Among the icy landscape of Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, at the largest oil field in North America, sits one of Antu Chicahuala’s most monstrous creations.
To move a drilling rig between well sites, Chicahuala’s company was contracted to design and build a custom trailer to stack the several thousand pounds worth of equipment “like Jenga” with the mast 150 feet in the air.
“It looks scary,” Chicahuala says. “Looks like a skyscraper.”
While a sizable business today, just under 30 years ago, Chicahuala’s parents were running Accusteel out of a family garage and barely broke even. His parents, who moved to Canada from Argentina, built up the business gradually, with Chicahuala eventually working for them as a mechanic and then an engineer after he went back to school.
“I grabbed a credit card, and I went to Best Buy, and I bought a computer. I called SolidWorks and bought a licence. I set up a little desk in the corner inside of a Sea-Can. Said, ‘OK, now we have an engineering department — now what?’”
After running the engineering department for nine years, Chicahuala realized he was going to take over the family business — which meant he needed to figure out how to run one.
After three years as the company’s vice president, he got an MBA, and today runs his family’s business as president with the values of honesty and hard work he got from his dad.
“I think he was instrumental in not writing out and officializing our core values, but he lived them and instilled them in us.”
This article appears in the Nov/Dec 2024 issue of Edify
