From the U.S. DOE to Pro2Serve, Sherry Browder is a master of connection
The Pro2Serve President and CEO has spent decades making Oak Ridge feel like a small town. Now she's running one of its most essential federal contractors.
For more than 30 years, Professional Project Services (Pro2Serve) has had a stake in Oak Ridge. The company serves as the backbone of a professional contract workforce, placing scientists, engineers, architects, and project managers with federal clients in East Tennessee and across the country.
The company, which was started by Dr. Barry Goss a little more than 30 years ago, is now championed by Sherry Browder.
Browder is hard to miss at any Oak Ridge event — and that’s exactly what Pro2Serve was counting on when they handed her the wheel. In some sense, she’s become a ubiquitous presence, making every room feel like a reunion of close friends. She said that nature is a combination of being a natural “social butterfly,” as her husband calls it, and working for several key institutions in town.
Browder graduated from Tennessee Tech University and immediately started working at the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) in environmental restoration. In the mid-1990s, Dr. Barry Goss, who would go on to found Pro2Serve, recruited Browder to Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), where she worked her way up over 17 years from Project Manager to Vice President. Around 2015, she took a role as a Reindustrialization Manager at United Cleanup Oak Ridge (UCOR).
Browder went on to receive the East Tennessee Economic Council (ETEC) Muddy Boot Award in 2018, which is given to individuals or groups that have helped build the community’s economic base. She also served on several boards, held community leadership positions, and maintained her ubiquitous presence.
Dr. Goss never lost track of her.
“I had known him for decades – and one day Dr. Goss asked me what I wanted to do next,” she said. “So, I started explaining what I enjoyed – and he said that my skills were the perfect definition of a Chief Operating Officer.”
So, in November of 2020, Browder joined the team, leading operations at Pro2Serve. One year later, Dr. Goss announced his retirement, and Browder moved into the role of Pro2Serve’s President and eventually CEO.
A niche, by design
“It’s a very interesting and exciting company to be a part of. We’ve got the technical depth to take on large, complex projects, but we are still agile, responsive, and relational like a small business,” she said. “The relational element is what I enjoy most.”
Most of Pro2Serve’s contracts cannot be disclosed. Many of their contracts focus on infrastructure modernization tied to the national security mission, or on projects within the Department of Energy nationwide.
“We’ve got the tagline, ‘Your Mission Becomes Ours,’ and we take that very literally. The projects we work on are very diverse in nature, and can be all over the place – from infrastructure modernization to legacy cleanup to national security programs and more. But whatever the mission is for our clients, their mission becomes ours,” Browder said.
Employee buy-in
About 10 years ago, Dr. Goss and the former management team decided to create an employee stock ownership plan (ESOP). Today, the company is 100% ESOP, which makes it unique in the professional project services industry.
“Pro2Serve has 98% employee participation,” Browder said. “I always tell our team to act like they own the place, because they do!”
Browder said it helps the team take more pride in where they work, be involved in the mission, and represent it well in the local community.
“As we’ve grown, we’ve never wanted to lose sight of where we started, which was here in East Tennessee. It’s always also been a hub of innovation, all the way back to the Manhattan Project, and it still is, and so we want to continue being part of that,” she said.
Learn more about Pro2Serve’s services here.
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