Eighty percent of Ray Garcia’s work is automatic gate systems, he says.
That is a lopsided split for a company called AA Custom Fence, run by a solo owner who has worked in the trade for more than 20 years. It was a decision. Garcia says ordinary fence work alone would not have set the company apart. “We got into industrial fence and gate systems to be different,” he says.
The company still builds and repairs fence, and Garcia calls it a general fence contractor that also designs gate systems. Its site lists industrial and security fence, iron and aluminum fence, enclosures and crash-post bollards, along with repairs after truck wrecks. The list of past work it names leans commercial: city governments, utilities, a power plant, a water treatment plant, railroad security fence and a golf entertainment venue. Garcia doesn’t do a lot of residential work, though he says that isn’t by choice. “That’s just the way it is,” he says.
Gate projects tend to change shape as they go, and Garcia says the job is to tell customers about every possibility before it happens. “They don’t have to think for us,” he says. “We’ve already opened up to them and told them everything.” He says his team already knows what else a job is likely to require, so customers aren’t caught off guard when it comes up. “With our knowledge and transparency, the customer is more comfortable,” he says.
A board member of an 18-unit condo association, which hired the company to put a gate across its parking garage, described what that looked like from the other side. The original design had to change more than once. Each time, the board member recounted online, Garcia got in touch, walked through the change and asked the board member to come out and see it in person before the work went further. When the job wrapped up, nothing had been left to assumption.
“Our reliability is our communication,” Garcia says. “We’re not the type of people to not answer the phone. We’re not the type of people to ignore somebody or anything like that.” He says that comes from experience. “The easier you make it for other people, the better.”
He warranties all of the company’s work, and he is plain about what he is not chasing. “We’re not here to just do as many jobs as possible,” he says. “We’re here to kill it, do a quality job.” The website names metro Denver as its territory, but the gate work travels. “We go everywhere,” he says. “We’ll go to different states.”
The trade came to him early. His father was a general contractor, and the family bought and sold houses around Denver. As a teenager, Garcia helped build houses that were then put up for sale. Even so, he says, “I’ve always been independent.” His first work for himself had nothing to do with construction.
“Just venturing out in my neighborhood and asking people to mow their lawn, just stuff like that,” he says. “I was only 11, 12 years old.”