SAN DIEGO _ As the final details in a $78 million business deal rushed toward dotted I's and crossed T's, Mick Ruis made a single demand before allowing the ink to dry.
The March 2016 transaction to sell 80 percent of American Scaffold, the company he launched with six employees just east of downtown San Diego, simply waited for a signature. The business rocketed from No. 5 in San Diego to the largest worldwide supplier for the U.S. Navy, operating in five states.
The high school dropout who grew up in the Rios Canyon area of El Cajon, duct-taping shoes together and folding over the front of socks when toes poked through, built the company after Quality Shoring _ which he started with $3,000 and a fax machine _ sold for $2.5 million.
The deal-breaker now? The new majority owners had to maintain the taco parties that rewarded employees for safety _ food, music, alcohol and all.
"Wow, that's a lot of liability," said Ruis, rewinding the mild protest from the other side of the table. "You know what I told them? I said, my guys hang 150 foot in the air. You don't call that liability? You know what we have for them? Insurance, right? So you're going to get insurance for my taco parties, because we're going to keep having them."
The owner and trainer of Bolt d'Oro, a one-time favorite in the May 5 Kentucky Derby who remains in smart-money conversations, provides a complex study in wits, sweat-soaked hustle and entrepreneurial gumption.
Ruis, a former dishwasher at an El Cajon pizza restaurant, gained a love for horse racing and number-crunching during weekend visits to Agua Caliente in Tijuana. In 1979, the teen who would sneak drinks from a tequila fountain at the track won his very first bet.
Most of his waking hours, however, focused on learning the scaffolding business _ first as a worker, then as the youngest manager in the company, and finally as a savvy, detail-oriented owner.
Ruis said he would visit competing job sites in the dark to figure out how many employees they used and the amount of work they finished each day. The math allowed him to tinker with costs and efficiencies, crafting bids that were impossible to match.
Many days, Ruis said, he and his crew would sleep at the site or office if necessary, to maximize time.
At a recent American Scaffold taco party, employee after employee rushed to greet Ruis with the kinds of hugs reserved for life-long friends, not some distant or detached economic engine behind a business empire. As the Brooks & Dunn song "Hard Workin' Man" blared from a makeshift DJ booth, Ruis sipped from a cheap plastic cup as he mingled.
Ruis is a jeans and T-shirt guy, despite a bank account that would allow wardrobe options challenging Justin Timberlake. When Bolt d'Oro _ named after Olympic sprinter Usain Bolt _ was nominated for a prestigious Eclipse Award based on his strong 2-year-old season, Ruis had to buy a suit for the January event ... because he didn't own one.
Wendy, Mick's wife, had a strategy session with a sales person at a Los Angeles-area Men's Wearhouse.
"Mick said if he could pick something out in 15 minutes, he'd go," she said. "I told the guy, 'You have 15 minutes with him. Do the best you can.' It was like $300-something for the whole thing. He threw in the shoes for the price."
At the point Ruis had amassed $5 million worth of scaffolding material, he continued to drive a rattling Nissan Sentra with 350,000 miles on it.
"To me, I hope it doesn't sound corny, but it's the great American story," said Daryl Priest, a successful home developer and close friend since the two attended Greenfield Middle School. "It's what the country's about. If you're willing to work hard enough and dedicate yourself to something, that's what Mick is about.
"When you come from that kind of background, you appreciate things. A lot of people have things given to them, but they don't appreciate it because they didn't have to work for it.
"And he's amazing generous. Those guys you saw hugging him (at the taco party), he's loaned them money and bought something for them and you're never going to hear about any of that stuff."
