February 24, 2026 • 22 mins
Pedro Galileo Romo, Founder & CEO, PGR Inc.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
iHeart Media presents CEOs You should Know. CEOs you should
Know Charleston is brought to you by SC two to
fifty Charleston Www dot SC two fifty Charleston dot org.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
It's Michael Blaze. Welcome to CEOs you should Know. Joining
us today Pedro Galileo Romo. He's founder and CEO of
PGR Incorporated. Welcome Pedro, Hey, Mike, good afternoon. It's great
to be here. Thanks for having me. Absolutely, I'm excited
to talk to you. Let's start with what exactly it
is PGR is and what does PGR do.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Yeah. Absolutely, What we're trying to do with PGR is
fundamentally accelerate how quickly companies can decrease the industrial learning curve.
What that means is that companies on average can take
up to ten years to put in place a continuous
improvement system, the processes, the leadership required to get too
(00:52):
true continuous improvement. How cool would it be if we
can do that in one year with technology? And so
we've done a lot of research, development, proof of concepts
to develop the technologies to do that, using artificial intelligence,
quantum algorithms, machine vision, and other technologies. And now we
want to bring that to market into twenty twenty six.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Now, does this encompass every aspect of the business, so
everything from human resources to automation, or is it concentrated
on just the human resources side or the automation side, or.
Speaker 3 (01:27):
Yeah, that's great. It's definitely focused on manufacturing, primarily aerospace
and automotive manufacturing. And so you have factories that are
making airplanes, you have factories that are making cars or
car parts. You have factories that are making appliances, and
all of these have a schedule or a recipe of
(01:47):
how to put these things together. You have the people,
the machines, the parts coming into as efficiently as possible
build these products. But it takes a while to get
really good at it. And so what our technology and
our vision is is to accelerate and decrease how long
it takes to get really good at it. Instead of
(02:08):
taking a few years to get really good at it,
let's do it in a few months or a year.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
Well, that's fantastic, because efficiency is money after all.
Speaker 3 (02:17):
Right, We believe that profit growth resilience is achieved if
you build that capacity and that flexibility into your business plan.
And when you're looking at the big industrial leaders that
are the largest aerospace, largest automotive, largest pharmaceutical manufacturing companies
(02:37):
in the world. They are spending billions of dollars right
now and rework, defects, waste, and this technology and this
efficiencies will really rip the benefits for them. They're going
to save billions of dollars a year by accelerating this
industrial learning curve.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
Does it use models? Can it like study, say they're
going to switch the manufacturer to a new part or
something like that. Does the AI come up with a
model of that and scale it up and go through
each step and study the efficiencies along the way, or
explain a little bit how it works in the real world.
Speaker 3 (03:15):
Yeah, right now, we can take in engineering data and
so these are the drawings, the three D models of
what the different components of the airplane, car or applians
are for example, and bring that into context. And so
in real time we know what today Wednesday, they're supposed
to be building this part of the airplane or the
(03:36):
car appliance. We know what parts are going into it.
We know for that area of the factory, what work
is scheduled, how many people are working on it at
the time, and what it should look like. Knowing what
it should look like then allows us to compare of
what actually happened, and it's that really cool comparison between
(03:59):
the planned versus is the actual that we can do
in real time, so we know what parts are being installed,
We know what parts should be installed in what sequence,
in what operation, and how long it should take. What
that ends up creating is this unsupervised learning models. The
AIS are able to capture in real time the steps
(04:21):
that it took to do that work step one, step two,
step three, step four, et cetera, how long each step
took and how efficient they were, also how long that
took relative to what the plant was and on average
on aggregate. Then you're able to have real time comparisons
every day of how you're doing are you're getting better
(04:43):
and these systems are also learning in the background. So
the more work you do, the longer you have the
systems and these platforms in place, the better your efficiencies.
That the better the recommendations the platform is making that says, hey, Mike,
I see that you're installing this engine on the airplane.
It took you this many hours to do that by
doing X, Y and Z A little different. You're going
(05:04):
to get a thirty four or fifty percent improvement in efficiency,
in quality, in safety. And these are making real time
recommendations for one team, one shift in one part of
the factory. When you scale that up by adding more
little computers, more cameras, then you're expanding the footprint of
this platform. Now you can see everything happening in these factories,
(05:27):
and that's the real power is we can optimize at scale.
And now you have an entire view of end to
end of the entire production system, that whole production line,
and how you can increase productivity thirty to forty fifty percent.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
That's fantastic. Now, how did you ever get involved with
your background?
Speaker 3 (05:46):
Yeah, my background is in computer and electrical engineering and
then I have two masters, so I got the technical piece,
the engineering, the leadership strategy piece, and then the business
acumen through an MBA from un c Q and Flagware,
and that gave me a holistic view of this is
(06:07):
the product that we're going to build to meet a demand,
a business need. Here's the people that bring it all together,
and how do we motivate work with them to really
develop the team to be the best. And then at
the end of the day, this has to be a
successful business that can perpetuate and grow value for our communities,
(06:27):
for a country, for a nation. So those were the
three components that I built my curriculum around. Professionally, I
spent thirteen years at Boeing as an engineering manager leader,
running multiple programs in Seattle and here in Charleston, South Carolina.
I used to joke saying that I had all electrical
(06:48):
systems on the seven eight seven, and the seven eight seven,
for our listeners, is an all electric airplane, and so
that means pretty much everything touched the electrical systems, including batteries.
And then I got recruited by Google to bring this
holistic optimization and digital transformation of business processes to their
(07:09):
data center portfolio, which is where Google spends all their
money on infrastructure data centers, and that same approach of
creating a simpler way of doing things that's more repeatable.
With digital twins being able to create a more modular,
plug and play data center allow the teams to really
(07:30):
scale how many data centers we were delivering near and near,
how fast we can do it, and how much more
efficiently we can do it. And so that's how I
got to learn about doing multiple programs, working with teams
literally all around the world on very large, complex systems
for twenty years, and that was the background that's at
(07:51):
the foundation to build PGR.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
Now, would you suggest to other entrepreneurs that are that
have their sights on startup to go get that experience
in the corporate world first, Do you think that that
was a good advantage for you?
Speaker 3 (08:10):
That's a great question, Mike. I did get to see
what excellence looks like in terms of the technical piece,
the academic piece, and the professional piece. Having the corporate
viewpoint and experience does help to understand how to run
and how to scale, because the programs that you run
(08:32):
at Boeing and the programs that you run at companies
like Google are massive at scale. And that gave me
the experience I needed to say, yeah, I know how
to build these companies that have now created from the
ground up to scale to be global companies. So that
is helpful for sure.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
Yeah. And then do you think it could also be
in a way in some ways a hindrance because it's
so regimented in a corporation and sometimes you can't experiment
and try new things. So there's a more uh, there's
more rigid parameters. And did you feel like you have
to challenge yourself to sometimes push the limit on things
(09:15):
that you know you wouldn't be able to do otherwise
in the corporate world.
Speaker 3 (09:19):
Oh, yes, correct, Mike. The larger the organization, the more
functionally concentrated somebody's role is going to be. Meaning you
could be spending an entire career designing brackets for something
and you it's incumbent on somebody that wants to be
a founder to get that breath of experience. And I
(09:43):
purposely spend some time rotating and seeking opportunities within Boeing,
within Google to get a breath of experience as well,
not just depth. And so I understood all the twenty
thirty teams involved in running these companies, how they interface,
what their output was, what their input was, their processes,
(10:04):
and that's what allowed me to better understand, even at
macro level companies, how to operate more efficiently and push
the boundaries of innovation that way, because you're right, those
constraints are there sometimes on purpose to slow down and
making sure that you're being deliberate about the changes that
you're putting into the airplane as an example. So bureaucracy
(10:27):
is not always a bad thing. It just depends on
how that can be overextended to other processes that could
be faster and more agile.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
Sure, well, let's get to know you a little bit
more personally. Where are you originally from?
Speaker 3 (10:42):
Yeah, I grew up in Mexico. I've spent the majority
of my elementary years in Jalisco, kind of central western
part of the country. And then in the mid nineties,
during the financial crisis in Mexico, my family decided to
try something new and we came to the US excelled academically, straight,
(11:05):
a's senior class president and that sort of thing. And
I decided to continue my education in science and math
by studying engineering, and I attended Gonzaga for undergrad and
grad school, where I met my lovely wife. We've been
together for many years and have four boys, and that's
definitely what keeps me motivated and busy.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
And we were talking before we started the show about
those four boys keep you busy, don't they?
Speaker 3 (11:33):
Oh? Yeah, NonStop action. It is not a linear function,
meaning that if you have one or two kids, is
not the level of effort of two kids. It starts
being compounded exponentially. Having four boys is having like sixteen
humans or something like that. They're awesome, They're awesome.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
You were telling me the other day or the other
week that every single one of them more bandaged up
in one manner or another.
Speaker 3 (11:59):
Yeah, we have a frequent flyer program. Hospital should do that,
just like I have status with Delta air Lines and Marriott.
We should have one at the right Scooper Hospital.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
Yeah. I was shared with you because I have boys too,
and I'm like, I never thought in a million years
that would ever meet my deductible on my healthcare. It
was like a ten thousand dollars deductible and I met it.
Speaker 3 (12:23):
Yeah, for Christmas the voice one go pro cameras. I'm like, oh, great,
now we have evidence of your right your theatrics.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
Yes, absolutely, So what about your parents were what did
they do for a living? Did they have an engineering
background or Yeah.
Speaker 3 (12:39):
My parents are a business professional. So my dad studied
business and was entrepreneurial and my mom elementary education and
so she was a teacher for many years. And they
were here in Mount Pleasant actually in the same neighborhood
as us, and recently relocated to Mexico to be closer
to a family because my grandma is to turn ninety
(13:00):
nine in a few months. Wow, my mom wanted to
spend some time there.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
Yeah, well, an early happy birthday to your grandma.
Speaker 3 (13:07):
Yeah, thank you. I have two brothers that are younger,
both started studying engineering. One just moved to Quito, Ecuador,
and the other one is still in Seattle. So if
we're all over the place ourselves.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Now, do you find now that you mentioned that, it
makes me think about, you know, the current status of
Through COVID, we learned a lot of companies learned both
positive things and negative things about working from home, having
a remote workforce. Do you notice that the world is smaller,
(13:41):
and I mean in a manner in which you know,
you can conduct business across the globe now pretty easily,
can't you.
Speaker 3 (13:50):
Yeah? I think the world has gotten smaller and has
gotten faster in response time relative to Hey, we got
to work on something. And just this week I just
got back from San Diego on the West Coast. On
that same trip, I was at the airport, I think
probably in Atlanta, and I was on the phone with Europe.
(14:12):
And then that early morning I was on the phone
with Japan and any given day that's what it looks
like because we the PGR team is located on the
West coast, the East coast, Europe, and Japan, and that's
the way that we've been operating from the get go.
Going back to that setting up foundation for a global company,
we have been global from day one.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
And I mean it's really a global economy now, isn't it.
Speaker 3 (14:38):
Yeah. Yeah, we do business overseas. We do business and
have collaborations with large companies overseas, and we have, of
course the desire to grow our presence here in Mount
Pleasant and continue developing this economy. Now, what do you
do when you're not working, That's a great question. I
(15:00):
love learning new things and specifically doing something that's hard,
and so when I called it my first retirement when
I left Google and I wanted to learn how to sail,
and so from the very beginning, I think it was
my first day back and I joined a crew and
(15:20):
I've been doing ocean racing ever since. I'm on my
third season, and that's really hard because everything was new.
I had never sailed before, so that's really fun. Other
things that I do that are difficult is learning new languages,
and so I speak Spanish, English, Italian, I can read
and understand French and Portuguese, and I've been studying Japanese.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
Wow, it's impressive. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (15:44):
And the other thing I do is travel. My motivation
was to show our boys that we live in a
very diverse country and exposed into as much of the
US culture, background history as possible. And we've been doing
this cross country road trips for the last two years
(16:06):
where boys have now been to forty three states and
so next month they'll be to the lower forty eight,
so we'll have Hawaiian Alaska left.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
That's really cool.
Speaker 3 (16:17):
Yeah, I've been to Old fifty and after next year,
I'll be to Old fifty States twice.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
Nice. Well, that's fantastic. And by the way, you said,
all of those languages you've been teaching yourself to be proficient,
and which one was the hardest one to learn?
Speaker 3 (16:34):
Oh for sure Japanese, Oh for sure. Having the Spanish
language as a background, Being native French, Italian, Portuguese, it's
kind of be easier to pick up. Japanese is tough,
I would imagine, So yeah, it comes in handy since
I go to Tokyo a few times a year.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
Yeah, that's really interesting to me, you know, and I've
heard that before Japanese and Chinese. In Chinese maybe even
harder than Japanese, you would know better than I.
Speaker 3 (17:04):
Doing hard things and traveling and really about the experiences
is what I do outside of work. I work out
every day. I love walking, hiking, backpacking. All of our
four boys are in Scouts, so the younger ones are
in Cup Scouts and the older two are in Boy Scouts.
And I'm in every out, in every camp out, every
(17:27):
height that we do, and our voys aren't banned as well.
So every concert in this I can say this, I've
never missed a birthday, an anniversary, a concert, a game.
And putting family first means you have to prioritize and
truly live to that. It's really about quality and quantity
of time. I hear people or parents sometimes say, oh,
(17:49):
I spend quality time with my kids, Well, what does
that mean? And so I think it's both. You got
to spend quality and quantity to have those relationships and
those eperiences. Some of the most fun I've had with
my boys has just been hanging out and joking and
just being there. It's hard to do when you're running
multiple companies. But you got to find a way to
(18:12):
do that.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
Sure, I really like that, and you're absolutely right. It's
just being there. And when you point out that, some
people say, well, I spend quality time because they don't.
You know, sometimes that's all you have to do. Maybe
they're just off playing and they just know that you're there,
and that's important I think for their feeling of safety
(18:35):
and even self worth.
Speaker 3 (18:39):
Yeah, at the end of the day, when I'm in
my nineties, hopefully I want to be able to look
back and say, hey, you know what, I was a
great husband, a great dad, and all the other stuff.
The school of the career that's secondary.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
Yeah. Well, I like how you said you challenge yourself
to do hard things, and that leads to this next question,
what's the philosophy that drives you each day?
Speaker 3 (19:05):
Yeah, that's I think. It's always to look at things
in a way that says I'm going to leave this
better than I found it. This kind of ties into
disgusts me the tiny bit. But you know, there's a
mantra within scouting in the outdoor code of leaving no trace,
But that also means you can leave it things better
(19:25):
and then you found them. And my parents I grew
up with that at home, that if you go into
a place, you borrow a tool, you travel somewhere, you
leave it better than you found it. In every role
I've had in the corporate life, within my team, within
my family, I approach it the same way, with that
philosophy of putting people first, people matter, and then leaving
(19:47):
things better than I found it. That's the philosophy that
drives me to continuously improve, continuously learn new things, leaving
it better than I found it, Helping to develop others,
helping him to grow, unlock their potential, leaving them better
than I found it. Going into every assignment, every company,
every program with leaving them with higher efficiencies, higher vision,
(20:12):
more strategic focus, more profitable, leaving them better than I
found them.
Speaker 2 (20:18):
I think that's a great philosophy, And believe it or not,
we're just about out of time. So let's wrap things
up with this question for you. If there are any
entrepreneurs out there who it might be in technical or
it might be you know, I mean, let's face it,
there's a lot of similarities in startups no matter what
(20:41):
the product, the end product is at the end of
the day or what the business does. You know, what
kind of advice would you give an entrepreneurial spirit that's
listening that wants to create their own startup.
Speaker 3 (20:56):
Yeah, the best advice I can give somebody would be
take care of yourself first. It is so important to
be mindful and self aware of your well being mentally, emotionally, physically.
If you take care of yourself first, you can take
care of your family, you can take care of your team,
(21:17):
you can take care of the customers really well. Because
what I see out there is founders CEOs that are
spending lots of hours, and sometimes that's needed. I understand that,
but let's make sure that you take care of yourself
first so that you can continue and be a sustainable model.
That's something that I practice and I make sure that
(21:38):
I'm in a good space every day, taking care of
my mind, taking care of my emotions, taking care of
my body so that I can keep the party going
for long term. And if any founder CEOs are curious
about how this works in practice, please feel free to
reach out. Send me an email and we'll get you connected.
Speaker 2 (21:56):
What's your email address if you don't mind, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (21:58):
Sure, it's Pedro at PGR One, Pedro at PGR dot O.
Speaker 2 (22:02):
Ney Pedro, Galileo Romo, founder and CEO of PGR Incorporated.
It's been a pleasure, Pedro.
Speaker 3 (22:09):
Yeah, thanks Mike, thanks for having me.
Speaker 2 (22:10):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (22:11):
You've been listening to iHeartRadio CEOs you should know, heard
every Tuesday and Saturday morning right here on this iHeartRadio station.
iHeart Media presents CEOs You should Know. CEOs you should
Know Charleston is brought to you by SC two to
fifty Charleston Www dot SC two fifty Charleston dot org.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
It's Michael Blaze. Welcome to CEOs you should Know. Joining
us today Pedro Galileo Romo. He's founder and CEO of
PGR Incorporated. Welcome Pedro, Hey, Mike, good afternoon. It's great
to be here. Thanks for having me. Absolutely, I'm excited
to talk to you. Let's start with what exactly it
is PGR is and what does PGR do.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Yeah. Absolutely, What we're trying to do with PGR is
fundamentally accelerate how quickly companies can decrease the industrial learning curve.
What that means is that companies on average can take
up to ten years to put in place a continuous
improvement system, the processes, the leadership required to get too
(00:52):
true continuous improvement. How cool would it be if we
can do that in one year with technology? And so
we've done a lot of research, development, proof of concepts
to develop the technologies to do that, using artificial intelligence,
quantum algorithms, machine vision, and other technologies. And now we
want to bring that to market into twenty twenty six.
Speaker 2 (01:14):
Now, does this encompass every aspect of the business, so
everything from human resources to automation, or is it concentrated
on just the human resources side or the automation side, or.
Speaker 3 (01:27):
Yeah, that's great. It's definitely focused on manufacturing, primarily aerospace
and automotive manufacturing. And so you have factories that are
making airplanes, you have factories that are making cars or
car parts. You have factories that are making appliances, and
all of these have a schedule or a recipe of
(01:47):
how to put these things together. You have the people,
the machines, the parts coming into as efficiently as possible
build these products. But it takes a while to get
really good at it. And so what our technology and
our vision is is to accelerate and decrease how long
it takes to get really good at it. Instead of
(02:08):
taking a few years to get really good at it,
let's do it in a few months or a year.
Speaker 2 (02:13):
Well, that's fantastic, because efficiency is money after all.
Speaker 3 (02:17):
Right, We believe that profit growth resilience is achieved if
you build that capacity and that flexibility into your business plan.
And when you're looking at the big industrial leaders that
are the largest aerospace, largest automotive, largest pharmaceutical manufacturing companies
(02:37):
in the world. They are spending billions of dollars right
now and rework, defects, waste, and this technology and this
efficiencies will really rip the benefits for them. They're going
to save billions of dollars a year by accelerating this
industrial learning curve.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
Does it use models? Can it like study, say they're
going to switch the manufacturer to a new part or
something like that. Does the AI come up with a
model of that and scale it up and go through
each step and study the efficiencies along the way, or
explain a little bit how it works in the real world.
Speaker 3 (03:15):
Yeah, right now, we can take in engineering data and
so these are the drawings, the three D models of
what the different components of the airplane, car or applians
are for example, and bring that into context. And so
in real time we know what today Wednesday, they're supposed
to be building this part of the airplane or the
(03:36):
car appliance. We know what parts are going into it.
We know for that area of the factory, what work
is scheduled, how many people are working on it at
the time, and what it should look like. Knowing what
it should look like then allows us to compare of
what actually happened, and it's that really cool comparison between
(03:59):
the planned versus is the actual that we can do
in real time, so we know what parts are being installed,
We know what parts should be installed in what sequence,
in what operation, and how long it should take. What
that ends up creating is this unsupervised learning models. The
AIS are able to capture in real time the steps
(04:21):
that it took to do that work step one, step two,
step three, step four, et cetera, how long each step
took and how efficient they were, also how long that
took relative to what the plant was and on average
on aggregate. Then you're able to have real time comparisons
every day of how you're doing are you're getting better
(04:43):
and these systems are also learning in the background. So
the more work you do, the longer you have the
systems and these platforms in place, the better your efficiencies.
That the better the recommendations the platform is making that says, hey, Mike,
I see that you're installing this engine on the airplane.
It took you this many hours to do that by
doing X, Y and Z A little different. You're going
(05:04):
to get a thirty four or fifty percent improvement in efficiency,
in quality, in safety. And these are making real time
recommendations for one team, one shift in one part of
the factory. When you scale that up by adding more
little computers, more cameras, then you're expanding the footprint of
this platform. Now you can see everything happening in these factories,
(05:27):
and that's the real power is we can optimize at scale.
And now you have an entire view of end to
end of the entire production system, that whole production line,
and how you can increase productivity thirty to forty fifty percent.
Speaker 2 (05:42):
That's fantastic. Now, how did you ever get involved with
your background?
Speaker 3 (05:46):
Yeah, my background is in computer and electrical engineering and
then I have two masters, so I got the technical piece,
the engineering, the leadership strategy piece, and then the business
acumen through an MBA from un c Q and Flagware,
and that gave me a holistic view of this is
(06:07):
the product that we're going to build to meet a demand,
a business need. Here's the people that bring it all together,
and how do we motivate work with them to really
develop the team to be the best. And then at
the end of the day, this has to be a
successful business that can perpetuate and grow value for our communities,
(06:27):
for a country, for a nation. So those were the
three components that I built my curriculum around. Professionally, I
spent thirteen years at Boeing as an engineering manager leader,
running multiple programs in Seattle and here in Charleston, South Carolina.
I used to joke saying that I had all electrical
(06:48):
systems on the seven eight seven, and the seven eight seven,
for our listeners, is an all electric airplane, and so
that means pretty much everything touched the electrical systems, including batteries.
And then I got recruited by Google to bring this
holistic optimization and digital transformation of business processes to their
(07:09):
data center portfolio, which is where Google spends all their
money on infrastructure data centers, and that same approach of
creating a simpler way of doing things that's more repeatable.
With digital twins being able to create a more modular,
plug and play data center allow the teams to really
(07:30):
scale how many data centers we were delivering near and near,
how fast we can do it, and how much more
efficiently we can do it. And so that's how I
got to learn about doing multiple programs, working with teams
literally all around the world on very large, complex systems
for twenty years, and that was the background that's at
(07:51):
the foundation to build PGR.
Speaker 2 (07:54):
Now, would you suggest to other entrepreneurs that are that
have their sights on startup to go get that experience
in the corporate world first, Do you think that that
was a good advantage for you?
Speaker 3 (08:10):
That's a great question, Mike. I did get to see
what excellence looks like in terms of the technical piece,
the academic piece, and the professional piece. Having the corporate
viewpoint and experience does help to understand how to run
and how to scale, because the programs that you run
(08:32):
at Boeing and the programs that you run at companies
like Google are massive at scale. And that gave me
the experience I needed to say, yeah, I know how
to build these companies that have now created from the
ground up to scale to be global companies. So that
is helpful for sure.
Speaker 2 (08:50):
Yeah. And then do you think it could also be
in a way in some ways a hindrance because it's
so regimented in a corporation and sometimes you can't experiment
and try new things. So there's a more uh, there's
more rigid parameters. And did you feel like you have
to challenge yourself to sometimes push the limit on things
(09:15):
that you know you wouldn't be able to do otherwise
in the corporate world.
Speaker 3 (09:19):
Oh, yes, correct, Mike. The larger the organization, the more
functionally concentrated somebody's role is going to be. Meaning you
could be spending an entire career designing brackets for something
and you it's incumbent on somebody that wants to be
a founder to get that breath of experience. And I
(09:43):
purposely spend some time rotating and seeking opportunities within Boeing,
within Google to get a breath of experience as well,
not just depth. And so I understood all the twenty
thirty teams involved in running these companies, how they interface,
what their output was, what their input was, their processes,
(10:04):
and that's what allowed me to better understand, even at
macro level companies, how to operate more efficiently and push
the boundaries of innovation that way, because you're right, those
constraints are there sometimes on purpose to slow down and
making sure that you're being deliberate about the changes that
you're putting into the airplane as an example. So bureaucracy
(10:27):
is not always a bad thing. It just depends on
how that can be overextended to other processes that could
be faster and more agile.
Speaker 2 (10:36):
Sure, well, let's get to know you a little bit
more personally. Where are you originally from?
Speaker 3 (10:42):
Yeah, I grew up in Mexico. I've spent the majority
of my elementary years in Jalisco, kind of central western
part of the country. And then in the mid nineties,
during the financial crisis in Mexico, my family decided to
try something new and we came to the US excelled academically, straight,
(11:05):
a's senior class president and that sort of thing. And
I decided to continue my education in science and math
by studying engineering, and I attended Gonzaga for undergrad and
grad school, where I met my lovely wife. We've been
together for many years and have four boys, and that's
definitely what keeps me motivated and busy.
Speaker 2 (11:28):
And we were talking before we started the show about
those four boys keep you busy, don't they?
Speaker 3 (11:33):
Oh? Yeah, NonStop action. It is not a linear function,
meaning that if you have one or two kids, is
not the level of effort of two kids. It starts
being compounded exponentially. Having four boys is having like sixteen
humans or something like that. They're awesome, They're awesome.
Speaker 2 (11:52):
You were telling me the other day or the other
week that every single one of them more bandaged up
in one manner or another.
Speaker 3 (11:59):
Yeah, we have a frequent flyer program. Hospital should do that,
just like I have status with Delta air Lines and Marriott.
We should have one at the right Scooper Hospital.
Speaker 2 (12:11):
Yeah. I was shared with you because I have boys too,
and I'm like, I never thought in a million years
that would ever meet my deductible on my healthcare. It
was like a ten thousand dollars deductible and I met it.
Speaker 3 (12:23):
Yeah, for Christmas the voice one go pro cameras. I'm like, oh, great,
now we have evidence of your right your theatrics.
Speaker 2 (12:31):
Yes, absolutely, So what about your parents were what did
they do for a living? Did they have an engineering
background or Yeah.
Speaker 3 (12:39):
My parents are a business professional. So my dad studied
business and was entrepreneurial and my mom elementary education and
so she was a teacher for many years. And they
were here in Mount Pleasant actually in the same neighborhood
as us, and recently relocated to Mexico to be closer
to a family because my grandma is to turn ninety
(13:00):
nine in a few months. Wow, my mom wanted to
spend some time there.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
Yeah, well, an early happy birthday to your grandma.
Speaker 3 (13:07):
Yeah, thank you. I have two brothers that are younger,
both started studying engineering. One just moved to Quito, Ecuador,
and the other one is still in Seattle. So if
we're all over the place ourselves.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
Now, do you find now that you mentioned that, it
makes me think about, you know, the current status of
Through COVID, we learned a lot of companies learned both
positive things and negative things about working from home, having
a remote workforce. Do you notice that the world is smaller,
(13:41):
and I mean in a manner in which you know,
you can conduct business across the globe now pretty easily,
can't you.
Speaker 3 (13:50):
Yeah? I think the world has gotten smaller and has
gotten faster in response time relative to Hey, we got
to work on something. And just this week I just
got back from San Diego on the West Coast. On
that same trip, I was at the airport, I think
probably in Atlanta, and I was on the phone with Europe.
(14:12):
And then that early morning I was on the phone
with Japan and any given day that's what it looks
like because we the PGR team is located on the
West coast, the East coast, Europe, and Japan, and that's
the way that we've been operating from the get go.
Going back to that setting up foundation for a global company,
we have been global from day one.
Speaker 2 (14:35):
And I mean it's really a global economy now, isn't it.
Speaker 3 (14:38):
Yeah. Yeah, we do business overseas. We do business and
have collaborations with large companies overseas, and we have, of
course the desire to grow our presence here in Mount
Pleasant and continue developing this economy. Now, what do you
do when you're not working, That's a great question. I
(15:00):
love learning new things and specifically doing something that's hard,
and so when I called it my first retirement when
I left Google and I wanted to learn how to sail,
and so from the very beginning, I think it was
my first day back and I joined a crew and
(15:20):
I've been doing ocean racing ever since. I'm on my
third season, and that's really hard because everything was new.
I had never sailed before, so that's really fun. Other
things that I do that are difficult is learning new languages,
and so I speak Spanish, English, Italian, I can read
and understand French and Portuguese, and I've been studying Japanese.
Speaker 2 (15:43):
Wow, it's impressive. Yeah.
Speaker 3 (15:44):
And the other thing I do is travel. My motivation
was to show our boys that we live in a
very diverse country and exposed into as much of the
US culture, background history as possible. And we've been doing
this cross country road trips for the last two years
(16:06):
where boys have now been to forty three states and
so next month they'll be to the lower forty eight,
so we'll have Hawaiian Alaska left.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
That's really cool.
Speaker 3 (16:17):
Yeah, I've been to Old fifty and after next year,
I'll be to Old fifty States twice.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
Nice. Well, that's fantastic. And by the way, you said,
all of those languages you've been teaching yourself to be proficient,
and which one was the hardest one to learn?
Speaker 3 (16:34):
Oh for sure Japanese, Oh for sure. Having the Spanish
language as a background, Being native French, Italian, Portuguese, it's
kind of be easier to pick up. Japanese is tough,
I would imagine, So yeah, it comes in handy since
I go to Tokyo a few times a year.
Speaker 2 (16:55):
Yeah, that's really interesting to me, you know, and I've
heard that before Japanese and Chinese. In Chinese maybe even
harder than Japanese, you would know better than I.
Speaker 3 (17:04):
Doing hard things and traveling and really about the experiences
is what I do outside of work. I work out
every day. I love walking, hiking, backpacking. All of our
four boys are in Scouts, so the younger ones are
in Cup Scouts and the older two are in Boy Scouts.
And I'm in every out, in every camp out, every
(17:27):
height that we do, and our voys aren't banned as well.
So every concert in this I can say this, I've
never missed a birthday, an anniversary, a concert, a game.
And putting family first means you have to prioritize and
truly live to that. It's really about quality and quantity
of time. I hear people or parents sometimes say, oh,
(17:49):
I spend quality time with my kids, Well, what does
that mean? And so I think it's both. You got
to spend quality and quantity to have those relationships and
those eperiences. Some of the most fun I've had with
my boys has just been hanging out and joking and
just being there. It's hard to do when you're running
multiple companies. But you got to find a way to
(18:12):
do that.
Speaker 2 (18:12):
Sure, I really like that, and you're absolutely right. It's
just being there. And when you point out that, some
people say, well, I spend quality time because they don't.
You know, sometimes that's all you have to do. Maybe
they're just off playing and they just know that you're there,
and that's important I think for their feeling of safety
(18:35):
and even self worth.
Speaker 3 (18:39):
Yeah, at the end of the day, when I'm in
my nineties, hopefully I want to be able to look
back and say, hey, you know what, I was a
great husband, a great dad, and all the other stuff.
The school of the career that's secondary.
Speaker 2 (18:54):
Yeah. Well, I like how you said you challenge yourself
to do hard things, and that leads to this next question,
what's the philosophy that drives you each day?
Speaker 3 (19:05):
Yeah, that's I think. It's always to look at things
in a way that says I'm going to leave this
better than I found it. This kind of ties into
disgusts me the tiny bit. But you know, there's a
mantra within scouting in the outdoor code of leaving no trace,
But that also means you can leave it things better
(19:25):
and then you found them. And my parents I grew
up with that at home, that if you go into
a place, you borrow a tool, you travel somewhere, you
leave it better than you found it. In every role
I've had in the corporate life, within my team, within
my family, I approach it the same way, with that
philosophy of putting people first, people matter, and then leaving
(19:47):
things better than I found it. That's the philosophy that
drives me to continuously improve, continuously learn new things, leaving
it better than I found it, Helping to develop others,
helping him to grow, unlock their potential, leaving them better
than I found it. Going into every assignment, every company,
every program with leaving them with higher efficiencies, higher vision,
(20:12):
more strategic focus, more profitable, leaving them better than I
found them.
Speaker 2 (20:18):
I think that's a great philosophy, And believe it or not,
we're just about out of time. So let's wrap things
up with this question for you. If there are any
entrepreneurs out there who it might be in technical or
it might be you know, I mean, let's face it,
there's a lot of similarities in startups no matter what
(20:41):
the product, the end product is at the end of
the day or what the business does. You know, what
kind of advice would you give an entrepreneurial spirit that's
listening that wants to create their own startup.
Speaker 3 (20:56):
Yeah, the best advice I can give somebody would be
take care of yourself first. It is so important to
be mindful and self aware of your well being mentally, emotionally, physically.
If you take care of yourself first, you can take
care of your family, you can take care of your team,
(21:17):
you can take care of the customers really well. Because
what I see out there is founders CEOs that are
spending lots of hours, and sometimes that's needed. I understand that,
but let's make sure that you take care of yourself
first so that you can continue and be a sustainable model.
That's something that I practice and I make sure that
(21:38):
I'm in a good space every day, taking care of
my mind, taking care of my emotions, taking care of
my body so that I can keep the party going
for long term. And if any founder CEOs are curious
about how this works in practice, please feel free to
reach out. Send me an email and we'll get you connected.
Speaker 2 (21:56):
What's your email address if you don't mind, Yeah.
Speaker 3 (21:58):
Sure, it's Pedro at PGR One, Pedro at PGR dot O.
Speaker 2 (22:02):
Ney Pedro, Galileo Romo, founder and CEO of PGR Incorporated.
It's been a pleasure, Pedro.
Speaker 3 (22:09):
Yeah, thanks Mike, thanks for having me.
Speaker 2 (22:10):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (22:11):
You've been listening to iHeartRadio CEOs you should know, heard
every Tuesday and Saturday morning right here on this iHeartRadio station.
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