HOW ALLEVITY TURNED A FOUNDER’S VISION INTO A 50-YEAR PEO LEGACY

In 1974, long before PEO became a familiar term, Kent Ahlswede saw a problem.

As a CPA in Chico, California, he had encountered a business providing something resembling an employer-of-record service. But the operation was rudimentary: employees were being paid from clients’ own checking accounts, and important responsibilities such as HR, workers’ compensation and health insurance were not being properly managed.

Kent thought there had to be a better way.

He researched California’s labor laws and found a framework that allowed businesses to lease employees. Then he built a company around the concept. Staff Resources, Inc. opened in 1974 as one of the industry’s first PEOs.

More than five decades later, the company is known as Allevity and primarily still serves businesses in California while supporting employees in roughly a dozen additional states as clients hire remote workers or expand geographically.

While the company’s technology, services, footprint and name have evolved dramatically, what has not changed, says President Craig Ahlswede, is the belief at the center of his father’s original idea: a passion for helping businesses succeed.

Kent Ahlswede’s background as a CPA shaped the way he viewed the employer relationship.

People are often afraid of the IRS, Craig recalls his father telling him. They hire CPAs because they do not want to make a tax mistake or face an audit. But Kent believed that being an employer could expose a business owner to risks that were just as serious—and often less well understood.

Wage-and-hour claims, workers’ compensation issues, employment practices and other liabilities could threaten the survival of a business. Small and mid-size employers, however, rarely possess the internal expertise necessary to manage every requirement themselves.

That realization became both a business model and something of a mission.

“Being an employer is much more risky than people think,” Craig says. “They just don’t understand the risk that they’re putting themselves into.”

Over the ensuing decades, that complexity has only increased. Craig remembers the company once using a graphic to illustrate the expanding volume of employment laws and regulations: a relatively short stack in 1974, a taller one a decade later and an increasingly imposing one with every passing decade.

Eventually, he jokes, “it just goes off the page.”

The issues have changed, too. Remote work, multistate employment, leave requirements and a constantly evolving regulatory landscape have joined the perennial questions surrounding wage and hour, benefits and workplace practices.

That makes Allevity’s original value proposition more relevant, not less.

THE NEXT GENERATION

Craig did not initially expect to make the family business his career.

After graduating from college in 1990, he briefly joined the company, but quickly decided he needed experience elsewhere. He spent several years in recruiting, working with engineers, programmers, designers and project managers and gaining firsthand experience with payroll, pay rates, taxes, hiring, termination paperwork and other aspects of employment.

Then, in 1995, Kent suffered a life-threatening heart condition.

Craig returned to Chico and joined his father’s company for good, eventually taking over as company president in 2006.

The transition ultimately required more than learning the technical details of the business. It meant helping a company founded by an entrepreneur adapt to a larger organization.

Kent, Craig says, was an exceptional entrepreneur. When a founder can hear nearly every conversation happening in a company, that founder can make decisions quickly and personally solve problems. Growth requires a different model.

“As you grow, you’ve got to give people the ability, the authority to make decisions, to make mistakes and learn and grow,” Craig says.

That became one of his central contributions to the business.

Craig’s brother Kevin Ahlswede also found his way to the family business and played a central role in evolving the company’s service offering to attract a new set of clients. Kevin Ahlswede joined the company in September 1998, when the company still operated primarily with a benefits-focused PEO service model. Kevin recognized an opportunity to expand the company’s appeal to a segment of the market that Allevity had not catered to. To reach employers that did not want to provide employer-sponsored health benefits, Kevin helped launch Employer Concepts, a blue-collar division that offered PEO services without requiring health insurance.

Today, Kevin serves as Director of Business Development. He’s a trusted voice in the community with a reputation for developing relationships, understanding each organization’s challenges and recommending meaningful solutions that help businesses thrive.

HIGH TECH, HIGH TOUCH

At a time when much of the HR and PEO marketplace is racing toward greater automation, Allevity has taken a deliberately balanced approach.

The company embraces technology where it improves service and efficiency. But Craig is skeptical of the idea that every HR function can—or should—be reduced to an app.

Allevity assigns clients dedicated representatives who understand their businesses and histories. When clients call, the goal is for a person to answer rather than route them through a call center. The company wants clients to consider Allevity an extension of their own organization—their HR, payroll and recruiting department as well as a resource for workers’ compensation, benefits and related employer responsibilities.

Technology should support the business requirement, not define it.

Where software alone cannot fully meet a practical need, Allevity professionals provide the process, administration, reporting and guidance to close the gap.

That high-touch model is also central to how Craig describes Allevity’s competitive differentiation.

“We care about our clients,” he says. “We are in business with our clients as true partners.”

Their success, in other words, is Allevity’s success.

CULTURE BEFORE STRATEGY

Craig applies a similar philosophy inside the company.

Ask him about the biggest leadership challenge he has confronted, and he does not begin with technology, regulation or competition. He begins with culture.

A leader can devise strategies all day, he says, but they will go nowhere if employees do not feel valued and do not feel like teammates.

At Allevity, Craig wants work to feel like a true team environment—one in which employees cover for one another, step in when colleagues are away and make room for enjoyment alongside hard work.

One of the company’s culture-building traditions puts that idea into tangible form.

Employees can nominate coworkers for recognition when they go above and beyond for a colleague or client. Client compliments can generate recognition as well. The employee then gets a spin on a prize wheel with rewards that can range from gift cards and meals to leaving early on a Friday or even receiving an additional full day off.

While everyone appreciates the prizes, the larger objective is to give employees a mechanism to notice and celebrate one another.

“Giving them the tool to recognize each other has helped so much,” Craig says.

His view of leadership has evolved similarly. Success as a leader, he says, is not about claiming accomplishments. It is about lifting people up, helping others succeed and making sure they receive the recognition for what they achieve.

A NAME TO MATCH THE MISSION

For years, “Staff Resources” created a persistent branding problem. The name sounded like a staffing or employment agency, Craig says, and did not accurately communicate the breadth of services the company provided.

Around 2012, a group of employees approached the company’s owners and asked whether they would consider changing the name.

The answer was yes.

The internal team developed possibilities and ultimately landed on “Allevity,” a combination that evokes both alleviating the burden of being an employer and bringing a measure of levity—ease and even fun—to what can otherwise be a stressful responsibility. The company officially adopted the Allevity name in 2012.

The name was not designed to provide an instant definition of the company, Craig says. It was designed to start a conversation.

What does Allevity mean? What do you do?

The answer leads directly back to the company’s purpose.

A RISING TIDE LIFTS ALL BUSINESSES

Allevity’s history is closely intertwined with the history of the PEO industry itself.

Kent Ahlswede understood early on that for the emerging industry to succeed, PEOs needed more than a viable business model. They needed a collective voice.

Craig remembers traveling to Washington, D.C., with his father during the 1980s as federal tax reform legislation threatened to affect the PEO industry.

“If you want to have a say, or an impact on how laws change, you have to get involved,” Craig remembers his father saying. “You have to be there and be part of the conversation.”

Kent put that belief into action. In 1984, he joined 13 other PEO operators in founding the National Staff Leasing Association, which would later become NAPEO. From the beginning, he took an active leadership role, serving as the association’s first vice president.

Kent understood that the success of his own company was connected to the success and credibility of the PEO model itself. Building a stronger industry ultimately meant building stronger PEOs—and creating more opportunities to help employers succeed.

That philosophy has carried into the next generation.

Craig has served as chair of NAPEO’s California Leadership Council and remains active in state advocacy, working to ensure that laws and regulations written for employers appropriately account for the PEO relationship.

More than 50 years after the company first opened its doors, nearly everything around the business has changed from technology to employment laws to client expectations. Through it all, Allevity’s mission has remained remarkably consistent: Employers have enough to worry about. Allevity exists to make being one easier.

For Craig and the Allevity team today, carrying that purpose forward is about more than preserving a family business or honoring its history. It is about continuing the work Kent began—helping employers succeed, strengthening the PEO industry and adapting to whatever comes next.