When Jay Gill helped facilitate a $5 billion merger in April between United Security Bancshares and Community West Bancshares – the largest publicly held company headquartered in Fresno – he paused to reflect on how he got to this point in his career.
Gill owns 12 car dealerships, a real estate development business and a farming operation. He is a founding board member of Monterey Community Bank and an investor in American Savings Bank in Hawaii. His businesses employ more than 500 people in California and Hawaii. His many successful ventures were the result of hard work, vision and belief in himself. But perhaps none of it would be possible without the man he calls the “family patriarch,” his uncle Mukhtiar “Mike” Brar.
Brar was the first of the family to immigrate to the United States in 1959. He was born in Malaysia, lived in Punjab, India and settled in Clovis. And he developed a plan to move the rest of his family – including his parents and five siblings – so they, too, could pursue the American dream.
For Brar, that dream was sparked when he enrolled at Fresno City College and later joined the Army, becoming
a paratrooper. He used the money he earned from enlisting to attend Fresno State from 1965 to 1967 and became a naturalized citizen. While at Fresno State, he met his future wife, Norma (Surian) Brar, who graduated in 1966 with a bachelor’s in social work. A criminology major, he lived in the now torn-down police barracks and worked as a campus police officer.
In 1973, he helped bring his sister (Gill’s mother) to America. “Back then, it took many years once you sponsored somebody to bring them over,” Gill said. “He had a plan for how he was going to bring everyone over. It’s expensive, so he couldn’t bring everyone at the same time. So he brought my mom, and the plan was each person would sponsor the next.”
Brar went on to work for the California Department of Health, as a regional manager dealing with childhood immunizations. His daughter, Karen Gonzales, followed in his footsteps by attending Fresno State and is now a fourth-grade teacher at Fort Washington Elementary in Fresno. Her son, Dylan Gonzales, also graduated from Fresno State and is now a reporter at The Business Journal. All together, about eight family members attended the university.
By all accounts, Brar was a true champion for his family and their successes, up until the day he passed away from a stroke at age 68 in 2009.
“I don’t think my dad would believe, Jay, where you are now,” Gonzales said to her cousin. “Jay is the story, and I fully want him to be. My dad is just a part of it.”
Gill, the entrepreneur
Gill, who now lives in Kerman with his family, remembers the exact date he moved with his mother from India to the U.S. It was June 14, 1973, and he was 8 years old.
At the time, his family lived and worked in the fields. He remembers getting his first taste of Uncle Mike’s fondness for Fresno State, particularly the baseball, basketball and football programs.
“He liked to watch Bulldogs football games so much that, when we lived in the fields, he would come visit, and he gave us a black and white TV,” Gill said. “We’d be out there trying to get a clear picture.”
Like his uncle, Gill went on to study at Fresno State, graduating in 1988 with a degree in industrial technology. He took an engineering job in Silicon Valley, but quickly realized he had the entrepreneurial spirit.
His first taste of it came in college, when he said he used to buy cars for around $1,000 and turn around and sell them for $2,000.
“What college does is it teaches you about the world, about dealing with people, about life,” Gill said. “More than education itself, it’s the real-world people you meet. My passion has always been building something, growing something.”
In 1989, he partnered with another uncle to open a convenience store in Biola.
Then, in 1995, he wrote a business plan and got approved for a $200,000 small business administration loan to start a used-car business, Alpha Motors, in downtown Fresno. In 2003, he bought a Chevrolet dealership in Tranquility. In 2004, Gill bought a Ford-Mercury dealership in Coalinga. Over time, Gill expanded the business to 12 dealerships, with a variety of makes, in Central California, Northern California and one in Kailua, Hawaii.
In the midst of growing Gill Automotive Group from the ground up – and inspired by his mother working in the tomato and garlic fields – he also purchased an 800-acre almond farm in west Fresno County. “I did it for my father back in India,” Gill said. “The Punjabi culture is very proud of land ownership. To not own land, to work on someone else’s land, is looked down upon.”
CNBC did a story on Gill in 2015 and featured him in an online segment called “Blue Collar Millionaire,” in which they touted his rise “from the fields to an auto empire.” He was also honored in 2015 as the White House’s minority business Entrepreneur of the Year and was chosen as one of 32 U.S. delegates to attend the Asia Pacific Economic Conference in Manila, Philippines with the Obama administration.
Gill, who is 61 years old, hopes his story will inspire the next generation. “It’s not what I have and things I acquired. It’s the journey that’s most important,” Gill said.
And he knows his Uncle Mike, one of his biggest supporters, would take great pride in the family’s success. “He showed how proud he was of you,” Gill said, smiling at the thought of those Saturday mornings when his uncle would ride with him to visit his dealerships throughout the Valley.
“It’s a typical American story that started when someone came in and laid the foundation. My Uncle Mike came and got it started, and we took advantage of that,” Gill said.
“I’m grateful I had the opportunity to come to a country and build a life for myself. We attribute all of this to Mike – he had the foresight and wisdom.”
Written by Eddie Hughes (‘05)
