Peerless Partners is a boutique consulting firm working to enable its clients maximize both the return and the investment of their digital capital investment portfolio by doing more, better, and faster.

Peerless Partners' focus remains on extending the 'R' in ROI by helping organizations build the muscles to prioritize problems to solve and define desired outcomes to drive. The company is a specialist in thinking creatively on how to iteratively deliver thin slices of value sooner. Peerless Partners is also working to enable putting the customer at the center, making data-driven decisions, and clearly defining (measuring) success for each investment their clients make.

To minimize the 'I' in ROI, Peerless Partners helps translate the idea of being an agile organization into tangible practices and behaviors that teams use on a daily basis, such as allowing clients to eliminate waste, empower teams to move with speed, and improve the engagement models and ways of working across their business.

Peerless Partners help teams and individuals to do their best work. Across all shapes and sizes of companies, individuals spend an average of 47 hours per week at work. Each team member likely spends more time at work than with family or friends, or on their hobbies and passions. One of the things that get Peerless Partners up in the morning is enabling highly productive, engaged teams that are invested, not just in the output, but also in the outcomes they are producing. Helping to create the space to drive those outcomes so that they are excited to show up every day.

Learning Life Lessons through Experience

Janel Wellborn is the Founder and Managing Partner of Peerless Partners. She embeds herself within her clients' organizations to transform their culture by shifting mindsets at all levels. Janel helps her clients make many small changes in their way of working, which can have a huge impact on their ability to meet their customer needs and deliver measurable business value. She started out as a big five consultant and later went to work for one of her clients. Janel again switched her work to consulting but later went on to work with one more client. Finally, she landed back in consulting when she decided to build her own boutique firm to maximize her impact. As the Founder and Managing Partner of Peerless Partners, Janel applies her critical thinking, naturally curious and straight-shooting style to many different organizations that face many of the same challenges.

Janel's approach with her clients is to 'teach them how to fish', so that rather than calling her in the future for the same challenge, they call her for a different one. She has always invested a copious amount of energy in training and in-context coaching to shift mindsets and make small changes within an organization to increase the likeliness that the changes stick over time, even without Peerless Partners' help.

In her early career days, she felt a lot of pressure to always have an answer for questions from her clients, team, boss, etc. The company she worked for was billing employees out at a high rate and expected their consultants to be experts. But one day Janel realized that injecting a bit of humility into the game could go a long way. Soon, she became comfortable enough to say, "I actually don't know! But I'll go find out." Janel then followed up to close the loop and do just that.

"Shouldn't the environment employees work in allow harnessing their best work and ideas and solve the organizational/culture challenges that may be holding them back from adding even more value?", adds Janel.

Breaking the Routine of Outshining 

Janel has always admired women executives who acknowledge that they are only as strong as the team they build and the relationships they forge. She recognizes a leader as someone who has no need to outshine everyone and compete. She invests energy in hiring people who compliment her strengths (rather than duplicating them), focusing her time on coaching rather than managing, modeling the behavior of taking risks, and learning from failures.

As a consultant in the first ten years, Janel traveled and worked crazy long hours, blurring the lines between work and life. However, over the past fifteen years, she has not just been a woman in tech but also a mom in tech. Janel worked to set clear boundaries to create a real work-life balance. When Janel is at work, she is at work. She does not check personal emails nor makes dinner reservations. She is laser-focused and incredibly productive at that time. But when Janel is not working (during afternoon carpool, while cooking or enjoying dinner with her family, at a soccer game, a hike with a friend, or a vacation out of the country), she is not working. Janel is present, engaged, and modeling good behavior for her daughters, team, and peers at work. She thinks that this energizes her on both the important sides of her life!

Transformational Leaders Must Learn Tactics and Real Emotions

Janel opines that to drive transformation; she feels that a leader has to be willing to transform themselves and learn about the tactics and genuine emotions that come along with changes, failures and risks. She presumes that it is critical to learn and experiment with new tactics continually. According to Janel, leaders should use the scars on their back to help see around corners and avoid pitfalls. However, they should not let those scars hold them back or give permission to chicken out! She insists that this helps with innovating on the services Peerless Partners provides the transformations the company drives with its clients. The firm is framing hypotheses with a clear problem to solve, an approach to tackle the problem, and a measurable outcome that the company expects to drive.

Innovating to Tackle the Problems

Janel says that one of her favorite mantras is 'have a strong point of view, weakly held.' For Janel, this has been critical to her ability to help her clients, team, and herself. Janel emphasizes that by doing the due diligence, leveraging quantitative and qualitative data, and applying critical thinking, logic, and experience, all helps Peerless Partners form and defend a point of view. Henceforth, the company can tackle any problem. But Janel thinks that it is just as important to consider and incorporate perspective, the realities of her clients' strategic objectives and political landscape, being humble enough and open to shifting that point of view, searching for the right answer, not just being right.

Implementing Disruptive Technology is in Leader's Hand

According to Janel, disruptive technologies are just reinforcing what people have known for a while. She mentions that 'change is the only constant!' Janel affirms that the more leaders empower teams, rallying them around (measurable) outcomes and give them the necessary runway, the better. To do this, leaders today have to invest more in mindsets, culture, and shared missions rather than processes and structures and policies. She adds that only then people can harness their collective creativity and get the space to experiment, learn, iterative, and deliver value as quickly as possible.

Envisioning the Future Ahead

Janel remarks that the future excites her a lot. She foresees an opportunity for Peerless Partners to join its clients to keep shifting mindsets and making small changes in the ways of working, which can have big impacts on both their customers and employees.

Guidance to the Emerging Women Leaders

Janel asks women leaders to imagine the characteristics of the career they want and how they'll show up in it. Not a specific job but a whole career. She advises that few of the women leaders should anticipate where they'll end up. Janel insists that leaders should be open to organic ebb and flow, learning opportunities, accepting evolution and embracing revolution in their industry, and have the discipline to dig in and work hard. She concludes by mentioning the phrase, "She believed she could, and so she did."