(Credit: Steve Thurston, 2022)
Catherine Hover takes a hug from a well-wisher at the ribbon cutting ceremony at her expanded community space 480 Broadway in Saratoga.
Saratoga Springs’ Catherine Hover is getting the attention of a small economic dynamo.
She has been featured as a “40 under 40” in the Albany Business Journal, has seen coverage in the Times Union and was the cover story in fall edition of Her Life magazine.
FoothillsBusinessDaily.com has given her space on the website as she shuttered Palette Cafe last February and moved toward shoring up her women-focused coworking and networking community of the same name. Her latest move, an expansion into a third location — this one across the street from the first — fills the space at 480 Broadway, formerly office space for the nonprofit Wellspring.
[Read our coverage of the Palette community and Catherine Hover here.]
She’s bullish on Saratoga Springs and the northeast generally. Her belief: the region has water, but not hurricanes, and snow, but not the kind of weather that makes a person pack their bags and run for their lives.
"It's a great region of the country to live in," the New Orleans native said in a recent interview. "As far as regions go, I think we got the best of the best."
She and her husband, Mark, ended up here because he is in the dredging business, and he was part of the Hudson River dredging project in Fort Edward. They knew he would be working in the area for five or more years, so they moved here in 2011, their first time living together, got married, then stayed.
"We've made it our own town,” she said, and referred back to her life in New Orleans, which felt too political, too nepotistic for one couple to have much of an impact.
Not Saratoga Springs, where they have gotten involved in community activities and started another business, Saratoga Paint & Sip, where people share a drink while painting with some help from professionals.
It has been great in town, but not always perfect. She says the Saratoga area really should be shouting louder about how great it is. She finds at times that people seem to want to keep it their little secret, an idea that Hover counters.
"You can love something so much and still try to make it better,” she said recently. "If New Orleans can be built on debauchery...imagine what we could have here," she says.
She said she’ll be expanding on some of these ideas during a panel discussion with the Albany Business Journal next week.
Her company, which she built starting in 2019, opened with the Palette Cafe on the ground floor of 493 Broadway (the Broadway Grind has since taken over the space), and expanded months later above the cafe with the Palette community space. In 2020, she leased space to expand in Schenectady, and earlier this year took over the former Wellspring space.
The new space, as with the old, has conference rooms, individual offices and amenities such as printers and a "leave one/take one library," but it is the tireless focus on the needs of the women in the community that has grown the business through the pandemic, Hover said. She thinks of the ways that she can give them a return on their monthly investment, beyond desks and a place to put their bags down.
It is about mentoring and making connections: “As a working mom, you can’t go to all those networking events, and you need someone advocating for you."
Correction: We are very sorry for the typo in the name of the company that we ran throughout the story. It has been corrected, and our sincerest apologies to the Palette community. –Steve Thurston, Editor.