Victoria Jenn Rodriguez Paves the Path for Latina Entrepreneurs to Thrive by Daring Greatly
Few names resonate as strongly in mindset mastery and business consultancy as Victoria Jenn Rodriguez.
With a multifaceted career spanning over two decades, she has carved her niche as a visionary thinker, media personality, and keynote speaker. Throughout that time, she’s trained over 20,000 entrepreneurs, helping them optimize their performance through emotional intelligence, reflection, and empathetic leadership. Her dedication to giving back is evident through her impressive client portfolio, which includes Fortune 500 giants.
Yet, Rodriguez’s impact extends far beyond corporate boardrooms. As the CEO of the Dare to Leap Academy, she champions ambitious women in transitioning from corporate to entrepreneurship. Also, as the founder of The Female Collaborative, Inc., she leads a non-profit organization revolutionizing collaboration and business practices.
In an exclusive interview with Modern Muze, Rodriguez shared her best insights into scaling a business, transitioning into entrepreneurship, and putting your community first.
Your journey spans from being a master mindset and business consultant to hosting a successful podcast. How do you maintain such diverse roles effectively, and what strategies do you employ to ensure each endeavor aligns with your overarching mission of uplifting communities and individuals?
If you’re first starting out, the joy of entrepreneurship, fun part and the benefit is that you get to test out what brings you passion. What motivates you? What skill set can you get paid doing? So figuring that out on that journey is really important because a lot of new entrepreneurs feel like they need to do what they see on Instagram, or what they see their favorite influencer doing. Or a guru tells them, “Oh no, you need to write a book, because if you write a book, you’re going to get speaking engagements and all things.”
But they never really take the time to think about, well, what do I enjoy? What do I really like doing? And what is this skill set that I currently have that I can monetize? I would say start there, do some self-analysis, and figure out what makes you happy. The only way for you to figure that out, if you haven’t identified it already, is for you to do some trial and error.
In my journey, that’s been the framework that I followed. I started doing interviews, mock interview training and resumes because that’s what I was doing in corporate. I was a recruiter, so I said, “Oh, I can make money doing this.” Seven years later, I now do business consulting, and I teach women how to get paid five and six figures by going after corporate and government contracts. But then I’m also hired by corporate to humanize their culture, and now I have this podcast.
It’s doing that check in to figure out what is making you happy, what is continuing to keep you excited about the work that you are doing. That’s what’s going to allow you to show up when you don’t feel like it.
The Dare to Leap Academy aims to support ambitious women transitioning from corporate to entrepreneurship. What inspired you to establish this platform, and what specific challenges do you see women facing in this transition?
What inspired me to start the Dare to Leap Academy was women were asking me how I was doing it. They were like, “Hey, we know you. You’ve been in corporate. How have you been successfully able to make this transition?” So I decided to take that experience, the wins, the losses, all the intellectual property and create kind of this hub where any woman who wanted to transition but had no idea where to start and was stuck.
There’s a step-by-step blueprint for you to make that transition. A big mistake that a lot of entrepreneurs make or a challenge that comes up is standing in your own way. It’s the imposter syndrome, the self-doubt. It’s you thinking that it’s not possible for you. So, a lot of the work that we do in the Academy starts with mindset, which is the foundation of everything that you do. Once you’re able to realize that, “Wow, I do have a skill set that I can monetize, I am amazing, I am powerful, I can use my voice as an asset.” Then it becomes easier for you to go out and sell yourself to get paid.
Over 85 of our participants make their investment back within the first three months of joining the program. It’s a five-figure investment. While we can’t guarantee that you’re going to get those results, what we can guarantee is that the framework works. If you show up and you execute against what you are learning, there’s an 85% probability that you’re going to make money within the first three months.
“Banking on Cultura” has garnered significant attention, especially in reshaping the narrative surrounding Latinx culture and entrepreneurship. What inspired you to start it?
“Banking on Cultura” came about because I was a little lost on my journey. I was trying to figure out what this next chapter in my life was going to be.
I got this sign from God that I need to double down on my community because there is no central hub where Latinos can go to learn how to increase their income, create generational wealth, and eliminate their generational curses. There’s no place where they can go to really embrace their Latinidad and see by example how you can use your cultura as a competitive advantage rather than an Achilles heel. Banking on Cultura serves as a place where Latinos can learn our culture’s vibrancy and complexity.
If you’ve ever felt like you don’t want to follow the traditional path, and you feel you just don’t fit in, or there has to be more, that is what Banking on Cultura is meant to do. Inspire and motivate, mobilize the community to really see the magic that already exists within them.
Imposter syndrome is a common challenge faced by many individuals, including leaders and entrepreneurs. How have you personally navigated moments of self-doubt and imposter syndrome throughout your career, especially when taking on new and challenging ventures?
That’s a loaded question because over 70% of professionals experience imposter syndrome. For women and women of color, that number triples. So, there are so many examples I can give you, but there is one that I love to share.
I started my career on Wall Street, I was the youngest and the only Latina on a brokers trading desk. One day one of my brokers asked me to look up an account, and it was spelled Joel Epstein. When I walk over to him, I’m like, “Okay, so Joel [Joe-elle] Epstein has this amount of money to trade.”He turned around laughing hysterically saying, “Are you stupid? Can you not read?”
Baffled, I said, “What are you talking about? And he responded, “This says Joel [Joe-ool] Epstein.” I thought, “I’ve never met a Joel [Joe-ool] in my life. I know Joel [Joe-elle] because that’s my cousin. In that moment, I had a decision to make: go back to my desk and put my head down and go run to the restroom and cry because I was so ashamed, or I was going to use it as a learning opportunity and not let my imposter syndrome get the best of me.
I went back to the desk, put the speakers all the way up, and asked Google to tell me, how do you spell Joel, and how do you say it. Then, I blasted how it was spelled. I even gave the history of where the name came from. Everyone stopped laughing.
After, I walked over to him and asked, “So you haven’t met Joel? I haven’t met Joel. Learning opportunity for both of us.”
A great example of your cultura coming up in moments that you don’t really expect, but also when you have a choice to allow the imposter syndrome and the self-doubt to hold you back or not. I use these types of examples in the Dare to Leap Academy on thinking I could do that in all the work that I do, to show that those things are inevitable because there are biases that we are all carrying with us. It is our responsibility to educate in those moments because if not, then we just allow people to continue with that bias.
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