Left to right: Nicole Bluefort; Jennifer Desrosiers; Cyndee Gruden; Jennifer MacDonald and Josephine Moran were the presenters of the 2024 Powered by Women event, at the Manchester Country Club in Bedford on Nov. 7, 2024. (Photo by Jodie Andruskevich)
Women in the workforce can succeed by finding the right connections and celebrating one another. That’s what the five women leaders featured at NH Business Review’s recent Powered by Women forum say when they reflect on their careers.
Nothing conveyed that message more than an impromptu exercise from speaker Jennifer Desrosiers of Altitude Companies, who asked the event audience to turn their attention toward their fellow table guests.
“Turn to the next person beside you, and you’re going to look them in the eye and say, ‘I see you,’” she urged. “Turn the other direction and say, ‘I see you.’ We need to celebrate each other. Go to your favorite woman business owner — whether you know her or not — reach out in the DMs, call her out, recognize her and tell her how she makes you feel.”
Attendees to NH Business Review’s seventh annual speaking and networking event gathered at the Manchester Country Club in Bedford, with opportunities to meet one another over breakfast and listen to 10-minute talks from each of the five businesswomen, followed by a panel Q&A session between the women.
In addition to Desrosiers, this year’s speakers were Dr. Jennifer MacDonald of the Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute (ARMI); Manchester trial attorney Nicole Bluefort; Josephine Moran of Ledyard Financial Group; and University of New Hampshire engineering school dean Cyndee Gruden.
After opening remarks from Caitlin McCormick of United Healthcare, Bluefort was first among the speakers, expressing that it took a lot of assistance to build her career to where it is today. She gave several nods to East Wakefield lawyer Donald Stewart, whom she deemed her mentor.
“He took me under his wing and kind of taught me everything that I needed to know,” Bluefort said. “Before I knew it, I was hiring a secretary. Before I knew it, I was hiring an attorney. Then another one, another one and another one, and here we are today.”
Bluefort launched her first law office in Lynn, Massachusetts, in 2011. This year, she extended her business to New Hampshire, when she moved her operations to Manchester and opened a new office in July.
Her team comprises about 16 people, and she has received several awards from legal associations in Massachusetts and nationwide. But she might have gotten the most local attention thanks to a large billboard on Elm Street signaling her arrival to the Queen City.
“When you see my face up there, like that guy from Morgan and Morgan, (people) must think, ‘Boy, she must be so successful. She must have known all this time she wanted to be a lawyer,’” Bluefort remarked, leading into what she called the “definition of a come-up story.”
Rather, she went through her first semester at first in Boston College’s pre-med program before realizing by her second that it wasn’t meant to be. She found an unexpected spark of inspiration watching TV series “Judge Mathis” in her dorm, leading to what would ultimately become a passion for the legal profession.
“Go for your passion and I promise you, if you work hard, money is going to find you,” she said. “Had I worried about how I was comparing myself to other people making a six-figure check, I wouldn’t be a seven-figure law firm being focused on six figures.”
Manchester attorney Nicole Bluefort speaks to an audience amid her fellow panelists during the 2024 Powered by Women event. (Photo by Jodie Andruskevich)
For Desrosiers, whose Altitude Companies is a group of three regional restaurants, her business’ growth was also something she realized she couldn’t compare to others. She opened Laney and Lu in the Seacoast Region in 2015, expecting 30 customers a day and $100,000 in revenue by the end of her first year. Instead, she attracted hundreds daily and is on track to earn $1 million.
It’s led to her opening a second location, as well as a restaurant concept, Ginger Fox, in Stratham and starting an artisanal prepared food business with delivery options.
“Before I understood how to run a hospitality establishment, I was really thinking about how I would build an impactful business. How do I create something that’s not only going to change me but provide an experience for my team and guests?” Desrosiers said of her initial eatery. “I didn’t understand the impact that we would create for the people that are walking in the door. One of the most beautiful things I experience on an almost daily basis is someone calling for me from the front of the house, saying there’s someone who wants to talk to me.”
Those requests to talk, she said, are often because customers want to inform her that Laney and Lu is like a second home environment. Other, particularly other women, have told Desrosiers that she’s indirectly motivated them to pursue being a business owner when things previously felt uncertain and alone. Her story itself came out of being curious and adventurous, she said.
“If we step into life thinking that life is an itinerary and we are on a singular path, we are wrong and setting ourselves up for disappointment and feeling ‘less than,’” Desrosiers said. “But if we establish this feeling of, ‘I wonder what’s going to happen; I wonder what’s around the corner’ … then we will feel a little bit more peaceful.”
Mirroring Desrosiers’ reflections on women business owners, Cyndee Gruden said she also felt alone in her field as a civil engineer when she was first entering college at the university that is now her employer. She was named dean of UNH’s College of Engineering and Physical Sciences in January 2021, a long result of her childhood fascination with the sciences, raised by parents who were knowledgeable in construction but had not gone to college.
“I got into my first class, looked around and was like, ‘There are not many women here,” Gruden said. “We were about 10% women at the time, and unfortunately, we haven’t made enough progress until now (on attracting women).”
What kept her moving forward was finding “people who were kind of next to me on the path, or people who were on a different path but also alone on their path,” rather than looking for role models since she didn’t find others like her in her degree program.
“I started that at UNH, but have continued to create a community around me that sees me, that supports me, that challenges me and helps me to be my best self,” Gruden said. “Instead of thinking about role models, …. I really thought a lot about community.”
Jennifer MacDonald has been a guest to varying communities all throughout her life. In Minneapolis, while she was in medical school, she became acquainted with Hmong Americans whose families had immigrated to the U.S. from Laos from the 1970s into the 1990s who showed her that others who faced challenges still lived “with courage and purpose and joy.”
Jennifer MacDonald talks at the 2024 Powered by Women event about her experiences in the National Guard and Washington, D.C. leading up to her work at Manchester’s Advanced Regenerative Manufacturing Institute. (Photo by Jodie Andruskevich)
Elsewhere was when she was in Iraq in 2009 while serving in the National Guard, where she said she “had the ability to go into a few places where never in my life did I think I’d be.”
There, MacDonald attended “the opening of a school that was, for the first time, allowing girls to take STEM education,” she said, remembering the event and the girls singing Mawtini, the Iraqi National Anthem. “They’re singing their anthem on stage in front of all of the administrators and in front of their parents, about going into engineering and medicine and law and choosing professions that they never thought they could dream to be in.”
Years later, MacDonald had worked her way up several positions in the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs in D.C., last becoming the senior advisor to the VA secretary.
Her time in the nation’s capital was spurred by her experience seeing economic disparity among children in a Los Angeles community, where parents could hardly afford taking their kids to visit her in a federally qualified health clinic.
“I spent a good number of years in health care policy and operations, trying to clarify that path, trying to figure out how to be helpful, change things (and) use the learning along that path that people had generously given me,” she said. “Then, an out-of-the-blue call came from (Dean Kamen). … He explained we knew somebody in common and said, ‘You’re with the VA. You need to come up to New Hampshire as soon as you can get here.’”
That introduced her to ARMI, where she found the answers to her questions by joining as chief operating officer of the Manchester-based nonprofit, a role in which she said she couldn’t have seen herself five years earlier.
And for Josephine Moran, she’s navigated her working life based on a core principle: trusting her instincts. The president and chief banking officer of Ledyard Financial began her career just out of the Fashion Institute of Technology of New York, working her way to a district manager role of a fashion business after getting her degree through night school and working “many jobs” to pay for it.
“Then in the early 1990s, the economy was in a recession, retailers were failing and the industry was changing,” Moran said, noting that by that time, at age 26, she had recently married, had her first child and was developing an interest in financial planning.
“I read a book that greatly influenced me to take a different path, ‘Buy Term, Invest the Difference’ by David Babel, that focused on the power of investing on a monthly, consistent schedule. I was really passionate about it and decided to change my career completely and go into the world of financial services.”
Attendees to the 2024 Powered by Women event listen on in a packed room at the Manchester Country Club in Bedford on Nov. 7, 2024. (Photo by Jodie Andruskevich)
Some years after obtaining a master’s in finance, her instinct kicked into gear again when, at a Connecticut financial company after she’d completed a leadership development program, her bosses encouraged her to apply for a senior leadership role in another state.
“I got the job, then I turned it down because it wasn’t the right thing to do for my family,” Moran said. “It didn’t feel right. That did not play well with the senior leadership, but soon after, another opportunity became available very close to where my parents lived.”
She accepted that position and found that she made the right call when her father became sick and she was close enough to help provide care.
Following leadership work across four other banking institutions, she ended up at Ledyard after embracing a job recommendation to take on her current title, despite knowing nothing about New Hampshire.
“I found that this was a tremendous opportunity, so fortunately for me, I was selected to lead this wonderful organization with outstanding people and clients,” Moran said.
