Today's guest could have built his career anywhere.

Manolo Diaz Corrada left Puerto Rico after high school and spent 12 years on the mainland — engineering at Carnegie Mellon, law school at Penn — always intending to bring it all home, back to the island.

That's rarer than it sounds. More than 900,000 people have left Puerto Rico in the last 25 years, and they tend to be the most educated and most mobile ones. Manolo went the other direction.

‍He bought Bonneville Group, a telecom, electrical, and IT contractor founded in 1984, doing $12.5m in revenue and on track for $14m this year.

‍Now, that revenue line has a history. Bonneville did around $12m back in the 2010s — and collapsed to $2m in 2021, when Puerto Rico halted construction for eight months of Covid. A peak-to-trough drop like that should give any buyer pause, especially one signing a personal guarantee. Manolo and I get into how he got comfortable with it, and how he got a lender comfortable too.

That took some doing. Traditional search funds wouldn't back a Puerto Rico-only search, and then 20-some banks passed on his ultimately self-funded deal.

Listen for how Manolo finally got an SBA approval out of a bank in Tennessee, and used it as leverage to get a local Puerto Rican bank to write him a conventional loan instead.

Also listen for how Manolo measures his ambition. Not in dollars, but in jobs: 1,000 employees over the next 45 years, all of them in Puerto Rico.

Here he is, Manolo Diaz Corrada, owner of Bonneville Group.