Today, we’ll tell the story of how H.B Pat Zachry – the founder of the firm – went into business for himself at the age of 23.

After graduating as a Civil Engineer, Pat started work as a county surveyor in Texas, and as part of this job he had to design a plan for paving the dirt road connecting Laredo to Corpus Christi. The Texas Highway Department was running the project, and was paying him $200 a month (around $2,700 today). To many this would have represented a safe and secure job. But Pat saw things very differently. In 1924, encouraged by his father, he resigned as a surveyor and put in a bid for a section of the project — a $40,000 bridge at Laredo. He won the contract, worth about $540,000 in today’s money, and the H. B. Zachry Company of Laredo was on its way.

This milestone event also became part of company folklore. “One morning when I was short-handed,” Pat remembered, “I was driving a two-mule Fresno scraper when a local contractor drove by. He asked me what I was doing driving those mules, and doing such a poor job of it. I told him that one of my good men had failed to show, and I was trying to add some additional yardage to the day’s work. “Well,” he said, “I guess that’s all right, but remember one thing. You will never get very far in life looking at it through the rear end of a mule.”

It was blunt advice, but it lined up perfectly with Pat’s philosophy, shaping a leadership style that would help define the company for 90 years.