Programs Gave Successful Businessman His Start : Opportunity: Contracts under government rules and work ethic were the keys, Jack Ybarra says.
Jack Ybarra got his first summer job at the age of 7.
Some weeks it was beans. Others it was peaches. Then apricots, strawberries and walnuts. All through the summer he toiled alongside his brothers and sisters, harvesting fruits and vegetables in California’s steamy Central Valley.
“You start out when it gets light, as soon as it gets light, and then you come home whenever it gets dark. Those are the hours, six days a week,” he recalled recently.
Every summer the routine was the same. His father took two weeks off from his job with the railroad to drive his wife and children from El Paso to California where he helped them get work in the fields.
The family, children and mother, lived in whatever was available. Sometimes it was a tent. Sometimes it was a barn. Luxury was a plywood cottage a few farmers provided for their migrant laborers.
“It was a difficult time,” Ybarra said. “My father had 10 children, and he was earning $35 every two weeks. When you have a family that large it helps if there is additional income, and it keeps 10 children busy.”
For Ybarra, a stout man in his mid-50s, to talk about such things today is rare. The migrant camps and the years that followed as an organizer for Cesar Chavez are a world away from what he does now.
As principle owner and president of Transmetrics Inc., an engineering, planning and construction company, Ybarra today runs a multimillion-dollar enterprise, engaged literally in projects throughout the world.
For Ybarra, son of poor Mexican immigrants, none of this would have happened without the aid of affirmative action--and hard work. Like hundreds of others, his business got a much needed boost from government programs for minority- and women-owned businesses.
Dressed in pin-striped suits, white shirts and silk ties, Ybarra spends his workday jetting across the country in pursuit of contracts or wooing prospective clients from his offices atop a gleaming skyscraper on Figueroa Street in Downtown Los Angeles.
The fruits of his labors are obvious: Transmetrics can claim a part of some of the biggest construction projects of the decade. It is a bridge consultant for a company building a new high-speed rail line from Taipei to Kaohsiung in Taiwan, one of the construction managers for the MTA’s light-rail system from Union Station to Pasadena and a provider of engineering services for the new Los Angeles County--USC Medical Center replacement--to name a few.
Founded in the early 1980s, when Ybarra used to celebrate with a bottle of champagne whenever he got a contract as large as $6,000, Transmetrics today grosses about $4 million a year and employs 30 people.
In the early years when he was struggling to get the company started, Ybarra recalled, the doors to the government contracts he had hoped to make his specialty were shut everywhere.
Contractors either did not want subcontractors or they did not want to do business with a new, unknown company that was not part of the network they were used to working with.
And, he recalled, they were certainly not interested in hiring a company run by a Latino.
“It’s always been an attitude that we have to deal with that unqualified people and minorities are one in the same,” he said. “I still have to deal with that attitude even today.”
For Ybarra the turnaround came with the institution of new government rules and regulations requiring that minorities and women be given a greater share of public contracts. Tiny contracts for only a few thousand dollars began to trickle in as contractors searched for minority-owned companies to fulfill the new goals.
Slowly, Ybarra said, the company began to build a reputation for efficiency and dependability. The contracts got bigger. In 1982 the company, with two employees, grossed about $73,000. The next year it was $146,000. Then it was $800,000. By the fourth year, Ybarra was able for the first time to take home a salary and stop living off his wife’s small earnings from a fledgling law practice.
Through the 1980s and into the ‘90s the company registered phenomenal growth, adding employees--nearly all minorities--and expanding into new areas such as hospital construction. “The [affirmative action] programs were good for us,” Ybarra said. “They helped us get started. They brought wind under our sails and sent us on our way.”
But although affirmative action may have opened doors, Ybarra insists that other ingredients were also essential--business acumen and a work ethic drummed into him by two extraordinary parents.
Even as a young child toiling in the fields, he recalled, his mother instilled pride in him. “She taught that just because you’re poor doesn’t mean that you’re poor at heart and soul,” he said. “You may not have money, but you have a tradition--and ours is to work hard and that’s how you get ahead. Even the most menial task must be done well. If you’re cleaning toilets, your toilets better be the cleanest ones around.”
It angers him that so many now view affirmative action as a program that gives jobs to the unqualified and fail to recognize the hard work and organizational skills it takes to run any successful company.
As the future of affirmative action is debated, Ybarra plans to be in the forefront of its supporters. “The minority business enterprise program has not created one Communist or one socialist, but it has created a lot of entrepreneurs,” he says. “Isn’t that what this country is all about--free enterprise?”
