Bradenton entrepreneur reboots career from software engineer to COO

Trevor Ewen knew he wanted to be more than a software engineer. Around 2019, he was working at Bloomberg as a senior software engineer and says there was no real upward mobility.

“It's just a very hard career to make a lifetime career,” Ewen says. “I also think the biggest challenges are at the larger organizational level, and I wanted to embrace those challenges.”

Photo by Mark Wemple

So he began carving out his own path to the C-suite.

“I did go to business school to try to diversify,” says Ewen, who earned his MBA from Columbia Business School and London Business School in 2021.

He also teamed up with a partner to use a search fund — an investment vehicle that entrepreneurs use to get investors to back them in finding, buying and running a company. Now Ewen is the COO of QBench, a cloud-based software firm that handles laboratory management.

Since 2022 when they bought QBench, Ewen and his partner, Nicholas Evans, have quintupled revenue, he says. (He declines to disclose specific revenue figures.) When they came in, the business had solid product and implementation teams but needed help with things like finance, marketing and HR, says Ewen, who focuses on finance, HR, technology strategy and operations for the company, which has 62 remote employees.

In 2025, as QBench was growing, its leaders decided to hire executive coach Sherman Black, who has since become Ewen’s mentor. 

“One of the biggest things that he's given me is to figure out where do I derive my authority,” Ewen says. “What do I actually bring to the table so that someone who is effectively better and more experienced” will listen?

While he is putting his leadership skills to the test at QBench, there is another place where Ewen is also embracing the challenge of being an authority figure — as a dad.

Ewen and his wife have three children they adopted from the Texas foster care system who are siblings, ages 11, 15 and 20. He says they found that children who are adopted often try to research their siblings, and they thought it would bring the kids some stability to be adopted together. 

“We consider that kind of our ministry,” Ewen says. “It's been a huge blessing.”