Rosa Cazares
Company: La Mota
Title: CEO
Age: 31
There are 24 hours in the day, and La Mota CEO Rosa Cazares needs each and every one of them.
Cazares has guided the Oregon-based company through a time of incredible growth. She and her partner, Aaron Mitchell, opened the first La Mota store in 2015; the couple’s growing empire now has 20 cannabis retail stores, four outdoor farms and two wholesalers.
The self-funded company, which started with just Cazares and Mitchell, now has about 200 employees and expects to hit 300 by the end of the year.
“We’re going very fast,” Cazares says. “It’s a race to the top.”
Somehow she still finds time to be a mom and plan the company’s next step to take over the world.
One might think Cazares would feel burnout after more than four years of constant expansion and navigating the turbulent waters of an ever-changing industry. Quite the opposite. She loves the challenge and the opportunity.
“No other industry has this kind of opportunity for growth,” she says, adding that the company owns its own real estate and plans to have 30 shops in Oregon by the end of 2019, before bringing the brand to other states next year.
Cazares and Mitchell work well as a team, she says. He handles products, real estate and acquisitions, while she focuses on retail, licensing and construction. They feed off each other’s ambition.
“I didn’t envision being this big, but I always knew we’d do something amazing,” she says.