Troels serves as the Executive Vice President, leading Business Development, Marketing, Research and Strategy for the Greater Sacramento Economic Council. A native of Denmark but now a true believer in the California Dream, he lives in Sacramento with his wife Christy and their two rambunctious boys.

An accomplished economic development executive, Troels has personally been involved in the creation of over 13,000 jobs throughout his career. Prior to joining the Greater Sacramento Economic Council, he led tradable sector economic development activities for the City of Portland, Oregon. During his tenure, he strategically repositioned his team to serve the City of Portland’s key industry clusters with a strong inclusion lens and reenergized the city’s international trade efforts. Major wins included the expansions of Adidas’ and Daimler Trucks’ North American Headquarters and new locations of Genentech, Amazon Web Services and Square. All told, these and other projects supported the creation of 4,400 net new jobs for the city and hundreds of millions in new capital investment. Troels was also instrumental in serving Portland businesses during the pandemic, leading several major emergency grant and loan programs, advising key leaders on recovery planning and co-creating the statewide Small Business Stabilization Fund in partnership with the Oregon Community Foundation.

Prior to his time in Portland, Troels spent nine years in Atlanta, first with Partnership Gwinnett and then leading the Metro Atlanta Chamber’s work in developing that region’s globally competitive supply chain and automotive ecosystems. Together with executives from Porsche, AT&T, Panasonic, Cox Automotive and Georgia Tech he founded a regional automotive technology consortium to bring R&D assets to Metro Atlanta. He also launched a major initiative in partnership with 25 major corporations to spotlight Atlanta’s supply chain technology ecosystem and sourced projects that led to the creation of over 2,500 jobs in the region.

Before he found his true calling in economic development, Troels started out in the community development space, building his nonprofit management and accounting skills at one of New York City’s largest community-based nonprofits, CAMBA. He is particularly passionate about early childhood nutrition and currently serves as a Board Member for the Urban School Food Alliance, a coalition of the largest school districts in the United States working together to improve school food for our nation’s children.

Troels is a proud alum of the University of Copenhagen with a BA in Political Science and holds two master’s degrees: a Master of Public Administration from Baruch College and a Master’s in City and Regional Planning from Georgia Tech. The latter earned him the prestigious Ed McClure Award from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Planning, given to the top Master’s student paper in North America each year.