Manuel Castaneda has come a long way from his humble beginnings in a small Mexican village, where he herded goats as a teenager.
At that time, in the early 1980s, his parents were already in the United States. He was left to fend for himself at age 7. He bounced from one guardian to another, selling things on the Mexican streets and herding goats.
Now, Castaneda is one of the most successful minority business owners in Oregon, a man lording over a literal empire of dirt.
For more than 20 years, Castaneda has owned Pro Landscape, a Hillsboro-based company that has seen appreciable growth – from a business specializing in yard maintenance to a full-fledged construction company.
And on Oct. 1, Castaneda will receive the Oregon Minority Small Business Person of the Year award.
Harry DeWolf, the Portland Director of the Small Business Administration, calls Castaneda’s entrepreneurial spirit a model for others to follow.
Though honored by the recognition, Castaneda says his success has come from hard work and innovation.
It also took a healthy dollop of luck.
Castaneda started his first landscaping job when he was 15, after his brothers who worked for a local landscaping company vouched for him to a wary management team that balked at his age.
Once hired, though, Castaneda found the owner to be a “nice man, very caring,” who paid him $5.10 per hour. It was enough to live on – barely.
“But he was kind of a hippie guy,” Castaneda added.
Project managers for the company would often go missing from jobsites while their employees maintained bushes and pulled weeds, Castaneda says, to engage in extracurricular activities involving plants of a more dubious nature.
He saw a lack of managerial prowess and became frustrated with the company, which wasn’t going to promote him anyway.
So with a credit card worth $800, Castaneda left to start his own company. He used the credit to purchase his first lawnmower, and he eventually used his industry connections to find clients, all of whom he remembers by name today.
Starting a business turned out to be a serendipitous decision, Castaneda says.
His company grew and he eventually took and passed the state’s contractor exam, at which point he decided to focus on landscape construction rather than simply maintenance.
“I saw that there wasn’t much room for growth in yard maintenance,” he says.
With that decision, he gave most of the maintenance accounts to his former employees, many of whom used the accounts to start their own companies that still exist today: C & T Landscape Maintenance, Forest Landscape and Beaver Landscape Maintenance.
There were still obstacles, however. For one, his expenses were higher due to construction costs and he noticed a significant decrease in work during the winter months, a fact he saw no way to overcome.
Or so he thought.
As fortunes would have it, he was contacted by a British engineer, soon to be a client, who wanted to know if Castaneda would be interested in performing soil stabilization for steep surfaces – a process achieved by planting small pins into the soil.
He had no idea how to do this, but he accepted nonetheless.
“But I told him, ‘You tell me what I need, and I’ll do it,’ ” Castaneda said.
The engineer indeed showed Casteneda how to do it, and he alone accounted for a quarter of a million dollars for Castaneda’s young company.
Others followed, and the stabilization work, which was piling up, led Castaneda to a realization: most of this work came during the wet winter months, when hillsides were more likely to shift or slide.
Goodbye, winter woes. Hello, year-round success.
Now, Pro Landscape is among the top 30 fastest growing Hispanic-owned businesses in the country.
Still, Castaneda doesn’t want to rest on his laurels, nor does he want to stop growing. Surveying his current headquarters in Hillsboro, the back of which is piled high with strange foreign equipment and sundry building materials, he says it’s too small.
He plans to sell the property soon and move to a newer, larger location, but he’s finding it difficult to secure a loan in today’s sour financial market.
He doesn’t know when he’ll be able to move.
Maybe, Castaneda asserts, that’s simply his next challenge.