If you haven't heard of the Latina disrupting the way corporations add value to supply chains, just wait.

LATINO Magazine sat down with Yanyn "Yany" San Luis, the CEO and founder of The Win Woman, to discover how she created a woman-owned business enterprise that helps billion-dollar companies thrive. The Win Woman levels the playing field by spotlighting the importance of having minority-owned businesses in the supply chain. San Luis points out that the key to winning is companies taking pride in shining a light on corporate social responsibility. Amongst many things, her team is charged with tapping into the sustainable nonprofit ecosystem and storytelling the evolution of its growth.

"Part of my mission is to ensure that more minority- and women-owned businesses get a piece of the pie when working with corporations to make their impact and visibility bigger," she says.

San Luis was raised in Miami after her parents and grandparents immigrated to the United States from Cuba. While the exile experience creates resourcefulness, sacrifice has a price, which often means becoming quite comfortable in the unknown: "When you are trying something new for the first time, you always have that window where you are uncomfortable; I think I live in that space where I am uncomfortable, and then I feel great about mastering whatever I am setting out to do."

Como buena Latina, she is proud of her roots, which have provided her with a unique perspective, one brimming with gratitude, humility and honor to carry her family's torch. Throughout her childhood, San Luis remembers her father instilling in her a competitive spirit, on which she still leans. He pushed his daughter to find her stride and would even race her to the dining room table every night for dinner. While some children would take those moments for granted, San Luis used that competitive nature as motivation to catapult her forward. "I think that is me at the core of peak curiosity, wanting to take more risk and wanting to win," she recalled.

The evolution of The Win Woman was a combined effort to provide a strategic vision for sustainability and revenue growth while ensuring supplier diversity. "I like solving problems for people. In the consulting world, we are hired to solve the issues and add capacity to teams that don't have a lot of bandwidth," explained San Luis, whose efforts have helped train over 2,500 business executives in sustainability and raise over $23 million for Latino-serving nonprofit organizations. Her team is 100% minorities with the majority being Latinas. They help organizations determine what is going wrong and then, they work to amplify what is working, which adds capacity to a company's efforts and sets critical performance indicators and goals to help them win.

The Win Woman's secret sauce lies in growing clients' revenue, visibility and impact internally and externally. Large corporations and nonprofits have a procurement division to purchase goods and services, which houses initiatives that extend meaningful opportunities to minority and women-owned businesses. Creating impact reports communicating the stories of the work being done by these small companies helped the businesses grow their notoriety through internal and external communications, boosting their economic impact.

The Win Woman’s partnership with AARP is an excellent example of how San Luis and her team examined particular challenges and worked to create a communications strategy that promoted the organization's supplier diversity program.

“The Win Woman truly revitalized our Supplier Diversity Program,” said Kimberly Ayers, Director, Supplier Diversity, AARP. “By using data storytelling and creating a Supplier Diversity Economic Impact Report, our team communicated more effectively, highlighted the value of small and diverse suppliers, and showed how easy it is to connect with them to meet business needs.”

We asked San Luis where she finds her inspiration, and she explained that there is great satisfaction in representing the underrepresented and thereby empowering organizations to win: "Part of what we do is align ourselves with organizations doing more for Latinos. I have a mission to get more visibility for what we do as a community for Latinos and Latinas."

As an adjunct professor at Florida International University, she uses her fail-proof negotiations framework to empower the next generation of sales and marketing undergraduate and graduate students. San Luis knew that this created the responsibility to change people's perceptions of Latinidad. "The root of a lot of my work is being tired of seeing people second-guess what minorities and, most of all, Latinas can do," she said.

Her success is fueled by the chance to champion the positive work of Latinos, and she is at the table every day negotiating for that representation in corporate America. She sees the stakes of lacking representation and knows that is not an option: “I am in the market and need to see more organizations or businesses hyper-focusing on Latinas, period. There aren't enough organizations looking out for the new majority."

For San Luis, it comes down to empowering future changemakers and ensuring they know how important it is to take chances on their dreams: "We are in a very risk-averse society, and not enough people are betting on themselves and their dreams and ability to get things done. Lean in more to your gut. Think about the idea, see where it lies, test it in the market, see what it takes and take the risk."

Why? Because when we dream, we win.