Troy Sowers joined M. Wood Company, entering the search profession after acquiring extensive information technology (IT) and business vertical experience in broad based global industries including communications and healthcare.  His career spans more than 27 years in strategic development, channel operations, engineering and sales management, consulting, marketing and search.

Sowers began his professional career as an IBM systems programmer, eventually using these structured disciplines to provide mainframe sales and account leadership for two of the world’s largest telecommunication companies. He later joined a large communications equipment provider and structured the sales and distribution processes for a team of sales and service professionals responsible for generating and managing a 100 million dollar annual service provider business in then 14 western states.

In his 27 year career track, Sowers brings a unique skill set and broad exposure to M. Wood Company. As an example, his deep experience in complex global outsourcing and BPO services has helped major corporations reduce SG&A expenses and enabled better services. Having held various leadership positions in corporate America, working with large IT vendors and managing a multitude of consulting engagements enables Sowers to provide great knowledge and thought leadership to the executive search process. Further, Sowers has repeatedly built strong relationships with customers including major players in the healthcare industry as mentioned above. He has been successful in understanding their challenges and creating value propositions which resulted in win/win scenarios for all parties. His experience and deep rooted relationships developed via a consultative approach creates a great synergy with M. Wood Company’s philosophy of serving clients.  

Examples of his successes include the following:

• Sowers partnered with the IT and billing organizations of a national communications service provider to identify and develop a strategy to resolve both short and long term business billing issues associated with the speed and reliability of the UNIX operating environments used by the long distance switches to collect the usage information needed to bill clients. As a result of this initiative, the first commercially available IBM mainframe compatible UNIX operating environment was developed. This development significantly improved the accuracy, speed and billing revenue.

• To facilitate the consolidation from 28 to 6 data centers for a major communications company, Sowers partnered with the IT organizations of two companies to develop a product and implementation strategy. This effort resulted in significant annual cost savings for the client and the development of the first commercially available logical partitioning tool. Logical partitioning is a standard on most enterprise servers sold today.

• To support the need to lower the cost of sales and distribution, Sowers converted a 100 million dollar a year direct sales model to a 100 percent channel driven sales model. This change significantly improved the competitive positioning and sales lead generation, as well as significantly lowering the overall cost of operation.

• To facilitate contract compliance for the insurance provider of the Federal Employee Health Insurance program, Sowers partnered with the client and a team of consulting professionals to conduct a contract compliance review, an operational and documentation review of the claims adjudication environment, development of a non-disruptive migration strategy and the writing of an RFP to enable the client to solicit competitive bids for the support of this environment. This work brought the client into contract compliance and enabled the base-lining of their current support cost structure.