Nina G. Vaca

Nina Vaca
Occupation Chairman & CEO Pinnacle Group

Nina Vaca is Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Pinnacle Group, a Dallas-based company which includes several companies founded by Vaca, including its flagship, Pinnacle Technical Resources, Inc., an award-winning information technology services provider to the Fortune 500 founded in 1996, and Provade, Inc., a global provider of vendor management software that Pinnacle acquired in 2011. Under Vaca’s leadership, Pinnacle has become one of the largest firms in its industry, with several thousand consultants across the United States and Canada and more than $650 million in annual revenues.[1][2][3] Vaca serves as the Chairman of Provade,Inc. which provides services in over 60 countries and manages more than $2 billion of trans- actions annually. She is a director at Cinemark Holdings, Kohl's Corporation and Comerica, Inc., and is a founding member of the Startup America Partnership. She is Chairman Emeritus of the Board of the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.[3] Vaca also serves as a Presidential Ambassador for Global Entrepreneurship (PAGE) by the White House and works alongside the Department of Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker and Steve Case to inspire entrepreneurship worldwide. Pinnacle is also an investor in My Plates , the sole provider of specialty license plates in the state of Texas, which leverages its proprietary software to contribute millions of dollars to the state general fund each year.

Early life and education

Vaca immigrated to Los Angeles from Quito, Ecuador with her family at a young age.[4] Her father and mother were both entrepreneurs, her father, Hernan, owning a chain of travel agencies and her mother, Amanda, owning several retail businesses.[4]

From an early age, Vaca helped out with the family businesses, and in 1989, Vaca’s father was shot and killed during a robbery at one of his offices so she and her older sister took over his business.[5] The two ran the chain for a year in order to prepare it for sale; then Vaca began school at Texas State University.[5]

Vaca graduated from Texas State University with a B.A. in Speech Communications and Business Administration and has since been named the youngest Distinguished Alumna in university history.[3] She is a graduate of the Harvard Business School – Corporate Governance Executive Program and holds honorary Doctor of Laws degrees from both Northwood University and Mount Mary College.[3][6] She has graduated from programs at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern, and the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas in Austin.[7]

Marriage and family

Nina Vaca married Jim Humrichouse in 1999. They live with their four children in Dallas, Texas. In 2001, Jim left his job as a strategic advisor for McKinsey & Company to join Pinnacle, eventually becoming President in 2004. He holds a MBA from Harvard and a Bachelor's in Finance from the Honors Business Program at the University of Texas at Austin.

Almost all of Vaca’s siblings work or have worked at Pinnacle.[4] Freddy Vaca, Nina Vaca’s younger brother, is Sr. Vice President at Pinnacle, and Jessica Narvaez, her older sister, is an Executive Director for Pinnacle.[8] Vaca’s brother, Chris Vaca, worked at Pinnacle as Resource Manager for a period of time, and her sister, Monica El-Hajj, has a real estate brokerage in Houston.[5]

Career & Awards

Vaca worked at Computer Development Services, Inc. in Dallas, Texas before founding Pinnacle Technical Resources in 1996 as an information technology services provider for Fortune 500 companies.[3] Since its conception, Pinnacle has grown to include all aspects of the client-vendor relationship, providing IT Staff Augmentation Services, Professional Staffing, and Payrolling services.[2] In 2001, Vaca bought her business partner’s ownership in the company, becoming the full owner and bringing it out of the post 9/11 slump in the staffing industry.[7] During this time, Pinnacle began to move toward fixed price deliverable based projects as opposed to time and material staff augmentation services offered in the past.[7] In recent times, Pinnacle has swung back toward time and material staff augmentation.[7] In 2011, Pinnacle bought the vendor management services firm Provade, based out of San Mateo, California, and it now operates as its own separate entity under the ownership of Pinnacle.[9]

The story of Nina Vaca and Pinnacle opens the Entrepreneur chapter of the McGraw-Hill textbook, “Understanding Business”.[2] In 2005, she was named an Ernst & Young Entrepreneur Of The Year.[10] Vaca has represented the U.S. internationally in transatlantic leadership forms, including the German Marshall Memorial Fellow program (a subset of the German Marshall Fund) as a member of the British-American Project.[3] She served as the chairman of the Greater Dallas Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in 2005.[7] In 2010, she was named chairman of the Board of Directors of the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.[7] In 2013, she became Chairman Emeritus and Chairman of the Nominations Committee. She was succeeded by Marc A. Rodriguez.[11]

In addition to being CEO of Pinnacle, Vaca is also a Director with Comerica, Inc., Director with Kohl’s Corporation, Director at Cinemark Holdings, Chairman Emeritus for the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, and one of the founding board members of Startup America Partnership.[3]

References

  1. ↑ Blanco, Octavio. "Nina Vaca: Daughter of immigrants now runs a $650 million firm". money.cnn.com. CNN. Retrieved 29 September 2015.
  2. 1 2 3 "Nina G. Vaca-Humrichouse". Startup America Partnership. Retrieved 23 May 2012.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 "Nina G. VacaHumrichouse Executive Profile". Businessweek. Retrieved 24 May 2012.
  4. 1 2 3 Chin, Michael. "Nina Vaca: Born Entrepreneur". Color Magazine. Retrieved 22 May 2012.
  5. 1 2 3 "CEO, December 28, 2007". KERA. Retrieved 22 May 2012.
  6. ↑ Pabst, Georgia. "New U.S. Hispanic Chamber chair to give commencement". Latino Connection. Journal Sentinel. Retrieved 22 May 2012.
  7. 1 2 3 4 5 6 Jean, Sheryl. "Dallas' Nina Vaca named chairwoman for U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce". The Dallas Morning News. Retrieved 22 May 2012.
  8. ↑ Holloway, Lindsay. "Young Millionaires". Entrepreneur. Retrieved 24 May 2012.
  9. ↑ "Staffing Firm Buys VMS". Staffing Industry Analysts. Retrieved 24 May 2012.
  10. ↑ "Technology and Communications Entrepreneur of the Year Award Recipient". Ernst & Young. June 19, 2005.
  11. ↑ "Marc A. Rodriguez Named Chairman-Elect of United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce". PRWeb. Retrieved 23 Mar 2013.

External links

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