For Sybel Pici, two years at San Antonio College yielded a lifetime of success

Sybel Pici’s career has spanned multiple industries, leadership positions, and entrepreneurial ventures over the years. If you ask her, it all started with two formative years at San Antonio College.

From SAC, Pici rose through the ranks at a local tech firm. She then earned national recognition as a franchise owner operating four McDonald’s restaurants with her husband for 20 years. Today, she’s the director of business development for a remodeling firm.

Through each role and every new challenge, she has carried with her the advice of her history professor, John Naranjo.

“He told us, ‘I’m not interested in whether you got the answer right. I’m interested in why you think that’s the right answer,’” she recalled. “I’m still listening to Mr. Naranjo in 2025.”

SAC was Pici’s first step beyond the community she considers her hometown: Fort Sam Houston, where her father was stationed. Her family moved there from Puerto Rico when she was 10 and spoke little English. At Cole High School on base, she considered common career options for women at the time: teacher, nurse, wife, or nun.

Her parents expected her to attend a four-year university, and she was accepted at Wellesley College, with Texas State also on her list.

Then a part-time job changed everything.

When a new restaurant called McDonald’s opened in San Antonio, Pici and her friends became regulars. One night, an employee suggested they apply for jobs since they were there all the time anyway.

“It was 1972, I was babysitting for 50 cents an hour, and minimum wage was $1.65,” she said. “That sounded astronomical.”

She thrived at McDonald’s, drawn in by both the work and a crush on the manager. So when friends made plans to attend SAC after graduation, she joined them and kept working.

Her father hoped she would study education—he had been a teacher before being drafted—but she had other ideas.

“My business teacher told me, ‘I want you to know I think you’re a businessperson, and whatever you do next, I want to encourage you to take some business classes,’” she said.

She took that advice to heart, studying business at SAC along with other subjects that interested her, including radio-television-film courses, zoology, and even a mortuary science class (“I did one little turn in that until we visited the morgue at Fort Sam”).

She found her niche in business classes.

“I just fell in love with shorthand, typing, critical thinking,” she said. “I loved everything about it.”

She continued working at McDonald’s, eventually becoming engaged to her manager, Bob Pici, now her husband of 47 years.

McDonald’s policy prohibited couples from working together, so Pici transferred to another location. There she noticed lunchtime regulars wearing ID badges.

“I asked if they were CIA,” she joked. “They told me they worked at a tech company called Datapoint.”

Eager for her own nametag, she applied and was hired as a clerk typist. She left both McDonald’s and SAC, and over ten years there, advanced into roles as a group president and national sales director.

After Datapoint was sold, she and her husband invested their savings in a McDonald’s franchise. Over the next two decades, their business grew to include four restaurants employing 250 people.

“The consumer services, process orientation and systematic training at McDonald’s made learning fun and easy,” she said. “If you do steps one through seven, you win. Do them every day, and you win every day. It’s a microcosm of how business works.”

As a franchise owner, she noticed teenagers hanging around her restaurants each summer, too young to work but eager for something to do. She often offered them food in exchange for helping keep tables clean. That sparked a bigger idea.

Working with Northeast Independent School District, McDonald’s Corp., and a federal grant, she launched Camp Mickey D’s, a free summer program to prepare teens for the workplace. Students learned teamwork, communication, safety, financial literacy, and even chemistry and biology, all inside her restaurants.

“If McDonald’s employs more first-time workers than anyone, who better to do a camp?” she said. “We did it to give kids that didn’t have anybody watching them something to do in the summer. And it worked.”

The camp ran for over 20 years and expanded to other communities. The program earned recognition from the Texas governor and national media.Camp Mickey D’s was a direct result of the critical thinking her SAC history professor inspired in her, she said.

“That was me trying to give Mr. Naranjo what he wanted,” she said.

She had the opportunity to thank him years later when she was a McDonald’s owner and he was a principal within the Northeast Independent School District.

“I told him, ‘I was your student. You changed me,’” she said.

The success of Camp Mickey D’s led to Pici’s recruitment to the board of Goodwill Industries of San Antonio, where she has served for 16 years, including a term as board chair. She credits the experience with deepening her perspective on workforce development.

“It made me a smarter business owner to see how Goodwill operates,” she said. “It’s a think tank of the best business practices.”

During her tenure, Goodwill partnered with Alamo Colleges to deliver workforce training programs, a full-circle moment that tied back to her beginnings at SAC.

Today, as director of business development for CROSS Luxury Design-Build Remodeling, Pici continues to draw on the skills she first cultivated at SAC, from asking questions to working with multiple generations.

“A hundred years of lifting students to their next level is a big thing,” she said. “I’m proud to share that heritage.”

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