Name and how long you have been in the industry?
Hello! I am Andrea Bordenca. My dad founded DESCO in 1970. I started working in the industry as a service coordinator assistant when I was in middle school (1988). After college, I left HTM for a few beats, working as a technical writer. I came back to DESCO full-time in 2000.
How did you get into the industry? Anything that drew you in?
Since DESCO was always a part of my life, there was a strong pull to work here. Both my sister and I worked part-time, playing a variety of roles throughout middle and high school at DESCO. I always enjoyed the fast pace, the collaborative problem-solving, and being a part of the satisfaction when reconciling competing demands, which comes with the HTM territory!
In 2000, I worked as a quality assurance coordinator. I had the opportunity to learn what was needed to ensure patient safety, and what DESCO needed to do to educate our customers to ensure they understood compliance mandates. The more I learned, the more I became involved in customer communication and coordination. This started my love of relationship management. I loved working side by side with my colleagues and our customers to strategize logistics and fulfillment.
As my role and experience evolved, I gravitated towards business development. Through this transition from operations to business development, I learned how critical it is to bridge operations and sales through the building of cross-functional teams. One of the discoveries made along the way is that I have a knack for collaborating and building cross-functional teams.
What milestones or contributing factors helped elevate you to where you are today?
I started working at DESCO as the start of my career right before I learned I was pregnant with my first (of 3) sons. The timing felt serendipitous. My dad founded DESCO and encouraged me and my sister to work here. As a young professional, I felt resistant to working at DESCO because it was my “dad’s thing”. I wasn’t sure if it was also “my thing”.
What I learned is that the fast pace, the daily challenges, the problem-solving, and cross-functional collaboration is very much “my thing”. I learned that I thrive in fast-paced environments and that it can either lead to burn out from the constant adrenaline rush (which was something I did experience in my early 30s!), or when leveraging others’ strengths & not going it alone this fast paced environment can provide a healing opportunity through pausing to invite others in. I have learned how to slow down in the rush of urgency and learn how to bring the right people into each conversation so the burden isn’t felt by any one person & so all people can benefit.
As I developed my skills in leadership presence and finding calm in potentially chaotic situations at work, I quickly learned that raising two small kids who were 16 months a part allowed me to practice presence and finding calm in chaos at home and at work. My husband was the primary caregiver for our kids and brought play and lightness to my life. By the time my third son was born, I had more practice not taking myself so seriously which served to lighten me up a bit at work.
I love to be silly and playful, which was not what I understood leadership to be as a young professional. As I grew in my professional role, I learned that I could create my own definition of what leadership is, and also what professionalism is. I realized quickly that I was living others’ standards of what leadership and professionalism were that didn’t feel authentically me. My husband helped me see that through the way he connected to our kids, created a safe space for them, and a safe space with me.
What roadblocks did you have to overcome?
The biggest roadblock for me was connecting to myself authentically. In my early career, I was very serious and had very high standards for myself and everyone around me. I was reactive and explosive. I thought this is how I needed to be to be taken seriously as a woman in a male dominant industry.
One of the most memorable moments was my excitement at the anticipation of telling one of my dad’s dear male friends who was in the HTM industry that I was named CEO. There was an industry event that I knew he’d be at. When I went to seek him out to tell him with pure joy, he paused after I told him and then burst out laughing. It took me a beat to realize he was laughing at me. He then followed it up with “you don’t know how to run a company!” I wanted to run away and in fact, I did! I ran into the bathroom and shed a few tears. There was a voice in my head that nagged at me and made me wonder if he was right. As I sat there and reflected among the feelings of doubt and fear, I was able to come to terms with the reality of the situation: I was a beginner and although his response was mean-spirited, he wasn’t totally wrong, I had never run a company before.
As I moved through the range of emotions I felt and sifted through the stories in my head, I realized I had built an expectation and had played over what I was hoping for several times. My expectation was that he would support me and want to mentor me. After the upset of not having met my expectations, I was able to separate who I was and what I wanted separate from what I was hoping from him. I realized that I cared about learning how to run a company and was committed to learning that. I felt up to the challenge and realized that when I needed there were people around me that supported me and that I trusted to mentor me. This guy certainly wasn’t the person!
What do you feel makes a great leader in this industry?
Being a part of a network of support for others and having a strong network of support around me. I have seen firsthand that having people who give and willingly receive honest feedback is a powerful motivator for learning and evolving; being around powerful, unapologetic women is also extremely important to me.
HTM industry is saturated with men. Being in a male-dominant industry is challenging due to gender conditioning that society, history, and culture imposes upon all of us. No one is immune to it. There are so many incredibly healthy and helpful men and women, and there are also unhealthy men and women who perpetuate learned historical toxic patterns that come from toxic masculinity. We have an opportunity to recognize that gender conditioning is just that: conditioning. We have the power to influence how we work together, how we communicate our emotions, and how we express our emotions. There’s a lot of unhealthy habits that are tolerated and that are common because that has been what is learned. We can bring new patterns of health and thriving and we need each other for the support to do that because breaking old patterns and systems requires collaboration, community, and uncomfortable conversations.
What advice to you have for the other women in HTM
Trust your intuition. If you don’t feel safe or heard by someone, find someone in your network that you do feel safe and heard. In that vein, build a community of people around you that share your values and level of ambition. We can be so often dragged down by those who don’t share our values, our goals and the possibilities that bring us aliveness. What is possible to you is possible. Some others don’t see possibilities in the same way, it doesn’t make your ambitions impossible. Who are you going to for advice? Do they reflect what you see in yourself and also what you see in others? If not, seek out those who do. We need each other! Sometimes we need to discern where, when and who to set different boundaries with.
BIO:
Andrea Bordenca resides in Ludlow, Massachusetts with her husband Christopher Bordenca and three sons. Andrea is the CEO of DESCO Service, a healthcare technology management organization. Andre’s focus as a leader is creating a culture of belonging.
2025 marks Andrea’s 20th year being the CEO of DESCO Service. Throughout these 20 years, Andrea has engaged in leadership learning and coaching certification. Andrea is a white cisgender woman who is passionate about working with women & non-binary leaders of all races, and abilities in male-dominant industries.
Andrea works with leaders to create effective boundaries so leaders can negotiate self-care and. care for others in a transparent & uncomplicated way. She is works with leaders to be self-advocates of voice and power so they can step into their full authenticity. When leaders are taking care of themselves, they can better take care of others and include others’ voices. This is when collaboration and innovation happens.
Andrea is a recovering “solo performer” & has learned & experienced that it does not need to be “lonely at the top”.