Entrepreneurial Foundations:

Purdue alumna helps build better businesses

Sunny Lu Williams (BA CLA’04), president and CEO of TechServ Corp. and winner of the Daniels School’s
2024 Burton D. Morgan Entrepreneurship Award, comes from a long line of trailblazing women.

Her grandmother, Taiwanese immigrant Judy Lu, founded TechServ after President Reagan signed the
Women’s Business Ownership Act into law in 1988, creating government support for women business
owners and eliminating the requirement of male co-signers on loans for female entrepreneurs. One of
the first female-owned IT companies in the U.S., TechServ incorporated in 1992 and engaged in
procurement and service work to deliver and service computer equipment.

“While entrepreneurship runs in my blood, I am more process-oriented,” Williams says. “Growing up as
the oldest daughter of two Taiwanese entrepreneurs, I was exposed to their business ventures at a
young age and had what I call an ‘apprenticeship in entrepreneurship.’” She furthered those skills
working for nearly 14 years under well-known Hoosier business leader, Albert Chen, who founded the
Carmel-based telecommunications technology firm, Telamon.

“In working with Telamon clients, the more I could see the challenges they faced were people
problems,” Williams says. “They didn’t know how to use technology to solve the business problems of
today. They didn’t know how to mobilize and monetize the technology. That’s why it became so
important to understand how people work – separately and together – and what, at the end of the day,
they were trying to accomplish. Only by understanding the people can you come up with appropriate
technological solutions.”

In 2018, Williams acquired the health care division of Telamon and its population health management
and community health data collection platform, StatWatch. A year later, Williams took the helm at
TechServ from her mother, Patty Lu, then combined its capabilities in education and health care with
that of the Telamon division.

Running both operations under the TechServ umbrella, the consulting and project management
company now provides an integrated technology offering for health care, public safety and educational
institutions, bringing consulting, project management, training and technical assistance, programmatic
development, grant management and creative marketing services to a growing list of blue-chip clients.

IT is still a strong component of the TechServ business model, but it has evolved in significant ways
under Williams’ leadership. Today, the company uses its philosophy on continuous quality improvement,
expertise in community centric data collection and resulting analytics, as well as expertise in program
and grant management, strategic planning and workforce development to “create meaningful change in
the world,” Williams says.

As she grows the business, Williams, who was a Hansard Scholar at the London School of Economics and
received an MBA from Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business, continues to draw as much on her
undergraduate education at Purdue as she does on her graduate experience.

“My undergraduate humanities education provided foundational teachings about how to do human
capital management, or in other terms, how to drive teams, inspire people and lead, especially through
contentious or exciting times,” she says. “Excitement can be quickly tempered and turn into frustration if the
direction, vision and consistency of the leadership isn’t there. You have to know how to support
the human condition when looking at change management in transformational systems.”

She credits her continued success to those who have championed her over the years. “True
entrepreneurship requires a tremendous amount of support,” Williams says. “I have always been very
blessed with the right people willing to help me at the times that I need it.”