Plenty of clients call Ricardo, who owns VenCrete Ready Mix in San Antonio, needing concrete at one o’clock. Sometimes the answer is no. “I cannot do it at one o’clock,” he says. “The next available spot is at three o’clock.”
He gives that answer on purpose. “I much rather tell them the truth that, hey, I can’t do it then,” he says. Putting a customer down for a time he can’t make, taking the money and leaving them to wait for the truck is out of the question. “Absolutely not.”
VenCrete is a ready-mix batch plant on Quintana Road. Ricardo opened it in 2022, owns it alone and says its focus is commercial work. He thinks the clock is the reason customers stay. “They know that if they need it at a specific time and I give them that specific time, it’s going to be there,” he says.
He traces the habit back a long way. “I just learn very, very early that punctuality and basically your word,” he says, then corrects himself mid-thought: “Your word is definitely worth more than money. If you tell your clients you’re going to do something and you do it, they count on you, they rely on you.”
That lesson came out of a different trade. By the time he was 20, Ricardo had opened his first business, a towing company. It moved into private-property impounding, hauling cars parked in fire lanes and handicapped spaces at apartment complexes, and he did that work for 29 years before the batch plant.
At VenCrete he calls himself a working boss. “I’m the first one in, I’m the last one out,” he says. “I make sure our schedule is run tight.”
He doesn’t expect the crew to match his pace, and he has built the pay around that. “We have a performance pay rate,” he says. Top performers get the top rate.
“Some people are just happy where they’re at,” he says, “and they’re just comfortable with what they can do.” He has made his peace with that. “I can’t force people to be just like me.”
Not every order is large, and Ricardo goes looking for the ones that aren’t. He aims at the smaller customer, the one who needs a modest load rather than a contract’s worth. “If you’re asking me for 10 yards, if you’re asking me for seven yards, we want to make sure that we accommodate those type of clients,” he says. “The bigger people can focus on the bigger contracts. I would like to focus on the little people.”
Whatever the size of the pour, he holds his trucks to a tighter mark than the customer asked for.
“If I tell you I’m going to be there at two in the morning,” he says, “we’re going to be there at 1:45.”