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Monique Hayward
President & CEO, Nouveau Connoisseurs Corporation
Monique Hayward is President & CEO of Nouveau Connoisseurs Corporation, which she founded in
April 2004 and owns and operates the award-winning Dessert Noir Café & Bar in Beaverton, Ore. She
is responsible for setting the company's strategic direction and managing its business priorities.
Monique is also a senior marketing manager at Intel Corporation in Hillsboro, Oregon.
Monique is an entrepreneur and corporate player with 14 years of experience in marketing,
communications, public relations, business development, and entrepreneurship. She has shared her
knowledge and expertise as a contributing writer and interviewee for online and print publications
for minority and women entrepreneurs, speaker at conferences and colleges, guest on TV and radio
shows, and mentor to up-and-coming professionals and entrepreneurs.
Monique was recently selected as a winner in the 2008 Make Mine a Million $ Business program, a
collaboration between Count Me In for Women's Economic Independence and OPEN from American Express
that provides a combination of money, mentoring, marketing, and technology tools that women
entrepreneurs need to help grow their businesses into million-dollar enterprises. She also was
recently nominated for the Portland Business Journal's "40 Under 40" award, which honors young
business leaders and entrepreneurs in the Portland area. She is currently writing a book titled
Divas Doing Business: What the Guidebooks Don't Tell You About Being a Woman Entrepreneur, and
Monique also has worked as a commercial model and spokesperson and served as the executive producer,
writer, and host of her own talk show on a local cable TV station.
A native of New York City who also spent part of her childhood in Columbia, S.C., Monique has a
master of business administration in marketing from Case Western Reserve University and a bachelor
of arts (magna cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa) in journalism from the University of Maryland College
Park. She is an inaugural fellow of the ASCENT Mastering Management Program at the Tuck School of
Business at Dartmouth College, and she participates as a visiting fellow for the Austin
Entrepreneurship Program at Oregon State University and teaches a course for aspiring women
entrepreneurs at Portland Community College. She also is a member of the National Association of
Female Executives and Entrepreneurs. Monique is married to Tom Freeman and the couple resides in
Beaverton.
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