FOUNDATION BOARD
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.
“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.”
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.
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.
“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.”
“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.
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.
Like many of Stan State’s students, Valencia was a firstgeneration 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
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.
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