The journey to fulfilling your professional aspirations is not a linear path, but rather a complex map created with commitment and resilience. Center stage on this map is Laura M. Troyer, MBA, a professional whose career trajectory is defined by her unwavering inner essence. She is an award-winning Business Consultant, best-selling author, and impactful international speaker. Laura is driven by her heart for humanity and a passion for solution-oriented outcomes.
Laura’s life story underscores a manifesto for perseverance in her personal and professional life. Growing up the second oldest of six children in Ohio, she quickly learned that anything is possible when we work together. Now living in Greenville, South Carolina, she works in high-stakes professional sectors; including legal, healthcare, and higher education, while continuing to prioritize her family. As a mother of three successful adult children and ‘Gigi’ of three grandchildren (with two more due in 2026), her personal life has become the compassion-fuelled engine for her involvement in the community.
While navigating through corporate life, Laura maintains a relentless focus on the profound and weighty work of empowering individuals, as she is living proof that leadership is a legacy defined by being present, remaining teachable, and always inviting the higher bar of integrity.
Early Life and Professional Awakening
Laura’s narrative begins in Toledo, Ohio. Her large family structure immediately shaped her collaborative spirit and instilled essential resilience, lessons learned daily from her parents, Chuck and Pam Kessinger. After completing her high school education, she continued her path of discipline and focus, earning her bachelor’s degree from Grace College in Winona Lake, Indiana. Her initial career stepping stone was in the banking industry, where she gained foundational knowledge in finance and client service. She later made a profound, conscious choice to pivot and become a stay-at-home mother, a period that became, unexpectedly, her true professional awakening.
Her transition into sales began accidentally when she simply needed a Mary Kay consultant after moving. Though she previously rejected the notion of being a “salesperson,” she viewed the opportunity as a positive environment for building new friendships. She quickly realized the core truth: sales is about talking authentically, listening intently, and providing solutions, not just selling products. She rapidly ascended to team leader, and this hands-on, home-based business served as the accidental yet crucial launchpad for her future consulting career. Following a divorce, Laura returned to the full-time workforce in demanding business sales consultant roles, driven by a single, profound motivation: to be the reliable provider and a pillar of strength for her children. She maintains a passion for nature-based activities like camping and boating, finding peace outdoors with family and friends. She also remains a loyal fan of the Ohio State Buckeyes and Cincinnati Bengals, proving her roots run deep.
Strategic Career Design and Mastery
Laura’s career trajectory is deeply and intentionally marked by her commitment to keeping her family as her non-negotiable anchor. Early on, she established a firm boundary, refusing any professional role that required lengthy travel away from her children. This commitment came at the cost of promotions and higher salaries, but she reasoned that her most vital role was raising the next generation of leaders, instilling core values like integrity, a strong work ethic, and modelling respect.
To successfully integrate her career with her children’s active lives, she strategically sought out outside or field sales consultant roles with a strict one-hour geographic constraint on her territory. This strategy forced her to maintain control over her own schedule and master exceptional time management skills. Her natural excellence in remote work, long before it was common, became a powerful, strategic enabler of her sustained work-life balance and high performance, cutting commute times and reducing costs.
Decades after her undergraduate studies, Laura pursued a lifelong aspiration: an MBA. This was a challenging commitment, as she began her studies while balancing a career and family. Despite falling slightly short on the GMAT, she successfully submitted a persuasive appeal based on her two decades of high-level professional experience, gaining acceptance on probation. Her intense dedication paid off: she graduated with her Master of Business Administration (MBA) from the Raj Soin College of Business at Wright State University in December 2019, a monumental achievement that validated her commitment to continuous intellectual growth and the pursuit of mastery.
The Consultant’s Core: Purpose, Resilience, and Tenacity
Laura holds an enormous appetite for the world of business, viewing it as the “engine that makes the world go round,” but her focus remains relentlessly on individual empowerment. Her professional drive is dedicated to helping organizations find solutions and achieve success, fuelled by the conviction that assisting someone professionally inherently helps them personally by providing financial stability and mental health security. She finds great satisfaction in leveraging her entrepreneurial spirit to manage her own book of business and make crucial strategic decisions. Her constant application and sharpening of skills across diverse industries, legal, healthcare, and higher education, ensure her ongoing learning and mental stimulation.
Her internal drive is supported by exceptional time management and a highly task-oriented nature, built on the discipline of completing one task entirely before moving on. Critically, she learned that true leadership isn’t a title; it is built upon caring sincerely about others. This perspective guides her: a great leader must hire competent people, provide training, and release them with the essential gift of trust to execute their roles. They must prioritize their team’s total well-being, avoiding the debilitating stress of micromanagement and recognizing employees have lives outside of work. Crucial personal lessons were mastering the power of humility, which she views as a strength born from learning from mistakes, and recognizing that “it’s ok to say ‘no’ sometimes” to maintain focus and avoid burnout. She actively works on developing robust emotional resilience against toxic work environments, learning to pause, step away, and not overthink scenarios involving workplace pressures. Her unwavering passion for truth, integrity, and maintaining a clear conscience forms the ethical foundation of her professional life.
Enduring the Post-Pandemic Upheaval
The optimism from her MBA graduation (Dec 2019) was short-lived. A year later, the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic hit with devastating force. Laura was fortunate to be in a remote role initially, but the long-term instability led to her enduring two layoffs in the same calendar year, a brutal shock after 15 years of stability and only one previous layoff. This experience forced her family’s relocation from Ohio to Greenville, South Carolina, in pursuit of stable work.
The transition was defined by extreme mental strain as she fought for stability in a job market that had become a “nightmare,” where highly competent professionals struggled for months to secure roles. She recalls a period of such mental drain that she had to stop checking professional social media, overwhelmed by the stories of people losing work and fearing for their security. Her optimism quickly shifted to a relentless focus on survival, leading her to question if her successful career was, in fact, over. She observed a disturbing rise in toxic work environments post-COVID, characterized by an excessive pressure for numbers, a lack of genuine leadership concern for employee well-being, and suffocating micromanagement. Despite the emotional weight of these reversals, Laura’s internal drive remained an unyielding compass, compelling her to persevere and find renewed success. This fight for stability gave her the courage and empathy to later share her story, transforming a personal setback into a platform for global encouragement.
Legacy: Milestones and The Unshakeable Self
Laura’s life story is a rich inventory of professional accolades and deep personal milestones. Her business sales career brought continuous awards, including the coveted “President’s Club” trip to Cancun, Mexico, and consistent recognition as “Top Consultant of the year” and “VIP winner of the month”. Furthermore, her commitment to her profession, family, and community earned her the prestigious “Outstanding Woman in Leadership” award from the Global Society of Empowered Women in 2016, followed by an invitation to join the Golden Key International Honor Society.
However, she consistently names her most meaningful accomplishment as raising her three children (Kayla, Brandon, Abbey) as a single mother. Despite the immense challenges and financial worries, all three successfully earned their college degrees- as a nurse practitioner, a mechanical engineer, and a Digital Marketing specialist. They are all happily married and have now bestowed upon her the cherished title of “Gigi” (grandmother), a source of immense pride, especially as two more grandchildren are expected in 2026.
Her unexpected career as an author and speaker began in 2022 after she enrolled in a public speaking class, which led to an invitation to share her single-parent experiences on a family seminar podcast. By January 2023, she became a collaborating author on “Maintain A Solid Mental Health,” courageously sharing her journey of human resiliency and strength. The book swiftly became a #1 international and Amazon bestseller, catapulting her onto the global stage. A crowning moment arrived in March 2025, when she was invited to speak in Paris, France, for International Women’s Day. Her insights were subsequently published in both the French Chronicles and the Peercite Journal, firmly establishing her as a global, compelling voice in professional empowerment and personal resilience. She uses this platform to inspire, empower, and positively impact individuals.
Laura’s ultimate wisdom is firm: never allow your job title to define your identity. She cautions that because people dedicate immense passion to their work, it is dangerously easy to let a profession become who you are, making layoffs devastating. Her essential message is to establish a clear, protective boundary to separate who you are from what you do. She encourages continuous self-love, proactive networking (even when happy in a current role), and the acknowledgment that company decisions are simply “business.” Above all, she reminds everyone that “you must never allow how others treat you or your professional performance to determine your self-worth”. She builds her enduring legacy on this unshakeable foundation of the self.
