Adding Value

Foundation Board Member Aaron Valencia Sees Opportunity in Connecting Students with the Business Community

By Gina Oltman

Rehabilitating neglected properties is Aaron Valencia’s business. Teamwork is the tool he uses to make his business thrive.

Whether he’s collaborating with his team to acquire and renew buildings or acting as the consummate host to make visitors to his office comfortable, Valencia understands the power of collaborating and connecting with others. He says teamwork is his preferred strategy for attaining success because it works so well.

“If you have a property that somebody else might see as a big problem, and you approach it by yourself with just your mind and just your money, it is a big problem,” he recently explained while reflecting on his career in his downtown Modesto office. “But if you approach it with 100 people behind you, it’s easy. So that’s the key for me. I have great people with me, and we all carry the weight.”

A member of the Stanislaus State Foundation Board of Directors since 2021, Valencia is the president of Royal Equity Group, LLC, a real estate investment firm he founded in 2006. He brings to the Foundation an extensive background in finance and project development, as well as his firm belief that if you help someone and earn their trust, they will reciprocate.

As a Board member, one of his goals is to improve the reciprocal relationship between the University and the San Joaquin Valley’s business community.

“We do the work to educate students, and they earn degrees, but we need to be more proactive about connecting students to the businesses and the business leaders in the Valley,” he said. “When we do that, we add more value to (the business community), and by default we will get more value returned to the University.”

As he brainstormed ideas, Valencia envisioned groups of students spending time with various business and agribusiness leaders to learn skills, help with projects and forge lasting connections. Perhaps it could be somewhat like the annual Love Modesto day of service, he noted.

“There are so many possibilities of how it can be done, but if we can figure it out, we can add more value to each other,” he said.

It’s likely Valencia will figure it out because “adding value” is important to him. An electrical engineer who worked for Cisco and Varian Associates in Silicon Valley before moving to the Valley nearly 15 years ago, he enjoys solving puzzles in ways that benefit everyone involved.

Like many of Stan State’s students, Valencia was a first-generation college student. He and his family moved to Southern California from Mexico in search of a better life when he was in the eighth grade, and he later earned his bachelor’s degree in engineering from a private technical college.

He says he got his first taste of business soon after arriving in the United States. He and his brother would walk their mother to her job cleaning rooms in the motels around Disneyland, and they found a way to make waiting for her profitable.

“I would literally go to the dumpsters (behind the motels), jump in, and get the soda cans. And my brother was bigger, so he was the one who smashed them down, and we would fill up a bag. Then we would get money for them on the weekend,” he said. “So that was one of the first things on our minds, because we had heard that in America you can collect these things and sell them. In Mexico, we just threw them away.”

Valencia’s business acumen and love of real estate has taken him far from those early days of aluminum can redemption. After moving to the Valley with his wife, Gloria Soriano (director of corporate accounting at E. & J. Gallo) and their son, he built up his business by renovating and reselling neglected homes, then moved on to acquiring and renovating commercial properties.

One of Valencia’s most recent projects is a big one — literally. He is renovating and restoring the massive grain silo structure on Madonia Avenue near Modesto Junior College (MJC). The Modesto Silos — as he’s named the project — is being developed as a space for casual get togethers, events, fine dining and private gatherings.

Two patios and an indoor/outdoor gathering space occupy the main level, while the basement has been transformed into a well-appointed lounge strictly for private get-togethers. He is building a kitchen and coffee bar using three 40-foot cargo containers and has lined up chefs from Sacramento and the Bay Area to ensure that food from the kitchen is top notch.

“It will be a place where you can go out and get coffee with a friend and relax in the daytime, and then in the evening we bring out the nice tablecloths and make it fancy,” he said. “We’ll have wine, good food, good friends, art and music.”

He says he has received a lot of support from nearby MJC, and he looks forward to adding value to the college campus by welcoming faculty, staff and students to his patios daily.

Like his other rehab projects, Valencia sees the Silos as more than a good business opportunity. He sees it as a chance to give back.

“Our purpose is not just to make money, but to add value to the community,” he said. “When we buy a property, clean it up, fix it, it improves the neighborhood. When it makes money, great. But first, we do something cool with that money, like donate some to charity. It’s the first thing you do. It’s like the money you are making must be blessed.”

Our purpose is not just to make money, but to add value to the community.

- Aaron Valencia