From Nothing....A Successful Business
Martin Marietta Materials opened the gates of its
Arrowood Quarry to AGG1 attendees in March.
From Nothing…a
The Aguilar family
didn’t let starting
out with nothing
but a truck and a
screen stop them
from turning their
small business
into a prosperous
company.
by Kerry Clines,
Senior Editor
26
AGGREGATES MANAGER November 2012
T
he small town of Socorro, N.M., just
south of Albuquerque, is the home
of A1 Quality Redi-Mix, Inc., owned
by Canda and Pablo Aguilar, Sr. and
operated by the family. It’s a thriving company,
consisting of a quarry, a ready-mix plant, and
an asphalt plant, but it wasn’t always like that. It
was quite different in the beginning.
Humble beginnings
Canda and Pablo started out with nothing but
a small dump truck back in 1953. Canda would
hold a screen in the back of the dump truck
to screen the sand, and Pablo would haul the
screened material to people in the area.
“Over the next eight years, they purchased
two more trucks to haul manganese from the
Black Canyon Mine located in the Socorro
area,” says Steven Aguilar, one of Canda and
Pablo’s sons. In 1967, when the Black Canyon
Mine closed down, the Aguilars bought their
first diesel dump truck, which they used to deliver products to other companies.
In 1969, the Aguilars bought their first
screening plant and started providing sand and
gravel to two concrete plants in Socorro and
one in Belen. After hauling product to a lumberyard in Belen one day, the truck driver, Canda’s brother, mentioned that the lumberyard
had purchased a new concrete batch plant and
that its old plant was no longer in use. Pablo
made arrangements to purchase it.
“They picked up and delivered the plant and
cement silo on a Saturday,” Steven says. “The
concrete batch plant was set up immediately,
but the cement silo was not, due to the fact they
needed a crane, and funding was limited.”
The Aguilars also bought a cement truck
from the lumberyard that needed work. Once
the truck was repaired, they began selling con-