Photography by Spacecrafting
Aly Silva Mulgrew and Stacy O’Reilly
When Stacy O’Reilly was 11, she sat down in her bedroom and wrote out her life’s plan: to run the family business. At 37, she became the third generation to run Plunkett’s Pest Control as CEO.
“I knew I wanted it — and what it meant to carry on my father’s and grandfather’s tradition of providing quality service, doing the hard work, having a presence in the community and being a great employer. It was everything about integrity and service well done.”
Years later, O’Reilly needed a president. While scrolling LinkedIn, she came across her friend Aly Silva Mulgrew, whom she met while they were parenting tots. “The number-one education for being a manager and leading people? Raise human beings,” she says. It wasn’t just that, of course: Silva brought a wealth of professional experience. “I knew she was brilliant and a really capable manager, but you never know how good a leader is until you work alongside them,” O’Reilly says. “I gave her impossible task after impossible task, and she crushed them.”
Plunkett’s also found a sweet spot with Bridgewater Bank, which O’Reilly values for its “resources of a big bank with the personal touch of a local banker.”
She and Silva work closely with Bridgewater Bank, actively engaging in their women’s networking circles. “Bridgewater has done an excellent job creating a space where female leaders can come together and build their own network,” says Silva. Leaders who also might understand what it’s like to lead both at work and at home.
Silva says there’s more than one way to be successful, and the group proves it time and again, sharing ideas and bringing them to life, both personally and professionally.
“We have an esprit de corps with other women executives, because we’ve all managed to work our way through challenges that men simply don’t have to work through,” O’Reilly says. “We can skip that part and help each other and provide a source of counsel, advice and laughter.”
