My name is Adolfo Garcia. My partners are Oscar Rosas and Chris Godinez. And, we three own Hi-Plains Civil Engineers. We bought the business from our previous boss in 2020. It used to be brand engineers, and, we rebranded in 2022 to High Plains Civil Engineers.
I had ten years of experience doing this before we made the leap to ownership.

 

What's your favorite part about owning your own business?
Just being able to do things our way, because we do municipal work. It's always to a higher standard. When we're dealing with taxpayer money, whatever you design has to last. What's nice is being able to say, hey, I'm going to do it my way, do it the right way, and I'm going to do it within your budget and everyone's going to be happy and then we feel good about it. Then everybody has clean water and safe roads because of what you do.

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How does your business get to positively impact the community?
We have one of the few careers where everything we do affects a wide range of people. Specifically the drinking water. People have drinking water, safe drinking water because of us. When the power goes out, you always have water. Nobody thinks about it. You just have water pressure. We build cities, so I think we directly impact every single resident in all these communities. We work for 26 cities. We work all over the Panhandle, and it's nice to be able to look at a map or a globe and I can I can say this area right here, we directly affect. We take a lot of pride in that.

 

What's the hardest thing about owning your own business?
Having to learn the administrative like QuickBooks, payroll, invoicing, HR, things like that that we weren't familiar with having to learn on the fly.

 

How did the SBDC help you with your small business?
We were approached by, Michelle to enter the enterprise challenge, and then right after that, I got connected with Shane at the SBDC and he helped me through writing our business plan and and doing our financial projections. I know how our business runs and I know what potential we could have, but he helped me put that down on paper.

 

If you didn't have to sleep what would you do with that time?
I would do a lot more activities at home with my family. My son plays hockey, so I'd love to spend more time with him on that. We like to go fishing, doing outdoor stuff, and I'd like to have a lot more free time to do things like that.