“When you are a visionary and have the passion and drive to succeed, you are going to succeed in anything you do,” says Rosa Santana, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of the Santana Group; a group of companies providing innovative outsourcing solutions to organizations across all industries.
Rosa is a past IWEC Foundation awardee – Congratulations for the recognition, Rosa!
By Gloria Romano-Barrera for Latina Style Magazine
Rosa Santana had been working at Kelly Ser vices, a Fortune 500 Company, for 17 years making substantial financial impact. In 1998 Santana joined Westaff, Inc., a staffing organization, and in 2002, downsizing there led to new opportunities for Santana. With the help of her eldest daughter, Lisa Navarro-Gonzales, she founded Integrated Human Capital (IHC) in the U.S. market and also opened her cross-border company, Workforce de Mexico, in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. After three successful years, she expanded to Austin, Texas. In 2005, she participated in a mentoring program where she learned Toyota was expanding to San Antonio. Without delay, Santana opened a small office hoping Toyota would take notice. At this time, her youngest daughter, Nicole Navarro-Velesiotis, joined the company. Later that year, Santana attended Toyota’s Opportunity Exchange and has diligently attended for the last 13 years. In 2014, Toyota in troduced Santana Group’s Forma Automotive LLC as the company’s first Hispanic woman-owned direct Tier I supplier. Today, Forma Automotive supplies fully assembled beds for the award-winning Tacoma truck.
“People do business with you because you have integrity and deliver exceptional results,” shares Santana. “People are going to find you and will want to do business with you.”
The daughter to a single mother of five children, Santana immigrated to the United States from Ciudad Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico, at the age of 5, speaking no English when she settled down with her family in El Paso, Texas. As Santana grew up, her mentors an d role models were her mom and grandmother. Her mother, Josefina, worked as a housekeeper at a hospital and then at a nursing facility and ensured she provided for Santana and her siblings each day.
“I recall very vividly what it was to have a mother who worked all the time, but she gave us a lot of love,” she states. “Mom always said ‘I work this hard so that you guys can do better’.”