In 1947, Naveen Kapur was born in New Delhi, India. Kapur grew up there with a wealthy family and attended school there. He attended BITS college, or the Birla Institute of Technology and Science, for engineering. Kapur majored in power engineering and met his wife-to-be, Pushpa Sheoran.

Kapur explained when he graduated from college, his father “invested” in his younger and older brothers. His father set up a big space for the younger brother to export bicycle parts to the Middle East and a foundry and machine shop for the older brother to ship parts to other manufacturers.

“The only problem was,” Kapur stated, “neither one of them knew how to run a business. My father was hemorrhaging money … So he asked me when I graduated. He said, ‘You are an engineer. You are really highly educated in the same space. I want you to be with your brothers and me.’”

Kapur responded, “I said, ‘You know, dad, how things are, he’s my elder brother, you are my father. I would have no control. Everything that I say is going to be debated and everything I say is going to be wrong, and everything you say will be right … This is really not what I went to college for.’”

His father asked him what he wanted to do. Kapur said that his brother-in-law had gone to the United States to become a doctor and that his brother-in-law said that going to the US would be the “best place for [Kapur] to exit this house.”

Shortly after graduation, Kapur and Pushpa tied the knot in January of 1970 and began their lives together. Ten days after the wedding, Kapur was on a flight to the United States of America with $6.50 in his pocket. The Indian government only allowed $6.50 of foreign exchange because “they were so starved of foreign exchange.”

Kapur was on his way to attend North Carolina State University for his master’s degree. Luckily for him, there was a professor at the college who had caught wind that a new student from India was to arrive. The professor was also from India, so he went to go pick up Kapur from the Raleigh airport.

Kapur did well in his first semester, so he was offered an assistantship.

“That helped out tremendously because with an assistantship, my fees went down substantially, and I was able to now get my wife an F2 visa so she could come and also work here,” Kapur said.

Kapur said he and his wife were able to move in together after she secured a job working for Caterpillar Inc, the construction, mining and other engineering equipment manufacturer. He said, “We moved into a one-bedroom apartment, and we thought, ‘Oh my God! This is luxury!’”

In a moment of reflection, he added, “But it’s interesting how, coming from where I had all the money that you would need, you suddenly turned into poverty. Literally.”

He explained that he sold newspapers to make money, “It was an Earth-shaking flip of the mind. And it’s the best thing that happened to me because now I was on my own. It’s like somebody dropped me in the desert, and I had to find the nearest source of water.”

“I started to work hard. I did a lot of other things just so that I could graduate, and I did,” Kapur said.

He graduated as a member of Alpha Pi Mu, an honor society for industrial and systems engineering students. He said his father could not believe it, and he sent a notarized statement from the head of the department back to his father in India.

After graduation, Kapur started his long career as a power engineer in the states.

He started as an electrical engineer in 1971 with a diesel engine and gas turbine generator manufacturer, Power Systems Division, in North Carolina.

“A year-and-a-half later, I was the assistant general manager. I was the number two guy,” Kapur said.

He explained that he talked to the head of the company, Frank Jones, and said, “‘Frank, I want to be on my own.’”

Jones introduced Kapur to the vice president of People’s Bank, Branson Hobb, in Rocky Mount, North Carolina. Kapur explained to the vice president that he wanted $300,000 to get his business, International Controls and Switchgear, Inc (ICS), off the ground when he, himself, only had about $500 in his own bank account.

Kapur had secured a contract with Western Electric, a purchasing arm of the then phone monopoly AT&T, “even though [Kapur] didn’t have a plant … [he] just had a warehouse.”

Kapur recounted the conversation with Hobb. “Branson Hobb sat next to me, and I had a whole plan laid out for him … He says, ‘Now son, I’ll give you that money, but I’ll give it to you in trenches. I’ll give you $50,000 now. When do you think you’ll have positive cash flow?’”

Kapur told Hobb he expected to have a positive cash flow within six months of opening.

Kapur started building controls, control panels, and switchgear for AT&T exclusively. Then he started to build 5,000 and 15,000 switchgears for nuclear power plants.

“These switchgears were seismically tested,” Kapur said, meaning they were tested in an earthquake simulator to ensure they would not collapse.

Kapur’s business was off the ground and running within four years of him landing in the United States.

When Kapur met with Hobb again to get the rest of the money, he told Kapur to “never give up your accent.” When asked why, Hobb explained it forced him to pay attention to Kapur’s words, “a salesman’s dream.”

“These were people with sincere purposes who found something in me. They were able to trust me, give me guidance for how to live my business and my life going forward,” Kapur said.

Kapur sold International Controls and Switchgear, Inc to King Fifth Wheel, a business formed in the 1800s that stayed in transportation.

“I don’t know where they found me, but they found me,” Kapur said. “They came in and I met the president and they made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. So they bought me.”

He recounted his struggles switching from being an entrepreneur to working in a big corporation, which ultimately led to him leaving the company.

He explained the vice president of finance came to the plant to meet with Kapur’s accounting manager. Following a disagreement between the two, Kapur tried to handle it himself, but was ultimately let go and given the money for the sale of ICS.

He and his wife moved back to India but had a hard time. Kapur said that his daughter was on her way to school and was hit by a motorcycle. Following her recovery, Pushpa and Kapur decided to move back to the United States.

In 1983, Kapur joined Morrison Knudsen Engineers (the then largest design firm in the United States according to ENR), and as their chief electrical engineer and director of power systems for the eastern region, he was responsible for the development, design and implementation of numerous privately-owned hydro and cogeneration power plants.

In 1986, Kapur founded N.K. Engineers, Inc (NKE), a design, development and consulting engineering company. In the last thirty-two years NKE has been the principal designer of over seventy-five operating cogeneration, hydro, peaking, standby, PV, fuel cell, and wind power plants. In addition, NKE was also responsible for the mechanical and electrical designs for numerous data centers ranging in size from 3,000 square feet to 300,000 square feet.

Kapur’s work has been recognized by The Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, Inc. Kapur’s name is on the Immigrant Wall of Honor for his work in the power engineering field. He was recognized in 1975.

To The Future Generations

Kapur has been invited by his college in India, BITS, four times to speak to the students about his life.

He says, “Energy flows only when there is a difference in potential. If you keep that in the back of your mind, you will drive yourself up in a very successful way.”

“Potential is voltage. Potential is your potential, also,” Kapur said. “If you want to climb Mount Everest, that’s the difference. You want to climb Mount Everest, you want to risk, you want to learn … and you’ll do it. [But] if you just sit there and say, ‘I can’t do it,’ then you are at zero! There’s no difference in potential.”

“So you set a target, and you go and aim for it. And that has worked for me and for most entrepreneurs very well. We share ego, we share pride. We just need to get what we want to do because that gives us more enjoyment than anything else,” Kapur said.

Kapur said he hopes he can get someone excited and say, “If he can do it as an immigrant, I can do it … Again, energy flows when there is a difference in potential. So when you get to a state in the mind that says, ‘I can do this,’ it’s amazing how things fall into place because you will make sure they fall into place.”

“This is a country of immigrants, and immigrants come in with this difference in potential. They want to get ahead,” Kapur said.

“If they have faith, and if they have gratitude, then you can get whatever you want,” he added. “One thing you learn as you climb the steps up is that not everything is as you had envisioned, so you make all the necessary changes to get it to the right space.”

Kapur said that everyone has a perspective. “You learn from that. When you learn from that, you earn from that. Learning and earning are together. You have to learn from someone’s experience, don’t criticize. Just figure out if you can make this work.”

“People in America will take the chance, but they have to be convinced that you are not a gambler. That what you’re proposing is not a gamble,” he stressed. “Once you’re committed to it, it’s amazing how people are willing to trust you … you gotta have layers of honesty [for] people to build trust in you. And in this country, once they build trust with you, it stays with you.”

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Reporter Sam Cross can be reached at sam@thebee.com.