Reinvent Your Career: Success Tips Fran Lessans

Want to reinvent your career? Women everywhere are doing it. Some start from scratch by going back to school and learning a totally new set of skills. Others, like Fran Lessans, take the expertise they’ve gained, find an underserved niche and apply that knowledge to creating a new career. You can read Lessans’ story here, but first, read on to learn some of the success keys that helped her reinvent her career and go from being a nurse to leading Passport Health, a nationally recognized company specializing in immunizations. Read more

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