Autobiography - The Galindo Group

Ram Galindo THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN Page 101
Since we arrived, Joe Elliott had been busy learning Spanish and getting to know the
town. But, always at my side, he recognized that this was the entrepreneurial
opportunity we had been longing for. He told me it was time to start our own business.
Time to act. Time to prove our mettle. Time to take control of our means of production.
Neither one of us realized how nearly impossible that was in a socialist environment. In
this case, as in many others, ignorance was bliss. Joe and I decided that our edge was
in applying technologies not yet common anywhere, much less in Cochabamba.
Although I was a good civil engineer, there was no one to hire my services except the
government, and the government was very mad at me.
Joe still had the handicap, though quickly vanishing, of a newcomer’s command of the
Spanish language. Through his own father he had, however, access to a new planning
tool recently developed for the Navy called Project Evaluation and Review Technique
(PERT), which with a little imagination could be applied to just about any commercial
undertaking. We decided that was our ticket to get started. His dad sent us what now I
would say was very primitive software to get us going and we promptly learned its use.
In April 1964 I incorporated Consultores Galindo Ltda. It was the first firm in Bolivia to
dedicate itself to the modern practice of consulting engineering.
Despite the fact that I was the first Bolivian born engineer to graduate and gain
bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Texas A&M, I could not practice my profession
without ratification of my academic credentials by Bolivian authorities. Under the
socialist regime academic accreditation was almost conditioned to swearing allegiance
to their party. In mid 1964 I was received by the Secretary of Public Works and asked
by him to join the party as a prerequisite to any work opportunities. I politely declined.
Fortunately, a few months later he and his party were expelled by a coup d’etat and
processing my degree’s ratification became easier, and work opportunities incresased.
As in every difficult financial point in my life before and after, my father was there to help
me. Upon his return in 1960 from about four years of self-exile in Peru, one of the few
surviving private businesses in Cochabamba, a brewery known as “Taquina” was at the
verge of closing down. In recognition of his organizational talents and his latest
industrial experience, the company’s stockholders offered him the position of chief
executive of the company. This is the job he was in when Joe and I arrived in
Cochabamba. By this time he had begun to turn the company around and was looking
to implement new approaches to his work. Joe and I presented to him a vision of how
we could help evaluate the small projects he was considering. He immediately asked us
for a proposal and became our first client. Our fees were not enough to cover expenses,
but allowed us to say that we were working as management consultants. In time he
became one of our important clients as he set about to expand the brewery
substantially.
Concurrently with this work, I found some contractors who were building government
projects and needed engineering services but were reluctant to pay any fees. I offered
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