THE problem solver

Sally Garza Fernandez has thrived on new challenges, big and small, while evolving from mega-corporation superstar to prolific entrepreneur.

By Conrad Dahlson

Got a problem? Tell Sally Garza Fernandez. Everybody else does.
Sally Garza is no stranger to conflicts full of mistrust, bad blood, alienated communities, big money and bull-headed

people. She’s well-acquainted with struggles that have gone so far that all concerned are about to crash over the cliff

of their own intransigence.
In fact, she has made a career of dealing with such situations.
It began when Garza Fernandez, at age 24 newly graduated from Michigan State University and starting law school, was

recruited by General Motors to assist with a crisis.
A major boycott of GM products by the Hispanic community was in the works, prompted by accusations of discrimination.

Garza Fernandez was called in because, despite her young age, she already had credibility and high visibility among

Hispanics as founder of the Michigan Hispanic Scholarship Fund and as a board member of the Society of Hispanic

Professional Engineers. “People knew who I was,” she concedes.
Her job was to identify ways to make General Motors more likeable to Latinos by preparing a multi-pronged plan

addressing every area of the company. A monumental task? Not for Garza Fernandez. She provided a complex roadmap in just

four months.
With that mission accomplished, Garza Fernandez was promoted to GM’s College Recruiting Group, where she was responsible

for hiring 500 engineers—and was designated to train GM recruiters to show them how it was done.
Later she was deployed to the Advanced Engineering Division, where she imposed a systematic program of decision and risk

analysis so the company could see the likely benefits, dangers and potential return on investment before spending mega

-money on research and development.
Her amazing business acuity and phenomenal management successes began to catch the attention of other Fortune 500

companies, which began knocking at her door. Anheuser-Busch won her over with a job offer as director of corporate

relations for their Asian, Hispanic and Native American markets. In her five years with the brewing company she played

leading roles in handling government affairs, corporate image and community relations.
At one point, Anheuser sent Fernandez to the Harvard Executive Development Program. When the company was ready to buy

into Mexico’s giant Modelo brewery, Garza Fernandez was ready to lead the acquisition team that brought home a 19-

percent share.
Garza Fernandez never faced a more colossal conundrum, however, than the one at Hughes Aircraft (now Raytheon), which

lured her away from Anheuser. An environmental lawsuit had just cost the missile-maker $84.5 million for allegedly

polluting the water table on Tucson’s south side with hazardous waste. Now the company faced another suit that, if

successful, would have shut down the plant and put its 10,000 employees out of work.
The first day she showed up for work to deal with the crisis, all of the top brass were off in California. Only one

executive remained behind, and he was preparing to retire. Garza Fernandez knew she had her work cut out for her.
First on her agenda was gaining the community’s trust and support by reversing the company’s highly secure closed-door

policy that up until then had created suspicion and uncertainty.
“I started a community advisory council and ran an image campaign,” she says. Her very deliberate goal was “letting the

world know who we are, what we do. My job was communications, public affairs, lobbying.”
Garza Fernandez made sure the community understood Hughes’s significant place in aircraft history, that the company was

vital to the nation’s security and that it was a huge local employer that supported many local businesses. By providing

some transparency, she hoped to help the community see it had a huge stake in the company.
Within 10 weeks, the Tucson community’s view of the company “went from 100 percent negative to 99 percent positive,” she

says proudly. “I’m a fixer. A problem solver.”
Garza Fernandez was rewarded with further high-level positions at Hughes, and she stayed with the company for five more

years before striking out on her own.
First came The Fernandez Group, the consultancy she started while still at Hughes. People unsurprisingly brought her

their problems—from environmental issues to crisis management to product launches—until she was serving some 60 clients.
Big clients. “Our first contract was on behalf of the entire manufacturing sector in the state [of Arizona], which was a

very big deal,” she says. Electricity was being deregulated and she led a massive coalition of manufacturers to stand up

to the giant utilities. “We say we won,” she recalls. “They say they won. But the important thing is that we got people

to cooperate. My strength is getting people to cooperate.”
Before long The Fernandez Group began expanding into multiple manufacturing and technological endeavors. From 2002-2003

Garza Fernandez served on the executive committee of the Arizona’s Manufacturers Association, where she espoused a best

-practices concept called “technology clustering.”
The technique, which she learned in Singapore, permits small non-competitive ventures to pool their resources, putting

them on equal footing with larger companies in bidding sitations.
Garza Fernandez also served as president of the Southern Arizona Technology Council, where she again employed technology

clustering to help local businesses. In Tucson, there are many small, highly specialized tech companies that are highly

dependent on bigger companies such as Raytheon for subcontracting work. When the subcontract disappears, however, so do

the firms, which are unable to survive. By promoting cooperation, Fernandez helped form six technology clusters were

able to survive on their own.
Garza Fernandez also founded the non-profit Technology Development and Research Institute, Inc. to apply for grants and

government contracts—which soon come streaming into Tucson.
It seemed inevitable that Garza Fernandez would eventually becomes involved in her own cluster, Unmanned Vehicles

Technologies, LLC. The company designs and manufactures UAVs, or unmanned aerial vehicles, that record and transmit

video images of borders, enemy troop movements and emplacements, harbors, utility lines and any other objects that

require snooping. The two little UAV models—the Paparazzi and the CyberEye—can be programmed on the fly or put on auto-

pilot, auto-launch, auto-land or simply ditched when the mission is completed or compromised.
Garza Fernandez found the UAVs have a need for video technology, propelling her into yet another arena. She took the

Array camera developed in Maryland to have an expansive 190-degree image capability—and since the more sensors the

better when it comes to detecting threats—her team combined it with a SENTRI acoustics sensor.
Which, by the way, is made by another company she owns, Safety Dynamics, Inc. SENTRI is a neurologically based sensor

that builds up a library of ambient noise, so anything out of the ordinary—like a gunshot—sets off an alarm. SENTRI can

be tied into the Array camera and smart weapons to look, listen and shoot in the direction of a threatening sound like

an IED explosion.
And there’s more. Another of her companies, Fernandez Enterprises, designs and makes three product lines: aluminum

aircraft-maintenance platforms that wrap right around the plane for total access by maintenance crews; specialized

coatings to make corroded old parts of a machine like new, so they don’t need replacements; and high-end, super-secure

containers for sensitive and expensive cargo like missiles, Rolls Royce engines or even unmanned aerial vehicles.
There appears to be no area Garza Fernandez is reluctant to explore, especially if it produces answers to problems

puzzling the world of business and industry. She tries to keep a balance between all the market segments she targets,

but with the world situation being what it is, the military weighs heavily in her sales.
As if all of that weren’t enough to keep several people busy, she recently became a board member of the U.S. Hispanic

Chamber of Commerce. When last seen, the Tucson-based, frequent-flying, multi-tasking, problem-solving entrepreneur

showed few signs of slowing down.

Early Days
When Garza Fernandez grew up in Port Huron, Michigan, near Detroit, there were only about 20 Hispanic families in tMhe

area. They had come, she says, “to sweep up all the money” from the auto industry.
But her grandfather, who worked at a foundry, taught her that a bigger future awaited her. He’d sit for hours with his

4-inch-thick dictionary translating the newspaper, and extolled the value of learning English.
By the time she enrolled in Michigan State University she already displayed uncanny skill at multi-tasking. She worked

for a state representative responding to constituents, worked as a peer counselor chiefly for minorities, taught pre-

school, and worked at a government-funded agency monitoring government community grants.
Young Sally took pre-law courses as well because her dad grew up in Texas in a migrant family from Mexico and he still

had brothers and sisters working in the fields that she met on trips to the Lone Star State. She wanted to be a labor

lawyer before other opportunities intervened.
“I paid for all my own schooling and paid for my car,” she says. “I was obsessed with doing things for myself.”