Lori Sofianek
Senior Vice President

Lori is a Senior Vice President of Cassara Management Group, Inc. based in Rochester, NY. Lori has more than 25 years of experience in the telecommunications sector. She has spent time in many different areas of the business including sales, sales management, sales support, marketing, customer service, order management, provisioning, billing and collections.

Lori was hired in 1983 by Rochester Telephone’s long distance division, RCI, to head the first direct sales force for long distance and private line services. After years in sales, Lori followed an operations path which proved to be her passion. As Rochester Telephone and RCI acquired local and long distance companies, Lori took on roles of increasing responsibility. In her last position at Global Crossing (formerly Frontier and RCI) she was the vice president of international customer support for the wholesale division.

Throughout her 17 years at the Rochester Telephone Companies Lori had the opportunity to work at the long distance, telephone equipment and local divisions. In 1993 she was tapped to oversee all aspects of operational readiness for the first competitive local exchange provider (CLEC) in the country. The scope of her responsibilities included negotiating interconnection and collocation agreements and creating viable processes for ordering, provisioning, repair management, operator services, moves, adds and changes, pic processing and wholesale billing. Much of what was developed in the Rochester market became the template for other larger telephone companies that opened their markets to competition.

In recent years, Lori has provided counseling to the senior leadership teams of many telecom companies, including Pangea, a European facilities based carrier, ACN a global direct marketing company for local, long distance, mobile and energy services ION, a start up addressing the NYS rural marketplace and Americatel, a reseller of long distance services in the Hispanic marketplace.

In her position at Cassara Management Group, Inc. (CMGI), Lori works directly with clients on a variety of projects within her areas of expertise. Most recently, Lori managed a corporate relocation of two locations in Michigan to one location in North Carolina. The project was broad in scope encompassing all aspects of the business. She oversaw the development of departmental transition plans, staffing and training plans, coordination the construction schedule with the occupancy requirements, and led the daily meeting with the executive steering committee. She has overseen the migration of a billing platform from the US to the UK, the migration of long distance traffic from carrier to carrier and the transition of all human resource and operational elements of a business purchased by another company. Lori played a key role in writing business plans for two different companies that wanted to expand their product set to include the sale of local services (UNE-P and wholesale). In each instance, the business cases were approved by the boards of directors and Lori was retained to project manage the launch of local service. Lori has provided several custom designed leadership development and teambuilding events for C-level executives. In each case the participants requested the event be recreated for the next level of the business as well as their overseas operation.

Lori has a bachelor’s degree in Psychology from Hartwick College. She lives in Rochester, New York with her husband and two daughters.

« Back to Our Team