NOT JUST A TITLE.
A WAY OF BUILDING.
I'm Betzy Vazquez. La Patroni.
Enterprise systems strategist. Construction CEO. Nonprofit founder. Servant leader. And someone who has spent more than 25 years believing that the most important thing you can build is something that keeps working after you step back from it.
My work lives at the intersection of strategy, systems, and purpose. It always has, long before I had language for it.
What I know now is that those three things are not separate disciplines. They are the same conversation, approached from different angles.
This page is where I try to explain how I got here. Not the résumé version. The real one.
Before the strategy,
there is a person.
And the person, when the meetings are done and the systems are running and the day has finally exhaled, is someone sitting at the edge of a lake, glass of wine in hand, watching the stars come out one by one.
That is where I do some of my best thinking. Not at a desk. Not in a conference room. Out there, in the quiet, where the only agenda is paying attention.
I mention that first because I think it matters. Who you are in the stillness tells you something about who you are in the storm. And I have learned, through years of leading in complex, high-pressure environments, that the capacity to be still, to be curious, to be genuinely present with what is in front of you, is not separate from good leadership. It is the foundation of it.
MY STORY
I have always been hungry to understand how the world works.
Not just professionally. Personally. Culturally. Humanly. International travel has been one of the great teachers of my life. Not travel as tourism, travel as inquiry. I go to new places because I want to understand how different people organize their lives, their values, their tables. What they eat. How they gather. What they consider worth celebrating. Every culture I have encountered has given me something I brought home, a different lens, a broader frame, a deeper well of empathy.
I am a committed foodie. Food is culture made edible. When I sit down at a table in a country I have never visited and order something I have never tasted, I am doing the same thing I do in every professional environment I enter, I am paying attention, staying curious, and trusting that there is something here worth understanding before I open my mouth.
A good glass of wine helps too.
WHY LA PATRONI?
La Patroni is not a title I gave myself.
It is one my team gave me, and the reason it stayed is because it was true. It captured something about how I lead that I had never quite named.
The authority of La Patrona, yes, but with a particular edge. A pursuit of excellence. An appreciation for precision, for quality, for doing things at a level that reflects the seriousness of the work. But here is what people who know me understand: La Patroni is not about being in charge. It is about being responsible. There is a significant difference.
To be La Patroni is to hold the standard. To protect the culture. To build environments where people can do their best work and feel the weight of something meaningful behind what they are doing every day. It is stewardship. And stewardship, done well, is one of the highest forms of leadership there is.
Curiosity is the throughline.
When I look back at every chapter of my career, across four industries, across enterprises and construction sites and nonprofit boardrooms, the thing that moved me forward was never ambition alone. It was curiosity. The genuine desire to understand how things work, why they break, what makes them last, and what the people inside them actually need.
That same curiosity is what makes me a better leader, a better builder, and (I hope) a better person to know.
I believe deeply in learning. In reading. In listening to people whose experiences are nothing like mine. In sitting with a question long enough to let the real answer surface instead of settling for the convenient one. Some of the most important things I know did not come from a certification or a boardroom. They came from a conversation with a stranger in another country, or a quiet hour watching the water while the rest of the world was still asleep.
I am, at my core, someone who loves people.
My spirituality grounds me in all of this, and I want to be honest about what that means, because honesty matters more to me than a tidy answer.
I have walked through different expressions of faith over the course of my life. What has deepened over time is not doctrine but presence. I have come to sense the Divine in everything: in the stillness at the edge of a lake, in the generosity of a stranger in a foreign city, in the moment a team finally finds its rhythm, in the face of someone who just needed someone to believe they were worth building for.
I do not believe any single institution has a monopoly on that. Religions, at their worst, divide the very people they were meant to serve. Spirituality, at its best, reminds you that we are all held by something larger than what we can name, and that the right response to that is not certainty, but humility. And love.
My mother taught me that long before I had language for it. It is still the truest thing I carry.