(originally posted August 16, 2017)—Catholic business leader Ric Brutocao has worn many hats in his storied career, but whether he’s heading up a major appliance manufacturer or leading a company of military engineers and support staff to defend communication stations in southern Vietnam, Brutocao has discovered along the way that good management skills not only makes for good business but like any other art can bring contraries into harmony to achieve success.
Taking that artistic approach in his own managerial success to the airwaves, Brutocao is one of the founding hosts of The Mentors Radio, a new radio program (launched March 4, 2017) and geared to help listeners find professional and personal success. The Mentors Radio features a team of veteran business leaders who take turns each week tackling isues of life, work, business ethics, even the finer points on the art of management, and more.
The Mentors Radio launched with three founding hosts Ric Brutocao (interviewed below), Tom Loarie, a pioneer in the life sciences industry who has helped bring more than 20 medical devices to market; and John Phillips, co-founder and co-owner of Associated Crafts and Willet-Hauser, now among the largest stained glass window companies in the world.
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UPDATE: Although Brutocao has not hosted The Mentors Radio show since 2019, we include this portion of his interview since the core principles of the radio program remain the same, Brutocao’s insights remain integral to its founding principles, and it is part of his unique Catholic business journey.
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According to Brutocao, The Mentors Radio is not only a chance to talk about his own experiences in business but also an opportunity to give others a chance to overcome the challenges of the business world and to discover the rewards of success. Having aired his first solo show last week (in 2017), Brutocao spoke with the Catholic Business Journal about his work as host of The Mentors Radio, his goals for the show and the ways in which his own career, crisscrossing the country and the globe, have led him to managerial success.
You’ll find, as you read below, that for Ric, the integration of Faith, work and life is so habitual a practice for him that it is seamless.
Catholic Business Journal (CBJ): Why are you excited about the launch of The Mentors Radio?
Ric Brutocao (RB): I believe in giving back. I teach math to kids in an underprivileged area. I do it because these kids look like they were all gang members of some sort and now they want to make something out of their lives. They’re going through a program that teaches them the basic skills of construction, but they’re troubled because they didn’t have good schooling, especially in mathematics. I happen to be good at mathematics, because I’m an engineer and so I help them in this way. Like I said, I believe in giving back and I believe mentoring is an important way to pass on the wisdom learned either through hard knocks or through schooling.
School prepares you to receive the wisdom of experience but you have to experience things, get knocked around a bit and learn from those experiences.
Those things I got out of my career I would like to tell others about as part of my work with “The Mentors.” I don’t think I have all the answers but I think I have a lot of situations that I can share with my listeners, situations that I hope will lead them to the right answers.
CBJ: Why radio?
RB: With radio, you get a larger audience. I’ve been writing for a while for Catholic Business Journal and I met [“The Mentors” producer 
and Catholic Business Journal owner and publisher] Karen [Walker] when I was speaking at a business and ethics event here in California. Before that I wrote a blog called Dad’s Daily Dose, and I discovered that writing is a good thinking platform for me. Every night when I sat down to write the blog, it helped me to dramatically think through things, whether it was a news item, a business item or an issue of interaction with people on a personal or business level.
But the thing about radio that makes me think it’s good is that people tune into radio if they’re interested in what you’re talking about. You get a broader reach and also people stay on the dial who want to learn or understand the discussion. So radio serves as another kind of platform for my ideas, one which allows me to interact more directly with others.
CBJ: What’s your personal background? Where were you born and raised?
RB: We are a 100 percent Italian family. Both my parents Louis and Dorina were born in Toronto, but just barely. Their older siblings were all born in Italy, but they got together in Toronto. One of my brothers and I were born there, and when I was about 6 years old we moved to California. California has been my home ever since, although I like to call it my pivot foot because I worked in a number of places, bounded around, but always returned to California. I am married to a girl from New Jersey. Michelle and I met in a Catholic high school in California, and we’ve been married 51 years this year. I have six children and 11 grandchildren.
I went to Catholic grammar school, high school and college, Santa Clara University, a Jesuit school—the only thing I didn’t get in a Catholic school was my master’s degree, which I got at California State University-Los Angeles, but everything else I did in terms of schooling was through a Catholic school.
CBJ: How did you maintain your Catholic faith?
RB: When I attended grade school, in those days, the nuns worked on you feverishly. I was always a strong Catholic, as were my mother and father. I got up and rode my bicycle to the church to serve Mass at six in the morning. I was committed to my faith. I went to seminary my first year out of grade school, but I was too immature to have gone at that time, looking back. Then I went to a Catholic high school, which was co-institutional. I was taught by the Sacred Heart Fathers and we would get together during lunch with the female students, and that’s where I met Michelle. Then I went off to Santa Clara University and I’ve almost always gone to daily Mass. I can’t say I’m a good Catholic—but my wife is and she drags me along; that’s the important thing.
CBJ: How has your faith been a part of your life?
RB: I don’t want to sound overly proud about these things—there’s so much more I can do as a Catholic—but Michelle and I are very committed to our faith. For example, we run the inquiry program for the Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults for our parish. We teach some of the classes as well. We’re involved in working on the committee for the new cathedral for the Diocese of Orange. We’re both members of the Knights of the Holy Sepulcher. Our life revolves around the Church and therefore has a big impact on us.
CBJ: How have you incorporated Catholic social teaching into your life and career?
RB: Along with five other people, I was a co-founder of the Spitzer Center for Ethical Leadership. One of Father Robert Spitzer’s favorite sayings is “If you have to ask someone to find a precedent that an action is right or ethical, you’ve asked the wrong question.” He also said 
something I’ve made my motto: “You need a good product line and you need to be ethical and moral; those two things will equal profits.”
The reality is that you can try to do things with a wink and try to sneak something by, but it will almost always bite you. It’s hard to tell the same lie over and over again and be consistent. So when you’re trying to deceive someone into making something happen, you’re likely setting yourself up for a short-term gain but a long-term failure.
My father used to say to me, “When you’re making a deal with someone, always leave a little on the table for the other guy.” In other words, if there’s not something in it for the other guy, the deal is going to go bad. It doesn’t matter if you’re trying to sell things or put something together with your management team, others have to see success to want to be part of the deal.
Also important is humility. The first shall be last and the last shall be first. I found every time, when I built and sold my own company, or worked for other companies, if you can show me an egoist who thinks he can do it all himself and doesn’t recognize a power above him, I’ll show you someone that will ultimately crash and burn.
In a conversation about implementing this sort of behavior as a management style, someone brought up Jeffrey Skilling [CEO of Enron, indicted on several counts as a result of Enron’s 2001 bankruptcy; tellingly, the book on which Skilling based his managerial philosophy was The Selfish Gene by atheist Richard Dawkins]. Skilling’s is that kind of story. I don’t know Jeff Skilling but I know he was flying high and he was overconfident of his abilities. I’m not passing judgment on him, but the state certainly did.
Obviously, being fair to your workers is important too. The people who work for you have to feel they can succeed. It’s not enough just to pay them; they also have to have personal satisfaction. If you take away a sense of contribution from your employees, you might as well hire a robot. There’s no creative input by your workers.
It’s also important that you let people have the ability to know that they work to live and not live to work. I figured at one time that I had lived so I could work hard, but I eventually learned it’s the other way around. I’m not suggesting you don’t work hard but always keep it in perspective.
CBJ: How did your military experience affect your career?
RB: I had a lot of education by some standards, but everything I learned in the classroom really came together for me in the military. The best education I got was there. It was practical and influenced my career greatly. When I got to Vietnam, I was a second lieutenant. I was there for about five weeks when my colonel calls me on the phone to tell me the major who ran the company is going stateside. So he needed me to take over the company until we get another major or captain in. That was my introduction to military leadership. 
For the first few weeks in the military, I had a pretty junior position, and then because many of the higher ranking men available were going to be cycling out of the military and the commanders wanted someone who was going to be sticking around for a while, they chose me for this position of leadership, running a 450-man company all over southern Vietnam.
Taking on that job, I realized there is only one thing that works. You just have to do it. (I thought of this idea long before Nike came up with it as its slogan.) It was a great experience. I had everything from communications sites to state of the art instruments and equipment, advanced microwave sites and opportunities to work with civilian contractors. I managed to do communications in-country and out of country. I had a huge motor pool to manage. And we had these sites all over the country on tops of mountains we had to defend. So I didn’t know what to do at first but learned pretty quickly to work with your team. The individuals on the team each knew more about one particular thing than I did about anything.
CBJ: Why did you decide to go into business rather than continue as an engineer?
RB: There are engineers who teach, but that wasn’t me. My father was not a college-educated man, but he was self-educated. He started his own company Brutocao Tool & Die, and built products. I guess I learned from example that being in business is a good calling.
Before World War II, my father started selling hot plates and portable heaters because he realized that the war was going to end sooner or later. When you rented an apartment you had four walls and a kitchen with a sink in it. Everything else, people had to buy. So he thought this was a great economic way for folks returning from the war to have some basic appliances and comforts. It turned out, the products were a big success, and he sold the company early on. But the most important lesson I learned from him is that there wasn’t a time when we as his children weren’t going to work. I think that’s where I got my business sense.
My father called me into the house one day when I was a boy and told me he had a gift for me. I opened the box and looked at what was in it. “What is this?” I asked. It was a shoeshine kit. “We’ll try it out in the garage,” my father said to me. “All you have to do is shine my shoes every week, and you’ll get 25 cents.” He had a lot of shoes.
CBJ: How did you make the jump from engineer to management specialist?
RB: When I returned from Vietnam, the military sent me to San Diego to interview with companies for a job in the civilian sector. There was no one in San Diego that I wanted to talk to about a job. They were all looking for design engineers and I wanted to do something else. So we didn’t go anywhere that weekend. I went to the big conferences but didn’t sign up for any interviews. Sunday morning, I get a call from a guy who noticed I hadn’t signed up for anything. His company wanted to talk to me, but I told him I wasn’t interested in being a design engineer. 
“What do you want to do?” he asked. I told him I wanted to use my technical background to get into management. “You know, we actually have a pilot position in management like that,” he said. “Maybe you should talk to me. Why don’t you come down?” I said I had to go to Mass and I would be back by 11 a.m. I went down to talk to him. It was a perfect fit.
So after the military, I got an engineering management position as a liaison between technical and production people. That’s what drove me to business because I realized how much I liked that more than designing systems. My job was all about building and designing computers, and working with the design team to get the computers into production.
Within three years they offered me the job of being assistant to the vice president of manufacturing. Back then, every one of our plants had between 3,000 and 7,000 people working in them, all over the country.
CBJ: Given the great variety of work in your career, do you see God’s hand in your career?
RB: I have no idea why God gave me the opportunities he gave me. That is a question I will ask him when I meet him. But each opportunity was unique. I don’t look at my career as a matter of great contributions I made, but as an opportunity given to me by God to work with people. I know I didn’t do everything perfectly but I tried to be fair and do the best for everyone. That’s something else that my father passed on to me.
CBJ: What’s the key to success in management?
RB: No matter what the job is, bring the things you’re good at to that job, because that’s where you’re going to make the most contribution.
Also, you have to figure out what you are. If you’re a manager, and it doesn’t matter how low level a manager you are, or if you’re the CEO, it makes no difference—understand what your job is. If you have the name manager in your title, it usually means you’re managing people, or a system or an approach. You might start out sweeping the floors for the company (and I recommend you start at the bottom and work your way up, so you know what it is you’re managing) but once you’re managing, you also have to remember that you’re no longer the one who’s sweeping the floors. It doesn’t mean you’re too good to sweep the floor but your job is to manage the sweepers to make sure the company gets good clean floors. If you’re not doing that, you’re not doing your job. When you work your way up, figure out what your real job is.
A manager is like a conductor of an orchestra. The conductor probably can’t play every instrument for the symphony, but he can pick those who can play the instruments well and he directs them in a way that they can all play together well and thereby achieve the desired product.
CBJ: How do you balance your sense of mission with your bottom line?
RB: The key is that you have to have faith and you have to anticipate that life is meant to be lived for something greater than who wins the Rose Bowl or other things of this earth that we think are so important. Such things are important in varying degrees, but they’re not as important as the fact that we’re supposed to do something on this earth to create with God our Father his kingdom. He doesn’t need us, but that’s the plan he put in place.
If that’s our mission and you make decisions that take you away from that mission, then you’re bottom line won’t matter for anything.
CBJ: What do you hope to achieve through The Mentors Radio?
RB: If listeners, and especially younger listeners, in the midst of career struggles, heard me talk on striking the right balance between life and work, and they made a good decision based on what they heard, that would make it all worth it. I hope one of the things that come out of “The Mentors Radio” is that people understand how the pressures of life and work are balanced by faith.
For some, maybe that faith has nothing to do with God, but we all have to have something to believe in beyond ourselves. That’s why we like paintings and music and poetry—things that other creatures have no affinity for—because there’s a spiritual side and emotional side to us. Hopefully, people will understand there’s more to life than who wins the Super Bowl. If you don’t bring that something more to life into your work life, you’re probably going to be dissatisfied and not be successful by appealing to all that is human, the spirit that is in us.
If I knew our program affected people so they could make good decisions and be more contributive to society in a full rounded way I would feel good about that.
Ready to listen?
The Mentors Radio show can be heard as a broadcast on Salem Media’s KTRB AM860 San Francisco, where it is exposed to 7 million, and internationally on iHeart Radio. The broadcast then becomes a podcast with access worldwide at www.TheMentorsRadio.com, on Spotify, Apple and all other podcast platforms. Learn more at www.TheMentorsRadio.com,
Update Note:
Although Brutocao has not hosted the radio show since 2019, his original broadcasts can still be found on TheMentorsRadio.com.
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Joseph O’Brien is a correspondent for the Catholic Business Journal. He lives in Wisconsin. This article was originally posted on August 16, 2017 and has been updated slightly.
