Donlan, 59, a longtime Hingham resident, is touching base with about a half-dozen key members of the South Shore Women’s Business Network, a group she cofounded in 1991, and largely shaped as its first executive director.
At the head of a conference table in an office building in Norwell, a space typically reserved for her business clients, Donlan sits with one arm draped over a chair back, confident in a leopard-skin print top, black skirt, and stilettos.
“She is a legend!’’ came one of the friendly shouts when Donlan initially arrived for the informal conversation about mentoring women, a subject close at hand as the South Shore network, celebrating its 20th anniversary, gears up for a professional development day today for more than 300 members, titled, “Elevate your business: a plan for climbing to new heights,’’ at the Derby Clubhouse in Hingham.
Donlan, a woman in possession of what her 34-year-old son, David Donlan, a successful businessman himself, calls “an electric level of energy,’’ is doing what she does well: She organizes people, builds business enterprises, and delivers the goods with a level of consistency and success that is almost uncanny, as if she is the recipient of a kind of outsized entrepreneurial gene.
“I do believe it is in my blood,’’ she said in an interview at her Hingham condominium earlier that morning, after returning from a daily 3-mile walk, a ritual of more than 33 years.
Among other things, Donlan was the first executive director of the Commonwealth Institute, a nonprofit formed by a dozen female chief executives in Boston to assist women entrepreneurs; the founder of Women’s Business, a monthly trade newspaper, sold to the Boston Herald in 2004; a former entrepreneur-in-residence at Bridgewater State University; and the author of “Her Turn: Why It’s Time for Women to Lead in America’’. She currently is a business consultant.
It is an understatement to say Donlan is exceptional in her ambition.
