CEO, Conquistador Consulting, LLC 

My Story

“I’m originally from Caracas, Venezuela. My family’s from there and Buenos Aires, Argentina. I identify very strongly with both those cities and nations. I’ve lived in the States off and on for over half my life, predominantly in Dayton. My parents worked as civilian teachers for the Department of Defense, so Wright-Patterson Air Force Base was my first point of contact with the Dayton area. My stepfather is from the Dayton region, and I gravitated here afterward because it’s been very family-inclusive, and it also has a progressive nature I very much enjoy. Whenever I’ve moved out of the country or state, I always came back to Dayton as a home base. The last time I moved back was 2007, and I’ve been here since.

On Getting Immigrants Involved 

“There is a very diverse immigrant population here. I’m involved in various young professionals groups, including one for Hispanic young professionals. Part of the goals of these networking groups should be to reach out to these various immigrant communities and include them in the conversation. There are several different sub-populations here in the city, and I would love to see if we can collaborate and share ideas to cross boundaries between the Hispanic community and the Turkish community, for instance, and the African community, all the subsets of Dayton culture.

I think that success as a whole is a group effort, and it’s not just going to be one group in the community that drives or fosters it. It’s going to take a collective effort. The more people we can get who share passion about Dayton and its business development, the better.”

Why Dayton?

There’s plenty of opportunity to be had here if you’re a business owner looking for a client base. Doing business here is really simple. People are very close-knit and it’s a very small town in some ways, so if you network in the right circles, you end up meeting plenty of people who can help your business. I started my business here because the marketplace is very conducive to what I’m doing. It’s not a place like Chicago or New York, where the market is already extremely saturated. Networking and opportunity is phenomenal, cost of living and cost of doing business are relatively low, and all of these aspects come together to form a really solid base for doing business.