With her love for travelling and computers, software consultant and CEO Wendy McGhee began an adventure that led to partnering with an entrepreneur to start an IT firm based in South Africa.
McGhee, a Troy University alumna, began her career as an IT professional spending nine years working as a software engineer for various Fortune 500 companies around the world.
By June 1999, she decided to start her own firm, Wendy McGhee and Associates, where she specializes in mergers, acquisitions and ERP (enterprise resource planning) software implementation projects.
McGhee knew that she had a passion for adventure since she was a high school student.
“My goal was to finish college, make a lot of money and be able to see the world. So, I got into computers after I graduated from college and found work in Montgomery. I worked there for a little while before I realized that Montgomery wasn’t a place I wanted to live in because I had always wanted to see the world,” said McGhee.
During the beginning of her career in IT, McGhee realized how the career path she chose was able to help achieve her goal to travel the world.
She has visited 12 countries across the globe so far.
It was while visiting South Africa that McGhee decided to partner with a South African IT entrepreneur to start PWM Technologies, a firm targeted at promoting businesses’ brands with the use of information technologies.
“I was gathered with a few friends at lunch and we were all just talking, and then a friend asked me what I did for work. I described my work in the IT business and how long I’ve been in business,” said McGhee. “Then she told me that she had an opportunity for me and that we should work together.”
McGhee describes the partnership as a great opportunity to make connections and experience moments she could never have imagined.
“It showed me the difference between being in the States and being there [South Africa],” she said. “We are talking of a little girl from Alabama who has sat with presidents, kings and princes. I was given the opportunity to work with them and they sat with me and now I have an office here in America and over there. Sometimes I think of where I came from and I couldn’t imagine a better life.”
McGhee graduated from TROY’s computer science program as one of its first students in 1990.
Her love for the University is shared within her family as about 10 of her relatives are TROY graduates.
She considers her time in TROY to have been the push she needed to help her achieve the kind of life she had always envisioned for herself.
“Once I left TROY, I had the courage to explore even more,” she said. “I trusted that my TROY education gave me the foundation I would need to be the best. And except for my Continuing Education training, I’ve not gone back to college because [my time at] TROY was enough to get me where I needed to be so I can be one of the top in my field.”
