Title: AV Sales Strategist/Account Manager
Company: Solutionz
Location: New York, NY
Overtime: She practices Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu anywhere between four and eight hours a week. She also assists with a kids’ class on weekends.
Why You Need to Know Her: Because she’s got guts! She took a two-month career break to do a solo backpacking trip across Asia.
Haley Lind Tuohy had the courage to include her backpacking trip under the “experience” section of her LinkedIn profile—a bold move in a country whose culture, while obsessed with personal development, can be wary of those who take extended breaks from work to travel the world. “In my job, I was used to being a leader—I was very proactive,” she explained. “In this case, I was intentional about how I behaved and how I acted, but I got to be like a passenger and a witness to the beautiful people and things around me.”
While she may have been a passenger, Tuohy wasn’t passive. She gained new perspective on audio on her trip. “Audio is different around the world," she offered. "What people prefer and what they want to hear is different."
She noticed that the restaurants sounded different to the ones back home. She learned about loudspeaker brands she’d never come across before. And she observed how work culture changes from region to region.
“The differences between Taiwan and Vietnam, from what I witnessed, is drastic,” Tuohy said. “You can see how different work cultures impact people, and as different as these cultures are, you can learn something from each of them.”
As Tuohy puts it, she somewhat fell into Pro AV and somewhat didn’t. She started playing drums when she was 10 years old and stuck with it throughout her teens and 20s. She went to SUNY Oneonta to study business and discovered the school also offered a minor in audio production. “The audio production side of things opened my mind to a whole new world,” she recalled.
After college, Tuohy went to work at Sennheiser, where she started out serving clients that oversaw audio production on Broadway. After a couple of years, the manufacturer offered her a national role in Pro AV sales. While she thought she’d spend her entire career in live sound, she couldn’t turn down the opportunity.
“I was in my early 20s at that time, and I had seen very little of the United States or the world,” Tuohy said. “I was so excited that I could have a national job.”
At HARMAN International, Tuohy moved into sales management, also in Pro AV. She spent almost four years managing teams, a role she loved, but at some point began to miss frontline sales. She was also curious about what it would be like to work in Pro AV integration. When a position became available at Solutionz, Tuohy grabbed it.
“Integration is so exciting and fast-paced,” Tuohy said. “I get to serve so many different people from different backgrounds, and that’s exciting for me.”
At the industry level, Tuohy is co-lead (with Maura Fitzgerald, regional account manager at display technology manufacturer Planar) of the North Jersey/NYC chapter of the AVIXA Women’s Council. The group holds networking events and focuses on connecting women of all races, ethnicities, and backgrounds with employment opportunities.
For those who are considering a career in Pro AV, Tuohy said that if you're interested, there's a job for you in this industry. "If you like working with your hands, there are a lot of jobs for you. If you like traveling and talking to people, you could be in sales," she offered. "If you have an MBA and you want to be a VP of an organization, there’s a role for that, whether it be in manufacturing, integration, or consulting. If you’re interested, there’s something for you, I promise.”
