Q&A: Meet Rob Elias, the new President/CEO of the Tucson Hispanic Chamber of Commerce | CEO Innerview

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AAlthough Rob Elias has a new position with the Tucson Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, he is no stranger to Tucson or our business community. Elias graduated from the University of Arizona with a degree in political science and has been a Tucson business partner for nearly 20 years, working with everything from credit unions to hotels to the Tucson Botanical Gardens. Elias’ strengths lie mainly in marketing, communication and branding, but he was also a co-founder of the Oro Valley Music Festival.

His work focuses on helping business people either by connecting with business resources and finance or with like-minded professionals. He says those goals made him a natural fit for chambers of commerce, which led him first to the Tucson Metro Chamber and now to the Tucson Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.

In his new role, Elias aims to make meaningful changes for minority-owned companies. The non-profit Tucson Hispanic Chamber of Commerce was founded in 1989 and recognized as Large Chamber of the Year by the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in 2013.

“Tucson has an extremely large and growing Latino community, and your support was just too great an opportunity to be missed,” said Elias.

Now that you are officially President / CEO of the Tucson Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, what business plans do you have for the local community?

I’m in the middle of my third week in this role and it was quite an ordeal to take all of the facets in my arms. But it was a great time. The only thing I can talk about is that chambers in general have done a phenomenal job of helping local businesses through advocacy, knowledge sharing and liaison building.

But the business landscape is changing at an incredible pace, and we need to better understand what is changing and how we can change within it. And the cause of this change is the consumer. Consumers are changing, and the recent events of social change and social justice talks, as well as the pandemic, are compounding this.

I firmly believe that consumers are aware of the power we have through our purchasing decisions and purchasing habits. It is causing businesses to evolve and change, and we have plans in the Hispanic Chamber how we will address this by evolving our offerings and events … is hard to do

sometimes.

Now that the COVID has subsided, have you seen any unique ways for Latinos or minority owned companies to recover or support one another?

The Latino community is extremely resilient and extremely loyal to the companies and the people who run these businesses. And that’s one of the aspects we’re going to dive into in the Hispanic Chamber. We will take a people-centered approach, and the reason for this is that 100% of businesses are people-run. This is even more evident in the Latino community, where we are so deeply rooted in connectivity with one another.

Our life revolves around this connectivity. If things open up because I think the Latino community is a little more cautious about re-entering it will take a little longer. But I think we’ll go back to the old days and support the companies we love so much.

You helped organize the Oro Valley Music Festival. Now that public events are returning, do you have any plans to sponsor or support those events?

This was an incredible event that we put together, especially considering that we had no experience hosting an event of this size. But an idea became something much bigger. Now with the Hispanic Chamber, it would be an understatement to say that music, arts, and culture are a huge part of the Latino community. It’s a huge part of us.

While we have no plans in the works, we are of course open to using our platform in any way that will help move the business and community of Tucson and Southern Arizona. When it comes to music we are more than happy to explore these possibilities.

What do you think are some of the biggest challenges facing the Hispanic business community? Is it mostly recovering from COVID or are there any issues stretching from before the pandemic?

There are definitely advanced topics that we need to talk about. We need to understand one thing: Latinos are inherently inclined to start a business for a number of reasons. Of course, it feels good to be our own boss, and we want to leave a legacy that our families can carry on, and we’re also interested in creating generational wealth and security.

So, one thing that I think Latinos faced was a shrinking support structure to help them with the challenges of entrepreneurship. It’s not easy to start a business, and these challenges definitely increase when you’re a minority owned business.

Another pre-COVID challenge that we will continue to work on is Latinos climbing the corporate ladder. The number of minority CEOs at Fortune 500 companies is shockingly low and has not really grown in the past decade.

In addition, the pay gap among people of color remains an issue. This results in Latinos having lower credit scores on average, as well as our ability to earn capital for companies we are about to start or have already started.

In your opinion, what makes Tucson a great place to be for a company?

There is a long list of things I can talk about, one of which is our climate: the fact that we have as much sunshine as we do and we don’t have to worry about natural disasters other than the heat in summer.

But probably the biggest contribution to this is the culture of who we are as a city and as a people. We have such a rich heritage and culture within the business world that everyone seems to embody whether you’ve been here for 90 years or nine days. Everyone assimilates and drawn to this coolness and unique factors we have here, from our vibrant murals to the interactions people have with Tucsonans.

We’re a bigger city, but it really doesn’t feel like that. I like to say that Tucson has a degree and a half of separation while everyone else has three or four degrees of separation because everyone is so ingrained. This is not tangible now, but you can feel it.

That’s why I think people are drawn to Tucson. And we are not a shrinking community. Despite the efforts of some, the growth is definitely happening here.

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