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From McCombs TODAY

Over a career that has spanned 15 years, Carlos Berriochoa’s work on major international construction projects has given him diverse professional perspectives: from construction to design to project finance. Now equipped with an MBA, Berriochoa says he has the holistic business perspective and analytical framework to make a major impact on toll projects in Texas and the United States.

As head of the estimating department for Ferrovial-Agroman, a subsidiary of a Spanish-based group that is financing and constructing toll roads across North America, Berriochoa’s recently awarded toll projects include State Highway 130, south of Austin, the North Tarrant Express in Dallas/Fort Worth, the LBJ Interstate Highway 635 in Dallas and Interstate 90 in Indiana. Ferrovial-Agroman follows a vertically integrated business model in which it handles the design and build aspects of these multibillion-dollar projects, while sister company Cintra handles the finance and operations.

“So far we have been very successful with this model around the world,” Berriochoa says. “I think our projects with Ferrovial-Agroman are part of a phase of deregulating the toll road industry in the United States.”

Currently, all the major tolls roads in Texas are public projects funded with government money. But Berriochoa sees a problem with this model: large monopolistic ventures may lack the transparency and accountability needed to provide citizens with the safest and most efficient roads, he says.

“You can get more value for the money by bringing the private sector into the toll road market and making them compete,” Berriochoa says. “It’s no longer just one company doing whatever they want; you have more companies competing to provide the best price.”

Berriochoa’s diverse set of career experiences is matched by the variety of locales from which he has operated. He earned bachelor’s and master’s of science degrees in civil engineering from the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid, one of Spain’s most prestigious universities, where he graduated in the top 10 percent of his class.

In 1996, he joined a large Spanish construction company and completed his first design-and-build project on the regional headquarters of a large bank in Russia. Berriochoa says that job framed the work he did the next several years, as he focused on major international construction projects. His work took him to six continents, and over time he acquired a working knowledge of seven languages.

“There’s so much value that you get from that international experience,” he says.  “Once you start learning a language and being able to talk to everyone from the top engineer to the bottom workers, then the experience is so much more interesting and rewarding. It’s really worth it to take the time to learn the languages and immerse yourself in different cultures.”

In 2003, Berriochoa managed a design team that built a $966 million railway in Turkey linking the cities of Ankara and Istanbul. The project took him to a new level professionally.

“I got a wider perspective and saw what design was all about and how construction costs could be optimized during the design phase,” he says. “It’s not just construction but how you first foresee construction solutions. If you do a good job, you can save a lot of money and bring in a lot of value.”

When Berriochoa joined Ferrovial-Agroman as a project manager, he gained exposure to another factor in construction capabilities: financing operations to put together the most competitive offers. Facing these professional challenges brought him to the Texas Executive MBA program.

“The higher up you go on a project, the more perspective you get,” he says. “I was never really able to consolidate everything in the way that I have with this program. Right now I feel like I have gained a much better understanding of how everything is organized—not just in the construction business but elsewhere.

“My MBA has given me the ability to not just see problems, but structure them in a way that allows me to solve them more effectively and understand and compare different options,” he says. “Finally, once I find a solution to a problem, I can more effectively sell that solution to a team. I now have both the knowledge and specific vocabulary that I need.”

By Behnaz Abolmaali