A first-generation kid from South Texas who went from the fields, to a call-center floor, to a director's chair, and built a leadership philosophy along the way.
I grew up in San Benito, Texas, in the Rio Grande Valley. My dad was a construction worker. My mom ran her own janitorial business. Nobody in my house talked about careers or boardrooms. We talked about paying the bills. I wasn't supposed to become anything in particular. I was supposed to find honest work and make it, like everybody else.
So that's what I did. And somewhere along the way I learned the thing this whole site is built on: if there's no path, you build one. My father built things with his hands. My mother built a business out of nothing. Built, not born isn't a phrase I picked because it sounded good. It's what I inherited.
Every year when I was a kid, my family would leave South Texas and drive up to Michigan to work the fields. We were born in this country, and so were my parents, but we spent our summers picking asparagus, cucumbers, cherries, and strawberries, side by side with immigrants who'd come a lot farther than we had. My grandfather was there through all of it, and he never gave anything less than everything. Every task, every person, 100 percent. Nobody sat me down and taught me a philosophy. I just watched him.
I started waiting tables and tending bar into my early twenties, until one day I realized I didn't want to be a thirty-year-old bartender. Nothing wrong with it. It just wasn't mine. I took a steadier job at a call center, frontline support for MSN dial-up internet. Entry level. The bottom. And I loved it. I kept climbing: senior rep, tier-two tech, analyst, trainer. Then a supervisor role, fifteen people, and the awakening: my decisions and my moods landed on my team, and sometimes those interactions left the building with them. Leadership stopped being a title and became a responsibility.
Two moments made me. In the Philippines, I took a struggling BPO site in Cavite, ranked 25th in the world, and in twelve months drove it to number one by making it safe for people to admit what they didn't know yet, and fixing it together. Later, I led global digital care for more than 4,000 people across T-Mobile and Sprint, and we earned back-to-back J.D. Power awards, not by squeezing people but by taking care of them and hitting the numbers at the same time. Today I lead rentals customer support and business operations at Zillow. Still in the arena. Still learning.
From the field to the boardroom. I got helping hands on the way up, people who gave me a shot before I'd earned it, and it changed the course of my life. This platform is how I give those hands back, at scale: teaching what I've learned so the next person responsible for other people doesn't have to figure it out alone.
I'll be honest: I'm not comfortable listing accomplishments. But I'll share a few, because they're part of the why. I earned three degrees while working full-time, including an MBA, and was named one of WGU's 2022 Distinguished Graduates. I testified at the Texas Capitol for a bill to make that same path easier for other working adults. I've co-chaired Latino employee networks at two companies, and with my wife I built REVJLO, a nonprofit back home in South Texas. I don't share those things to impress anyone. I share them because not one of them happened on my own. Someone opened each of those doors for me first, and this is me trying to be that someone for the next person. You can't be what you can't see.
At the center of all of it are my wife, Jennifer, and our two kids, Aria and Ezra. They're the humanity I refuse to check at the door.
Leadership isn't something you're born with. It's built, through your choices, your accountability, and a lot of getting it wrong before you get it right. I teach it as a method I call The Build, and underneath all of it is one rule I'd stake my name on: build trust, not fear.