Ricardo( Rick) Marrun, owner of Ricardo Marrun Construction( RMC), was born and raised in Redwood City.“ My dad worked as a garbage collector with Browning- Ferris Industries( BFI) and my mom was a homemaker who also cleaned houses,” he shares.“ My parents are originally from Mexico, which is where most of our family remains. We are a close-knit family, so those of us in the U. S. still visit our relatives in Mexico once or twice a year.” Although he now lives in Newark, Rick discovered that most of the people he grew up with in the Bay Area had also moved to Newark, so he is still surrounded by close family friends and their kids.
Rick’ s love of construction developed as a kid, when his summer vacations were spent going to construction sites with his uncle.“ Every morning at 6 AM, he’ d pick me up in his truck and have me help around the job site – doing clean up, grabbing a shovel and a pick – whatever I could manage.” When his uncle returned to bring his crew lunch, he would drive young Rick back home.“ I loved being outdoors and seeing how my uncle and his employees interacted.”
Despite this early exposure, Rick didn’ t see a clear path in school to get into construction, so he participated in the Regional Occupation Program( ROP) welding course, becoming a certified welder right out of high school.“ I’ d only been out of high school six months when my Kennedy High welding instructor, Mr.
Briscoe, called to ask if I was interested in a welding job,” recalls Rick.“ I got hired by the Right Away Redy Mix company, working as a welder for a couple of years before becoming a welding foreman, welding their concrete pumps and trucks.” During this time, he and the company’ s mechanic foreman decided to buy their own concrete pump and began doing residential concrete work.
In the early 90’ s, Rick got his contractor license and worked as a concrete contractor for nearly 15 years – pouring driveways and foundations for new housing developments and doing concrete for small parks until the 2008 Recession.“ When the recession hit, all our residential projects disappeared and I didn’ t have any connections to get into commercial projects, so I had to find other work.”
He kept busy at his sister’ s auto body shop while doing small side jobs here and there, then secured a decent-paying estimating and welding job before getting hired as an estimator for Robert A. Bothman Construction Company( Bothman), one of the largest commercial contractors on the West Coast.“ It was my first taste of the commercial construction world and there was a steep learning curve,” he notes,“ but I had my prior welding and concrete experience and was eager to learn. I was usually the first one in the office and often the last to leave.” He credits Angie Ramos, who ran the company’ s estimating department, with helping him to learn the
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