Scale Like a CEO

Scaling with Purpose: AI, Leadership, and the Art of Business with Jared Peno

• Justin Reinert • Season 1 • Episode 21

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The intersection of artificial intelligence and human potential is reshaping business operations across industries. But rather than replacing people, could AI actually unlock deeper human capabilities?

Jared Peno, founder of Alliance Technologies and Taligent, brings 15 years of entrepreneurial experience to this thought-provoking conversation about how technology and humanity can work together to create exceptional value. Having built his managed IT services company from scratch during the 2008 recession, Pano offers rare insight into sustainable business growth that prioritizes both technological efficiency and human development.

"What I am trying to do with systems and process is I'm unlocking the artistry of my employees," Peno explains, revealing his distinctive approach to business leadership. He shares practical wisdom on hiring for personality rather than technical skills, building leadership teams that can operate independently, and creating an environment where people feel safe to innovate and occasionally fail.

Peno's perspective on the coming "AI gold rush" provides valuable strategic guidance for business leaders. While he predicts slower employee growth but higher profitability for companies that effectively implement AI, he warns that success depends on having clean data foundations and clear understanding of how technology enhances rather than replaces human capabilities.

Most compelling is Peno's track record—his very first customer from 15 years ago remains with his company today, testament to his philosophy that "happy employees create happy customers." His concept of "relationship capital" and focus on "ownership and excellence" offer practical frameworks for businesses seeking to build lasting customer relationships in an increasingly automated world.

Whether you're a business owner navigating AI implementation, a leader struggling with delegation, or simply curious about the future of work, this conversation provides fresh insights into balancing technological advancement with human potential. Connect with Jared on LinkedIn or visit alliance-technologiesco to learn more about his approach to technology-enabled business growth.

Jared Peno:

I actually use AI in a lot of different ways in my technology company, which does make us more efficient, but what I am trying to do with systems and process is I'm unlocking the artistry of my employees that sit next to me. These people have insights, they have intuition, and I want to bottle that and I want to use that and deploy it in solving unique problems for our customers. So, while we use these processes, efficiencies, et cetera, we're using it not to replace people, but to make people even better in their own career and to elevate the level of service that we can offer our clients.

Speaker 2:

Welcome to Scale Like a CEO, where we explore the journeys and insights of successful business leaders. We're excited to bring you today's conversation with Jared Peno, a seasoned entrepreneur who has built and scaled multiple successful businesses over the past 15 years. Join us as we dive into Jared's experience in entrepreneurship, his approach to business growth and his unique perspectives on leadership in today's evolving business landscape.

Justin Reinert:

Thanks, for joining me on Scale Like a CEO. Just to get us started, if you wouldn't mind giving us a 90-second intro to you and your business.

Jared Peno:

Yeah, thanks for having me on, justin. I actually have two businesses and I've had many before, so I consider myself an entrepreneur. I started 15 years ago and I started with Alliance Technologies. I built that business as an IT managed service businesses and we serve mid-market customers 50 and 500 employees. I also have a talent acquisition business and what that business does is actually do recruiting and some outplacement services and it's called Taligent, so we serve the St Louis market and we actually have customers all over the nation.

Justin Reinert:

That's great, thank you, and so I'm sure it's got to be fun kind of having your hands in two different businesses. They're doing kind of two different things. I'm curious if you wouldn't start maybe we can start just by sharing what's one of the biggest problems that you see in one of the industries that you serve, and how are you solving that?

Jared Peno:

Yeah well, I think right now there's a lot of opportunity. I know a lot of people that I connect with, a lot of peer groups, are talking about AI pretty heavily. This is going to disrupt, this is going to change the landscape of many different businesses and industries alike. What it's going to do here initially, within the next three to four years, that's where I really see the gold rush. That's the opportunity, because AI is so accessible now and affordable and you be able to push that into your processes that you're going to see a ton more efficiency. And so the bad side of that right is that you're going to have slower and slower growth in terms of your employee base, because you're going to be a lot more efficient with the processes that you currently have and you're going to be interjecting AI. However, you're also going to be a lot more profitable, and that's where people's eyes really light up.

Jared Peno:

So, from the technology side, we're going in and implementing getting people set up to be able to actually use AI in a meaningful way, because it's all about that data right. If you don't have good and clean data, the AI, on top of bad data, is just going to give you more poor results. So we got to fix that problem first, and that's where a lot of the gains are going to happen in the next three to four years. After that, I think what you're going to see is a big shift. Now I don't have a crystal ball, so I don't know exactly what's going to happen, but I can only predict that we're going to see a lot of change and sort of traditional employment routes. Traditional types of jobs are going to be morphed and changed into something that is using AI quite heavily. So people are really going to have to get on board, understand what this is all about and how it might affect them in their individual career paths.

Justin Reinert:

And I'm curious what makes you unique in the way that you help others or serve your clients?

Jared Peno:

Well, the one thing that makes me unique in this day and age is that we focus a hundred percent on that customer satisfaction, like we are real people driven. So I'm a technology company. I actually use AI in a lot of different ways in my technology company, which does make us more efficient. But what I am trying to do with systems and process is I'm unlocking the artistry of my employees that sit next to me. Okay, these people have insights, they have intuition, and I want to bottle that and I want to use that and deploy it in solving unique problems for our customers.

Jared Peno:

So, while we use these processes, efficiencies, et cetera, we're using it not to replace people, but to make people even better in their own career and to elevate the level of service that we can offer our clients. I think that's a real key differentiator. I think a lot of people right now they say customer service is top right. A lot of service-based businesses say that's what they compete on. They don't compete on price, they compete on customer service. But I'll tell you one thing I started 15 years ago and my very first customer still exists today customer still exists today.

Justin Reinert:

That's a great testament to the work that you're doing. I'd love to go back to that 15 years ago and think about as you were growing the business what were some of the challenges you faced as you started to scale up?

Jared Peno:

Oh my gosh. Well, when I started, justin, I was 28 years old, I had a brand new baby and I had a. I still had a little bit of university debt and stuff like that. So I was, I went all in on myself the. That was probably the most exciting and scary moment in my life. It was exhilarating. I had to deliver.

Jared Peno:

So you know, to your question like, how did you get through that I'm aging myself a little bit, but that was back in 2008,. 2009 timeframe. We were, just as the U S was, in a bit of a recession period, so it was even harder to gain clients face to face and I relied on relationships and I made some very unique partnerships and I reached out to anybody and everybody that would listen to me. Um, but I had a good story to tell and I help people, so you always lead with value. In that first year, I gave way more than I ever got. I kept giving and giving, and giving and I knew that one day it would come back to me, I would gain a reputation, I would gain the trust of people and they would think about me and use me later on down the line, and that's really the only way that we were able to succeed, yeah, in that first three-year period.

Justin Reinert:

Yeah, that's great. That's great, but I can imagine that you've got a new baby. You've got to build this business, you've got to make it work, so there's got to be a lot of grit in there, of just tenacity to drive forward. You were talking about today how you really are using AI to bring out the best of your people. So I'm curious, as you've grown through people in your business, how did you, how did you decide it was time to start hiring and growing the people side of your business?

Jared Peno:

Hiring started slow for me. I approach hiring maybe different. I don't know. I would say other small businesses maybe have the same perspective. I know I came from corporate so I know that they don't have the same perspective in hiring. But when I hire I truly imagine that person retiring with us. I imagine them being for the long haul and I want to make sure that I have a place for them for the long term, a growth path that I can pour into them and they feel fulfilled in what they're doing with us, because happy employees create happy customers. Right? It's just flat out. That has been my observation over the last 15 years. So I do everything I can so I hire really slow.

Jared Peno:

So in that very first moments of me creating a business, when I know I needed to hire somebody, I first looked to outsource as much as possible because that keeps you a little bit more nimble, a little bit more dynamic and you don't have such a large commitment upfront. When I did make that first hire front, when I did make that first hire, it was I hired a lot for personality and I trained the skillset. I didn't have a huge budget to hire a bunch of people or hire the top, top talent. I was growing organically actually. Uh, that's why the first three years was such a struggle for me. So, growing organically and and hiring your first one to three people, I mean that's quite literally just in a a large percentage of your total organization, that's, you know, 30, 25, 10% of your entire organization in one hire. So you want to make sure it is absolutely spot on, and so that's why I hired for personality more so than technical skill.

Justin Reinert:

Yeah, that's interesting. So what were some of the kind of personality traits you were looking for?

Jared Peno:

Well, we still have those traits today. It's in my core values. A couple of them are ownership and serving with excellence. If you're going to do something, we got to simply do it right. I mean, that's what I teach my kids too. If you're going to do something, do it with excellence or don't do it. Just don't do it. There's so many other things to do. So that's what I tell everybody when they come in. That's what I'm looking for. I'm looking for the ways. When I interview somebody, I'm looking for the ways.

Jared Peno:

Tell me the experiences that you've had, that you and I know this is cliche, but that you went above and beyond or you saw something that was not right, that you stood up for yourself. You know you took something that was, yeah, you could have turned it in, but you made it even better. Extra effort is noticed. It's always the details and everything that is noticed by people. It's what makes luxury goods luxury goods.

Jared Peno:

Right, you can go get a watch or a purse anywhere, but it's the attention to detail and the craftsmanship, the artistry of the thing that makes it a luxury good for the most part. And that's what I'm trying to invoke and trying to get out of my interviews for people, my employees. So it's ownership and it's excellence. If you've got those two things, then I know you got what it takes because we run in a really fast paced, busy environment. It takes, because we run in a really fast paced busy environment, lots of things going on. You have to organize yourself and if you can do that, if you can demonstrate that, then I know you've got the chops to work here.

Justin Reinert:

Yeah, I mean you know it's interesting. In all the conversations I have, there's kind of two, two approaches where people are hiring for technical expertise and experience or they're hiring for more of those qualities, like what you're saying is I believe in that I can teach anybody anything, as long as we have those a certain few key characteristics that those individuals have. So, as you think about, you were hiring more for those values-based traits and knowing that you would train, how did you then go about getting people the skills that they needed so that you could feel confident delegating tasks down the organization?

Jared Peno:

Delegating tasks is a huge problem for a lot of people that I'm in several peer groups and it's a big problem for a lot of people. Everybody wants to own the business network in the business. It just means that you got to level up your own skills in the process too, because what I found very quickly is that I can't hire for I can only hire for parts of me. I can't hire my replacement but just doesn't exist. I have to hire for specific parts and then delegate it out, as as you alluded to. So delegation came down to a me problem for a long time, because there are many paths to a right answer that I found, and typically it's always like I want them to do it my way. That's just one way of doing it Right, so I had to get over that. That was a me problem. Um, however, you know when you've got enough people in your organization you know I'm up to almost 30 people now there's no way that I could do everything that it takes to run an organization this size. So you know, delegating is invoking some trust, and so you have to continuously give people the opportunity to be trustworthy of that duty. So I do that a lot, not only here in my company, but also at home raising three kids. You got to give them the opportunity to be trusted. So that's what I do, it's just, it's just ripping off a bandaid.

Jared Peno:

We do train, of course. Uh, there's lots of technical training that goes on in our organization, um, but the technical side, like I said, is only just a small sliver of what really goes on, because in our world it is really about the customer experience that keeps people coming back. We use the term relationship capital a lot and basically what that means is I'll ask somebody you know we have several clients what's our relationship capital? Is the bank full? And what that simply means is that we do what we say we're going to do, we do it on time and we do it with excellence. It doesn't mean that we're perfect or we don't make mistakes. So a lot of founders I talk to it's like, yeah, you want to delegate, but you got to understand there's multiple paths, nobody's going to be perfect, but do they have the foresight and the customer experience to be able to make a mistake, own it, fix it and still keep that bank full? And still keep that bank full? We do a really good job at that.

Justin Reinert:

We excel mightily at that, and that's when I know that an employee is ready for delegation and you said you're around 30 employees now and that's usually kind of getting in that 20, 30 mark. It's time to start building your own leaders from within or hiring leaders. How have you approached that?

Jared Peno:

in kind of building out your leadership bench to help you lead the organization. Yeah well, so we're also kind of hybrid too. That takes an extra layer of complexity because we're not all in the same building all the time. So you know, we have special chat rooms and stuff like that. Leadership chat rooms.

Jared Peno:

Um, the biggest thing is is to create an environment where your leadership team can be open and honest. If they don't understand something, if they have a conflicting or contrarian opinion about something, you've got to make sure that they're able to feel safe and comfortable raising their hand or explaining that to the team. And a lot of our team helps one another. And so, look, we're not SpaceX, we're not building rockets. Okay, this stuff that we're doing is not life and death. We can make mistakes and we can support one another. We're not in an in a emergency sort of ER situation. So the time it takes to get to resolution is acceptable in most cases. We just work together as a team.

Jared Peno:

So fostering that safe space for everybody to work together and kind of getting out of the way where they're not leaning on the CEO all the time for the answers that's probably been the biggest unlock. Other than that we have a few retreats, or we'll have leadership only, team meetings, stuff like that, which really helps out. But I would say you're absolutely right. I can see the trajectory and the growth that we have and that we're having and we're definitely going to have to scale that leadership resource in the future. You're exactly right. It's that it's right around that 25, 30 mark where you start getting a lot, of, a lot of different opinions.

Justin Reinert:

So yeah, yes, well, so what's the what's the future look like at, you know, both between Alliance Technologies and Taligent. What's you know what's the future look like?

Jared Peno:

The future is bright for Alliance Technologies and Taligent. What's the future look like? The future is bright for Alliance Technologies and really both companies. The reason I said Alliance Technologies Taligent we've set that up as more of a lifestyle company, so scale is not really in the ethos there. It's really high quality, boutique service and support for customers. So it's white glove through and through and we want to remain a small team so we can control that quality. So Taligent will get a little bit bigger, but we're not really going to scale a whole lot.

Jared Peno:

Alliance Technologies, however I think the sky's the limit. I've really, over the last 15 years, I have set this company up with systems, people, process, where I think that right now is the time to strike. So we're investing heavily into AI. We're investing in other markets across the country. We just got back from Florida. We're going to Kansas City next week, so we're really diving in and we want to serve customers that are looking to grow as well.

Jared Peno:

So the customers that are in that 50 to 500 range, that want to go to the $100 million to two to a billion dollar valuation range what we find is that they have IT departments that are immature. They've usually scaled up. They've got a guy that was good at IT. Now he's the IT director and he doesn't really know anything about setting up an IT department, making it run efficiently, aligning it with business objectives, stuff like that. So we go in there and we're just pouring into them, getting them set up and that really launches their success. It, it. They go from this chaotic kind of everybody's doing all these projects to we know what we're doing every day, we know the roadmap, et cetera. We're ready to scale. That's been the biggest kind of value add that we've had for people and we want to share that with the US nationally.

Justin Reinert:

Well, it's exciting. That's exciting If people want to get in touch with you. What's one of the best ways to do that?

Jared Peno:

Okay, so I'm on LinkedIn at Jared Pino and I'm on Twitter at Jared Pino LinkedIn. You can also find us at alliance-technologiesco on the website.

Justin Reinert:

Great Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Jared.

Jared Peno:

All right, thanks, justin.