This story is part of the Behind the Desk series, where Make It gets personal with successful business executives to find out everything from how they got to where they are to what makes them get out of bed in the morning to their daily routines.

For nearly three decades, Sandra Campos has helped build global brands like Diane von Furstenberg, Juicy Couture and Ralph Lauren — but the question she gets most frequently has nothing to do with fashion.

That’s because she’s also spent the last 16 years as a single mom, raising three children while rising up the career ladder. As Campos tells CNBC Make It, women often ask her: “How did you do it?”

Her answer: “I didn’t have a choice.”

In 2018, Campos became Diane von Furstenberg’s first-ever Latina CEO, a position she held until the company reorganized last year due the pandemic — a mutual decision, Campos says. Now, she’s the CEO of retail tech start-up Project Verte and the founder of Fashion Launchpad, an online education platform she launched shortly before leaving Diane von Furstenberg.

Campos, a first-generation Mexican-American, didn’t come from money — but from an early age, she dreamed of becoming a fashion company CEO. Her only regret, she says, is not publicly embracing her heritage as she climbed.

Instead, she was consumed by the competition of rising to the top, she says — and being a woman competing against men for top executive jobs was already enough of a challenge. ”[I] thought that it was going to be another part [of my identity] that was not going to help me,” Campos says.

But internally, her heritage has always motivated her. When she focuses on her “why,” she says, she remembers the sacrifices her parents and grandparents made coming to the U.S. so she and her siblings could have a better life.

“I’ve never taken that for granted,” she says.

Here, Campos talks about working at her family’s tortilla factory, why she didn’t publicly embrace her heritage sooner and the ups and downs of being a single working mother at the top of her field.