Get Your Own Coffee
Underestimated, Overlooked, and Now The Boss
by Suzanne Hopgood
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Pub Date Oct 21 2025 | Archive Date Nov 16 2025
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Description
Suzanne Hopgood was eleven when she got her first real job bussing tables at her parents’ hotel in New Hampshire. By seventeen, she was running the place. That’s when a chef threw a knife that barely missed her head because she’d forgotten to include turkey on the menu. It wouldn’t be the last time she had to duck and weave in her career.
In Get Your Own Coffee, Hopgood takes readers through her journey from that small-town beginning to chairing multiple corporate boards, including a NYSE company during what became known as Director Magazine’s article, “Board from Hell.” Along the way, she shows how she navigated a business world where the rules for women weren’t just different―they were kept secret until you broke them.
When her first boss told her, “You will always be underestimated. Use it to your advantage,” she couldn’t have known how valuable that advice would become. She’s had a boss grab her, throw her over his shoulder, and carry her into a business meeting. She’s been fired for refusing a boss’s late-night advances at her condo. She’s been fired for “insubordination.” She’s watched male colleagues take credit for her ideas while ignoring her voice at the table.
But she also became Chair/CEO after the proxy contest that The Wall Street Journal called “The Shot Heard Round the World,” fired executives who thought she didn’t have the authority, and slammed her files on the table before walking out of negotiations―only to have the deal she wanted waiting when she returned.
Between the corporate battles, Hopgood shares the joy she found with her husband Frank during their forty years together, biking through Southeast Asia, navigating the streets of Moscow and São Paulo, and finding laughter even in his final days.
She learned that getting ahead doesn’t mean playing by other people’s rules. Sometimes, you have to create your own―and sometimes, you just have to be bold enough to take a stand.
Advance Praise
"Reading Get Your Own Coffee is like sitting down for lunch with a friend, attending class with your favorite teacher, and having coffee with a wise mentor―all in one experience.
In each story Suzanne shares, there are powerful lessons in principled leadership, navigating a male-dominated culture, taking bold professional and personal risks, and turning adversity into opportunity.
No matter where you are in your own professional or personal journey, Suzanne’s life stories offer invaluable insights, presented with her signature blend of directness, candor, and humor.
Thank you, Suzanne, for sharing so much of your remarkable life, so we can all learn from it."
― Bonnie Malley
Vice President, Finance and Administration; CFO, Hartford Foundation for Public Giving
"Suzanne’s experiences in life and business as related in Get Your Own Coffee are interesting, instructive, and entertaining. She provides example after example of how her upbringing, attitudes, values, personal strategies, and dedicated relationship building contributed to overcoming even the most outrageous prejudices, setbacks, and forces of opposition to produce great personal and business satisfaction and success. Among the keys: finding and sharing the humor in almost any situation, and a huge heart and empathy for people from every walk of life.
Beginning in the late 1990s, a time when women serving on public company boards were few, Suzanne was a leader in the post-Enron revolution in public company governance, serving on six male-dominated public company boards. Even more impressively, she overcame initial skepticism and discomfort to be elected board chair of three of them. Called upon by some of the largest institutional investors in the U.S. to advocate for improved governance at companies like Disney and J.P. Morgan, she was an invited speaker on corporate governance at more than 100 public companies, private companies, and business and governance organizations. Anyone working in or seeking to penetrate the highest levels of corporate and civic leadership and responsibility will find valuable tips and lessons in her book."
― Michael W. Tankersley
Senior Counsel, Alston and Bird; Founding Director, Texas Business Law Foundation
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