TITLE: President and Chief Executive Officer
ORGANIZATION: Greater Dallas Hispanic Chamber of Commerce
DETAILS: Named president and CEO in July 2006; appointed in 2005 to the National Advisory Board of the Small Business Administration
WHY YOU NEED TO KNOW HER: Because she holds the key to the local Hispanic business community.
Rojas, who started her career selling cars, is a true jack-of-all-trades, with a knack for working with people and rising to new challenges.
Her current challenge: developing Hispanic-owned companies and helping other businesses reach the Hispanic community through work-force development and management diversification.
With a membership of more than 2,000 people and businesses, the Greater Dallas Hispanic Chamber is one of the largest Hispanic chambers in the country, and represents the nation’s fastest-growing ethnic population of business owners and consumers.
The Dallas chamber’s key focus: building leaders through educating and training local small-business owners. “If our members succeed,” Rojas says, “we succeed.”
Her ultimate goal is to make the Hispanic chamber a more innovative business association. But first she wants to dispel two common misconceptions: the idea that chamber members have to be Hispanic—and that they have to be business owners.
“We welcome everyone,” Rojas says. “We want to be the chamber of choice.”
