Eugenio Baeza dreamed of becoming a truck driver but ended up leading a multimillion-dollar company. He talks about his family's influence, his time at Ford, and the decisions that shaped his path from those early ambitions to where he is now.
When I graduated, I didn't want to go back. I was already there. Today I wanted to be a truck driver, if you know what I mean. I had a girlfriend whose father was a truck driver and had trailers. And, well, everything seemed right to me. Right? You see how relaxed American fashion is, right? You'd go out in sandals and shorts. So I said, I'm going to be a truck driver. And then, well, my father financed a trailer for me. And, well, that's when my parents went to the recording. And when we finished recording, she said to me, well, what's next? No, I told her, I'm going to stay here. And then he told me, no, no, no, no. If the education you have, which is different from what you have in Mexico, was paid for by Chihuahua, right? No, not me anymore. Then you have to go back to Chihuahua so that you can apply what you learned here. How are you going to apply it here? And so I went back to Chihuahua. When I returned to Chihuahua, I arrived and sat down with my father in his office, and I told him, now, I've already herded cows, this, the provisions and so on. Now, which ranch am I going to manage and what percentage are you going to give me? And he looked at me and said, yours. What, mine? The one you buy. That's the one you're going to manage, and you're going to have 100% when you buy it. Uh, so that decision my dad made, which must have cost him a lot of work, instead of pulling me and let's grow this, sending me to find another path, right? And that's when I went looking for a job. Did you ever blame him for that or did you resent him? There would be no before. I mean, I would put it another way. No, I would put it another way that it was a wise decision. There would be no before. Maybe we would have a lot of ranches and things. I'm not sure, right? But I think it was harder for him than for me to make that decision. So I go to work at Ford, and they interview me there. They interviewed me at the airport with the director of human resources. And he hired me for hourly wage labor relations. That is the relationship with the union. And so I joined Ford. And at Ford, well, I started working in a really fun executive environment, wearing suits, graduating interns, all that stuff, right? And then along comes Ford. At that time, he was building a mega engine plant, A million engines. Imagine this is in 83. The plant was huge, and they were bringing.
