Jesús M. Vargas and the education of a small fish

The fish are a reasonable place to start. An infrastructure consulting firm could decorate its offices with bridges, hard hats or photographs of important people holding ceremonial shovels. At VSCE, Jesús M. Vargas has made room for fish. They carry a lesson about the awkward business of finding work: careful preparation can still end with an empty hook.

An early mentor, experienced in winning and managing large consulting assignments, introduced him to the comparison. A proposal might go nowhere. An interview might produce interest without a contract. A small job might become a durable relationship. The imagery stayed with Vargas long enough to become part of his company’s explanation of itself. There is a refreshing lack of grandeur in this account of entrepreneurship. Sometimes, even after doing your homework, the fish simply has other plans.

The degree was an opening

Vargas was born in Mexico and grew up in Chicago. His father, also named Jesús, worked in a factory making automobile fuel tanks and wanted education to give his children more choices. The younger Vargas became the first in his family to attend college. That is the hinge in the story: a family’s ambition meeting a route into a profession.

He remembers being an unexceptional student in high school, with an enthusiasm for photography. He won a Photographer of the Year award and kept the nameplate for more than fifteen years. Counselors helped steer his mathematics and drafting abilities toward the University of Illinois Chicago. His degree was in structural engineering. After graduation, a Caltrans job took him to San Francisco; he made the move in a new black Pontiac Firebird.

A degree and a car make a wonderfully compact departure scene. They also conceal the less photogenic part: the people who helped make the departure possible. A parent’s insistence on education and a counselor’s suggestion have no place on an engineering drawing. Yet they belong in an engineer’s biography. Before there can be a professional network, someone has to help you enter the profession.

“The bigger the fish, the more planning and testing of strategies is required.”

The lesson Vargas describes learning from an early mentor

A camera, then change control

His university years ran from 1982 to 1987. Alongside engineering, his activities included the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, the Society of Women Engineers and the Confederation of Latin American Students. He also worked as a newspaper photographer. Even in a compressed education record, there is a mixture of technical study, student organization and observation.

Later, on the BART extension to San Francisco International Airport, he worked as change control manager supporting the on-site design team from January 2001 to March 2002. The title is less immediately picturesque than photographer. It belongs, however, to a recognizable problem: a large undertaking changes as it proceeds, and someone has to help keep the consequences intelligible.

The connection is interesting without pretending that one occupation caused the other. A photographer chooses what needs attention inside a frame. A project team needs a shared account of what has changed. Both make a useful reminder that technical work has an audience. Information has to reach another person in a form that person can use.

Vargas’s career eventually brought him into construction management, program management and public relations. The combination puts communication beside engineering in the ordinary course of business. Residents, contractors, designers and public agencies do not arrive with identical questions. A project can be one undertaking on paper and several different experiences in the people living or working around it.

Orange in 2004. Blue in 2005. Grey in 2006.

Vargas founded VSCE in 2004. Its three fish also preserve a service history. Orange represents construction management, which began with the firm’s earliest work in the fall of that year, including support connected to Point Park and the Fruitvale BART Transit Village. Blue marks program management, offered from 2005 through support for Alameda transportation agencies. Grey represents public relations, which developed through community outreach assignments in Oakland beginning in 2006.

That sequence gives the company a more human scale than a list of capabilities. The services have birthdays. They arose through assignments, clients and work that led to further work. The story allows room for development rather than presenting the finished company as something that sprang from a founder’s head already carrying a complete organization chart.

The fish are therefore doing two jobs. They identify the work and remind the people pursuing it that winning an assignment requires patience. A decorative object rarely gets a performance review, but these appear to have earned their wall space.

The business plan met the economy

In early 2009, as the economy deteriorated, Vargas revised VSCE’s business plan. The firm found work on rail and transit projects, recreational facilities and public-private infrastructure programs supported by federal stimulus funding. It added staff and purchased equipment. On August 13, 2010, the California Hispanic Chambers of Commerce recognized him as its Businessman of the Year at its statewide convention in Los Angeles.

The timing matters. An award can flatten a business history into a happy ending. Here, the preceding decision is at least as revealing as the ceremony. The business had to adjust to the conditions in which clients were actually commissioning work. Persistence, in this setting, involved changing the plan.

By then, Vargas was also mentoring young people and emerging businesses and helping agencies develop policies supporting participation by smaller and underrepresented firms. That puts another kind of work alongside delivering an assignment: helping determine who gets a chance to compete for one. For an owner of a consulting business, access to the competition is a practical concern.

A vote, a ceiling, a contract

One useful glimpse of VSCE’s place in public infrastructure comes from BART’s 2015 board record. Vargas addressed the board during consideration of sustaining construction management services. Directors authorized an agreement with VSCE with a ceiling of $3 million. A separate agreement of the same maximum amount went to Cornerstone Transportation Consulting. The motion passed unanimously among the eight directors voting.

A ceiling is an authorization limit, rather than a statement of revenue earned. Keeping that distinction makes the number more useful. It shows the scale of work the agency was prepared to authorize, without turning a board action into an invented measure of the founder’s wealth or the company’s income.

The scene also places Vargas somewhere less abstract than a founder biography: in front of a public board, participating in the process through which services are commissioned. A rail system’s visible parts are stations, trains and tracks. Its decisions also travel through meetings, agreements and votes. The record captures one of those moments with very little ceremony.

At the other end of the award

By December 2022, Vargas was serving as president of COMTO Northern California. At the chapter’s awards event, he joined Carl Holmes of the San Francisco County Transportation Authority in presenting VST Engineering with its Historically Underutilized Business of the Year award. The founders being recognized were Anthony Valdiosera, Dominic Tafoya and Michael Stanwick.

It is a small but telling change of position in the story. In 2010, Vargas received recognition. Twelve years later, he helped extend it to another business. Professional communities are partly made in such moments: people gather, identify work they value and give its practitioners a public introduction.

His participation also appears in Caltrans’s May 2023 Small Business Council meeting record, where he drew attention to COMTO’s forthcoming national convention in Los Angeles. There is no dramatic speech attached to the entry. There is simply a person carrying information from one professional gathering into another. Networks are maintained by such ordinary acts as well as by the occasions that produce photographs.

These public appearances give the portrait some movement. A company owner may spend one meeting explaining what his firm can deliver and another pointing colleagues toward a gathering where they can meet potential partners. Neither occasion requires a dramatic origin story. Together, they show the maintenance work of a professional life: staying involved, recognizing other people’s businesses and keeping channels open between organizations.

For readers following Vargas’s path, the distinction between a title and an activity is useful. Chapter president is a title. Presenting an award is an activity. The latter lets us see what he actually did in that role, on a particular evening, alongside identifiable colleagues.

The next person through the door

VSCE remains headquartered in Oakland, with a published portfolio extending through California and into Seattle. Its work brings together program managers, engineers, inspectors, construction managers and public relations specialists. Vargas’s stated founding principles include volunteering, service, collaboration, empowerment, respect and integrity. They describe the kind of company he intends to build as well as the services it offers.

Those intentions are easier to understand beside his own route into the field. He was helped toward college. He encountered a mentor who explained how consulting work is won. His business grew by adding services over time. Each episode gives another person a part in what might otherwise be told as an individual success.

The fish offer a modest way to keep that memory in view. They acknowledge preparation, waiting and the possibility of disappointment. They also leave room for another attempt. For a founder whose working life has involved both managing infrastructure and helping people participate in it, that seems an appropriate thing to put where visitors can see it.