Beneke: Designing IT solutions and making them work

After 19 years of leading development of new enterprises for Deposit Guaranty National Bank, Jill Beneke decided the time had come to create and run her own enterprise.

She established PILEUM Corp., an IT consulting and systems integration firm, and serves as chief executive officer and president.

“We help our clients refine their business, and we provide the hardware, software and technical assistance to make it work.”

Reflecting on what drives her own business, Beneke said, “I’m successful in running my own company in part because I had to watch from the penthouse as they tore my dynasty down.”

SThe “dynasty” is referring t the “portfolio” of noncredit products and services that she created for Deposit Guaranty, where she was hired straight out of the University of Mississippi. And the “they” refers to First American National Bank, which acquired DGB in 1998. The “penthouse”? That was Beneke’s position on the First American’s senior executive management team, which wanted her badly enough to fly her several times a week from Jackson to the corporate headquarters in Nashville.

But Beneke found she had no real power, so she created PILEUM in 2002 to “have control over my own destiny.”

A native of Quincy, Illinois, Beneke went into Deposit Guaranty’s management training program knowing she wanted to do something nontraditional. For each new product she and her team “conducted research, bult the business plan, put the sales team together, designed the systems associated with running a new enterprise within the company and purchase the technology.”

First American moved all that business “onto its backroom systems, which just weren’t robust enough,” Beneke said.

When AmSouth acquired First American in 2000, Beneke was ready to buld a business using the expertise she had developed at Deposit Guaranty.

She briefly worked for a competitor in the professional services field to better understand where the niche market was before founding PILEUM.

She and her 30 engineers don’t go for “cookie-cutter solutions” and “can be objective in designing the best solution for each client.”

Beneke set up founding headquarters with a laptop at a table in Jackson’s Broad Street Bakery & Cafe” and is not headquartered in the Pinnacle Building in downtown Jackson and has offices in Birmingham; Shreveport, Louisiana; and Knoxville, Tennessee.

Here are some of Beneke’s reflections on their her success:

Q: What was PILEUM’s first year like?

A: By the end of the year, we had five employees — three engineers, a part-time accountant and me. I didn’t take a salary the first year.

Q: Did you tap your banking connections for start-up financing?

A: We have no investors. We grow from what we make.

Q: What are a few examples of systems you’ve designed to meet specific needs?

A: A brokerage company needed a computer network system that would never go down. A hospital needed fail-safe emergency generator systems for its ER and operating rooms. We design systems from bottom up for smart buildings, like the Butler Snow Building in Ridgeland.

Q: What’s one of your biggest challenges?

A: Hiring. Most everybody in this company is an engineer — a mechanical, technology or electrical engineer. Ours is a fabulous team that designs, builds and supports the systems our clients need. But there is huge competition in hiring good IT people. You can’t just be a tech savvy propeller head. Our engineers need to have a natural instinct about how to apply their knowledge to the clients’ needs and the business savvy to talk wiht the people who are buying from us. We need to be nurturing these kinds of skills in more people.

Q: What’s your biggest success?

A: My four children. They’re the whole reason I built this company. I want them to have the passion about being entrepreneurs because their futures are going to be more challenging than ours.

Q: What advice do you have for aspiring entrepreneurs?

A: You need to be a risk taker, but a street savvy one. You need to develop a good business plan, but you can develop plans until you die. At some point you have to step off the cliff and be prepared to pull the parachute.

Excerpt from “Mississippi Entrepreneurs” by Polly Dement. Published by Cat Island Books, distributed by University Press of Mississippi.

This is the 10th in a weekly series of excerpts from “Mississippi Entrepreneurs” by Polly Dement.