Twenty-five years ago when Steve Martines walked away from a steady job and a weekly paycheck, he didn’t have any great vision for his future.
With a wife and two young daughters to house, clothe and feed, he knew two things: He was very good at what he did, and he’d had enough of working for someone else.
More than the willful Hispanic-American high school dropout son of divorced parents from a Denver suburb, according to associates, Martines was a skilled diesel engine mechanic who wanted only to do the best job he could. If that meant he had to be on his own, then so be it. He would take that risk.
With no shop or office, no capital and no business plan, Martines became an entrepreneur. He called the business Steve’s Equipment Service because that’s the only way customers knew him.
Is it an accident, then, that today Martines is CEO of one of the top 500 Hispanic-owned businesses in the United States? Is it coincidence that Steve’s Equipment Service (SES) Inc. of West Chicago shows annual sales figures of more than $15 million?
Martines, 55, says coincidence had nothing to do with it.
“The business grows according to the demands of the customers. If the customers aren’t there and they aren’t happy, the business doesn’t go anywhere,” Martines said of the success of his construction equipment sales and service company.
For customer Art Conte Jr., president of A.A. Conte & Son Inc., a West Chicago site contracting firm, there’s even more to it.
“Steve stands behind the work his mechanics do. He goes by what’s right and wrong, not by what someone wants to hear,” Conte said. “Steve is an excellent person to do business with. Even if it means standing up to a manufacturer, he will go to bat for you.
“We have a very good business relationship, and we’re able to be friends, too.” The two are neighbors in nearby Wayne, where Martines has taken to breeding horses as part of his second passion: horseback riding.
It’s only in the last 15 years that Martines has been riding. He began because he needed something to do on Sundays.
“I was in the process of buying a business from a man whom I admired, a mentor. He was 67 years old and was selling his business. It was the only thing in his life,” Martines said.
Up until then, SES had been almost the only thing in Martines’ life. He’d been working long hours, seven days a week.
Martines continued, “He called off the sale, possibly because he knew he had nothing else. A year later I bought the business from his estate. He had died.”
From that point on, Martines forced himself to take Sundays off. “I’d read the newspaper, and by 10 a.m. I’d sit there and say, `Now what?’ ” he said.
All Martines’ friends were business-related; he had no hobbies. His daughters were involved in horseback riding, so he gave it a try.
At first it was difficult because Martines was in such bad shape. “I drank too much, I took a lot of pills, and two or three times a year I’d check myself into a hospital thinking I had a heart attack,” he said. “Since I’ve been riding, I’ve dropped 80 pounds, I only have a beer or two on weekends, and I haven’t seen a doctor in eight years.”
Martines rides four times a week. He is “a dedicated and serious rider,” according to his trainer, Lynn Jane of Elgin. Two years ago, she said, Martines was president of the Illinois Hunter-Jumper Association. She describes him as determined.
“I ride competitively, show jumping, and I go fox hunting,” Martines explained recently from his Powis Road office. The huge, plush office is packed with the personal memorabilia of someone who loves horses.
Trophies, photos, bronze horse statues and plaques reveal that Martines might be as competitive on horseback as he is in the business world. Truth is, he is competitive with no one but himself.
“There’s a saying in competition that says, `Show me a good loser and I’ll show you a loser.’ I don’t believe that,” Martines said. “When I show competitively, I know that I’m only competing with myself. It’s my ride, and if I can honestly say I’ve given it my best shot, no matter where I placed, I’m satisfied.”
Martines’ oldest daughter, Cindy Whitehair, 33, of Deerfield, Wis., said that was one of the most important things her dad taught his daughters as they were growing up.
“To be responsible for our own actions. It didn’t matter what others said or did as long as we did the best we could,” Whitehair said.
Youngest daughter Julie Martines, 27, of Chicago agrees. “The drive, the ambition, the sense of responsibility that we have is due to our father,” she said.
Julie is owner of her own small equipment repair business in Chicago. She and her dad spend weekends together riding. Julie acknowledged they have never been closer as father and daughter as they have in the last six years.
“He tends to get a little obsessed with work,” Julie said, referring to her growing-up years when Martines was so focused on business that he was home very little. The humor in her understatement didn’t go unnoticed.
“He is probably the hardest working person I know. But he plays hard, too, riding. He doesn’t do anything half-heartedly,” she said. Not work, not riding, not life.
Martines began working as a teenager when he labored for his father, a cement contractor. “From the time I was big enough, I was working in construction. The money was always pretty good,” Martines recalled.
At the time he was living with his maternal grandmother, whom he credits with straightening him out, as best she could.
“When your parents get a divorce and they both remarry, you become the outsider in both houses,” Martines said. He was the only child of his parents’ marriage, but after their divorce they each had two other children with second spouses.
“I would stay with my dad for a while and he’d spoil me. Then I’d go to my mother’s house and she’d try to outdo my dad, spoiling me more. I’d go back to my dad, then back to my mother, and so on. I became spoiled rotten,” Martines said.
It was his grandmother, Martines said, who recognized his potential and knew being spoiled was not his fault. Even so, he never completed his junior year of high school.
“At 16, working in construction had gotten me a brand new 1955 Ford convertible with every accessory they offered on it,” Martines said. “It was pretty hard for a teacher to convince me that I needed a diploma when I had everything I wanted. Hell, I drove a nicer car than the teacher did.”
Martines quit school to work full time for his father. Eventually they had a falling out, and he quit to learn equipment repair working for another contractor. By the time he was 24, Martines had become a master mechanic.
Four years later, in 1968, Martines was offered a job as a factory service technician by a diesel engine manufacturer in Peoria. He accepted.
“I came to work the first day and was introduced around. I filled out all the paper work and toured the plant,” Martines remembered.
After lunch he was called back into the factory office where he was told they were very sorry but he couldn’t work for them. The job he was about to take required a college degree.
“They didn’t realize until I’d filled out the employment papers that I wasn’t a high school graduate,” Martines said, “They’d never asked me.”
Feeling badly that they had brought him all the way from Denver for nothing-luckily his wife, Nancy, and child had temporarily remained in Denver-the manufacturer made Martines a second offer: a mechanic’s job with one of their distributors who was located in Elmhurst.
Martines began working for Illinois Contractors’ Machinery in Elmhurst. Within a year he’d been promoted from mechanic to foreman to service manager.
As service manager he took an interest in the way the company did business and one day approached his boss with a list of suggestions on improving their productivity.
“He told me I was 75 percent right and 25 percent wrong. But as long as they could be right 25 percent of the time, they would continue to do so,” Martines said.
“I was shocked. I asked him, `Can you make money being right only 25 percent of the time?’ He said yes. Then I said, `I have got to be a millionaire!’ and I quit on the spot.”
That first year Martines could do only repairs that were in the field because he had no shop. After the first year he decided that, in order to appear more professional, he’d need a telephone number and a shop. In 1970, he rented a 6,000-square-foot building on North Avenue just east of Illinois Highway 59.
In 1972, he bought the building. In ’79, he added 24,000 square feet to it. In the early ’80s, he became a factory distributor, offering equipment sales and service.
In 1987, he built the 70,000-square-foot building SES currently occupies. Also in ’87, he bought Illinois Contractors’ Machinery.
Putting together a successful business took all of Martines’ time. “I had to work seven days a week, 12 hours a day,” he said.
Martines recalled words of advice from a mentor when he’d first started his own business: “Whatever you do, be the best at it. So that when two guys are having coffee and one says his equipment is broken, the other guy says, `Take it to Steve because he’s the best.’
“That’s what I aimed for. Instead of taking a shotgun approach, we looked at what we were doing and took a rifle approach. We narrowed the scope of what we did to rebuilding and overhauling diesel engines.
“You know, you’re only as good as your last job. You can do a hundred good jobs, but if you do one bad job everybody knows it.”
Cindy was very aware of her father’s desire to succeed on his own terms. “He would never put his name on the list to receive the minority set-aside contracts issued by the city of Chicago,” Cindy said.
He always told her that if he was going to make it, he would make it on his own without taking advantage of his minority status, Cindy said.
Consequently it was a struggle, Martines said, to get bonding, to get insurance, to get credit.
In order to stay afloat during the first three years of the ’80s, Martines went into long-term debt by mortgaging all his real estate. (“We do more business today in one month than we did the whole year of 1983,” he said.)
Martines eventually allowed SES to be put on the roster of minority-owned businesses, but only after a client requested it in order to qualify for government contracts.
“Once we did, it cost us customers,” Martines said. He explained that no one ever said anything, but the customers nevertheless stopped returning his firm’s calls.
“Everything else was the same. We were still the same business who had been doing good work for them all along,” Martines said. The only thing that changed was SES’ minority status.
Martines theorized that it was because there are businesses that resent the government-imposed quota programs so much that they are determined to see them fail.
“What no one understands is that the sooner minority-owned businesses are allowed to mainstream, the sooner those quota programs can be eliminated,” Martines said.
In spite of the setback, Martines persisted, and with the help of an improving economy in the mid-’80s, his business survived.
“Life is a series of periods of growth,” Martines explained. “Between those growth periods are levels where you take inventory and make necessary adjustments.”
It was at that point that Martines took an assessment and decided he had been a taker. “I had been busy building my business and never paid attention to giving anything back,” he said.
Martines began being active in the Hispanic community. He joined and later took a seat on the board of directors of HACIA (Hispanic American Construction Industry Association).
A Chicago metropolitan area organization, HACIA has a membership of 115 Hispanic contractors, architects, engineers, project managers and construction suppliers. They are a resource and an advocate for minority contractors, according to executive director Carlos Ponce.
“Steve is a natural leader. He’s very down-to-earth and relies heavily on common sense in making decisions,” Ponce said of Martines.
“Steve’s participation on the HACIA board is definitely a sacrifice for him since his company is big enough that he doesn’t need us,” Ponce said. Martines gives unselfishly of his time as well as his money in HACIA’s fundraising efforts, according to Ponce.
Martines said, “If I can speak from a higher platform because of the size of my business, then I will do so. If it helps other minority-owned companies, it’s the least I can do.”
Today Martines finds himself at another leveling-off. “I’m not any different than any other person who comes to work every day. I get tired after a while, too.”
Martines told about a recent day when he just took off one afternoon. Everyone was looking for him, but he’d gone home.
The next morning when an employee asked about his absence, Martines quipped, “I quit yesterday. But because I’m the boss, I had to come back today.”
“The fire that’s burning in your heart sometimes isn’t as bright as it was before. So you have to put something there,” Martines said. “Thank goodness I’ve got the horses. And thank goodness they’re very expensive. If I don’t work my tail off every single day, I’ll lose them.”
Asked what that 16-year-old with his ’55 Ford convertible would have thought if he’d been told one day he would be fox hunting, Martines answered, “He would’ve told somebody they were smoking something.”
As for the future, still no great vision, he said.
“We are blessed in this country with the ability to create the future we want,” Martines said. Maybe the hardest part is deciding what that future should be.
