Whether selling health care plans or vodka sauce she is smiling, enthusiastic and optimistic because, well, why shouldn't she be? “You only get to do this once,’ Maria Rose McNamara says, referring not just to the tasks and opportunities that fill up each day …. but to life itself. Her personal and professional journey has taught her that obstacles are only things to go around or climb over, and her current professional endeavors are not likely to be her last. “I prefer not to look at the negative,” says Maria, who has been kiddingly called a serial entrepreneur – a label usually reserved for the Musks and Winfreys and Huizengas of the world, but one that in a much more modest way fits her well. As she says, “There’s always a way to make things work.”

To understand Maria’s mindset it’s best to jump in the wayback machine – to the ‘70s, when as the youngest cousin in a large Italian family, she loved Sunday gatherings at her Aunt Mary’s house. So many kids! So much fun! And the food! Especially that pasta sauce! Maria would watch her aunt dice and mix and stir and season and taste and that instilled in her a love of cooking and a desire to someday be able to make a sauce as good. And grown-up Maria has done just that. But her vodka sauce version isn’t just making her family’s gatherings more memorable two generations later. She’s also selling it. Maria Rose Authentic Italian Vodka Sauce is on the shelves of eight (for now) grocery stores in Greater Hartford – and all because of a comment made two years ago by a dinner-guest friend that in most households would be just considered flattery. “He said, ‘This is so good you should sell it,’” Maria recalls. That’s all it took.

Maria loved business courses in high school and at age 22 co-founded an auto body shop. She worked the administrative side and in the years that followed had other secretarial and administrative jobs. She later became a registered dietitian (graduating from St. Joseph’s College in 2002) and along the way has raised three children. She and her husband own a small media company although that’s mostly Dan's thing – doing contract work that includes shooting commercials. As for Maria, she’s an authorized provider for Impact Health Sharing (a ‘modern and affordable alternative’ to traditional health insurance) while building the pasta sauce business. She also has continuously invested in herself in other ways, notably by taking personal development classes that stressed the importance of establishing goals and learning from failures and expanding one's capacity to realize whatever purpose it is you create for yourself. Through that, she said, she became conditioned to always think ‘Do it now’ rather than put things off. And so she does.