That New Santa Fe Travail

With $18,000 from a second mortgage on his house, a few hand tools, and his wife as bookkeeper, Robert Ozuna in 1967 founded an electrical contracting firm in his garage. Today his New Bedford Panoramex Corp. of Santa Fe Springs, Calif., occupies an 18,000-sq.-ft. building, employs 41 people and expects 1980 sales of $3.5 million. Ozuna assembles the instrument panels that monitor nuclear plants, oil drilling rigs and other high-technology hardware. Firms working the Alaskan oil pipeline use his products. With their dazzling displays of dials and switches, the panels look like something out of the control room in The China Syndrome.

A Mexican American raised in Los Angeles, Ozuna, 50, gained his expertise on the job. While working for small West Coast electronics companies in the '50s and '60s, he slogged through night-school classes to pick up engineering skills. Now that his perseverance has paid off, Ozuna is unhappy about what the economy is doing to his business. His chubby face sags as he grumbles: "We're working harder and selling more but making less money."

Unpredictable jumps in raw material prices constantly sabotage his planning. His suppliers have slowed their deliveries, and customers have stretched out their payments. The bank charges him 24% on loans to maintain his inventories. Since oilmen buy his control consoles, the energy boom has put Ozuna in better shape than most entrepreneurs to endure the recession, but his profit margin has plunged from 12% of sales in 1978 to 4% during the past six months.

Landing federal contracts would help, but Ozuna complains that the truckloads of paper work required give the advantage to big firms, which have bureaucracies to fill out the forms. He is disenchanted enough to envision building a new plant in Mexico. In the land of his ancestors, he says, government funds flow more freely, and oil money now gushes out of the ground.

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