How Far Have You Traveled?

Fran Lessans took the phrase “find a need and fill it” to heart and built a thriving business.

When a door closes, Fran Lessans is tenacious enough to keep knocking until it reopens—or looking until she finds a new one. The CEO and president of Passport Health has worked to prove herself and her business model in the medical industry.

“Being a nurse and a woman was a challenge,” Lessans says. “There were a lot of roadblocks.” The stigma that, as a woman, she wasn’t intelligent or savvy enough kept some hospital CEOs, her initial prospects, from agreeing to see her. She finally determined to take on a male, minority investor early in the life of her business. It seems (almost) unimaginable now, but in the early 1990s, discrimination against women was still so fierce that she realized she “needed that deep voice” to do presentations. Read more