of Inspectors of Record to oversee its most regulated construction. The inspection record an IOR produces is a legal, life-safety document — it is what the state relies on when it certifies that a hospital is safe to occupy.
04 — Growth
The practice is hiring.
SME is actively adding two to three inspectors, with the first coming aboard in October 2026. The work is HCAI healthcare inspection across the Bay Area, alongside a senior IOR rather than alone on a job site.
If you hold an IOR licence — or you are a tradesperson looking at the path into inspection — the conversation is worth having. Shane has walked that path himself and knows what it takes, including the parts nobody warns you about.
Bring your questions
Moving into inspection from another trade raises practical questions. Ask them early rather than late — Shane will talk them through before anything is signed.
Talk to Shane about joining →Start a conversation about your project.
SME works by relationship and reputation. The fastest way in is a direct note about the project — Shane reads them himself.
Email about a project →