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Throughout Vargas’ 16-year career in multicultural marketing and diversity strategy, she helped corporate teams across multiple sectors recruit and sustain diverse employees.

She took great satisfaction in her job: “I was using my experience as a Latina, as an immigrant, as a Spanish speaker who went to school in New York City and someone who is bilingual,” Vargas tells CNBC Select.

In time, Vargas started to see that other organizations were hungry for the kind of expertise she brought to the table, and she wanted to do more with her talents and skills.

“I knew I could offer so much to organizations who are dying for this type of work,” says Vargas.

So she began envisioning what would ultimately become The Latinista, a company that helps Latina and Latinx women of color build professional communities and thrive in their careers, while also working directly with businesses to promote diversity within the corporate culture.

In 2012, her side hustle was born. She didn’t make a lot of money at first and instead focused on building a professional network.

But there was a problem: Though Vargas was able to keep herself to a strict budget and put a big chunk of her 9-to-5 salary into savings, she struggled to kick her expensive coffee habit.

“Sometimes I was spending $14 a day on coffee,” says Vargas. “I was going into work at 8:00 in the morning and I wasn’t coming home until 2:00 in the morning because of the events that I was a part of.”

So she found a way to network and stick to her budget by taking coffee meetings.

“When women started to reach out to me and say, ‘Can I pick your brain and grab some advice?’ I would say ‘Sure, absolutely,'” Vargas says. “”It will only cost you taking me out to coffee.'”

In turn, Vargas drew inspiration from her meetings, getting a better understand what challenges her target demographic was facing. She used the information to develop workshops and conferences for Latina and Latinx professionals.

Vargas also took coffee meetings with corporate professionals who needed ideas to build diversity within their own organizations. She couldn’t always charge these clients (more than a cup of coffee anyway), as she was still employed with another company. But simply sharing insights from her own experiences and take-aways from her workshops was enough to make an impression.

Over time, she developed relationships with potential corporate clients who were waiting for her when she finally quit her job and devoted herself full-time to the Latinista.