In October, Sunrise Technologies Founder and President John Pence received the 2024 International Executive of the Year Award from the BYU Marriott School of Business. In a lecture hall packed with prospective and current business students, Pence explained how saying yes early in his career eventually led him to start and run his own company.
Pence earned a bachelor’s degree in economics and mathematics from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1979 and then accepted a job as a consultant at an econometrics firm. But his first day on the job changed the entire scope of his career. The firm’s only programmer had quit, and Pence was asked if he could step into the role. “I said, ‘Yes, if that’s what is needed, then I will do it,’” Pence recalled.
Saying yes that day launched Pence into a career in tech. “It’s not what I ever thought was going to happen, but it turned out to fit my personality and my passion,” he said. When he moved to Winston-Salem, North Carolina, econometrics jobs were hard to find, and Pence’s technical skills allowed him to take a computer programming job at Sara Lee.
“You have to thrive wherever you’re planted,” Pence said. “You just never know when a door is going to open, especially early in your career, so just walk through it.”
Pence spent the next 14 years working in various technology roles at Sara Lee. “It was a good job. I learned a lot, and I got a lot of opportunity,” he explained. After working for the company’s apparel department for a few years, Pence was sent to New York to manage the IT department of Coach Leatherwear, a small company at the time it was acquired by Sara Lee that housed all their operations and manufacturing within four floors of a Manhattan building—providing Pence the opportunity to see the scope of the entire business.
“In a huge company, it’s hard to get a feel for an entire company’s process,” Pence said. “But in a small organization, the same processes get shrunk down to where you can actually get your arms around it and get a sense of how manufacturing and distribution work, how the cash flow process works, and what the financial people are actually looking for.” He explained how being able to see the company’s supply chain “was a big break” for his career.
Pence spent a few more years working in technology for various large companies before a day on the job triggered a self-described midlife crisis: He was tasked with firing 30 employees because of the company’s poor financial quarter. “And at the end of that day, I knew I was going to go do something else, because I never wanted to have to do that again,” Pence said.
For the next two years, working from his own house, Pence built Sunrise Technologies from the ground up. Since “modern-day companies really are computer systems,” explained Pence, Sunrise Technologies implements large-scale technology solutions for companies, by either replacing the current computer systems with better solutions or applying technology to make the company more effective. “We live on that boundary between implementing technology and making it work for a company,” he said.
But Pence’s inspiration for Sunrise Technologies wasn’t just to improve technology systems for companies. “I started Sunrise to have a job that I wanted to go to every day and to surround myself with people that I wanted to see and work with every day,” Pence said.
His founding process started with creating the company’s values: honesty, work hard, and be nice. Pence explained how those values have stayed with the company over the past 30 years. “It’s always been the driving force of Sunrise. It’s not a passive thing. It’s something that we work hard at,” he explained.
He saw how those values were tested in 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic affected not only all of Sunrise Technologies’ customers and income but also the company’s payroll decisions. “The easiest thing would have been to furlough people. The easiest thing would have been to call the 15 college hires we had offers to, tell them that we didn’t have work, and let them go,” Pence said. “Instead, we did none of that.”
Despite not knowing how the company would move forward in the long term, Pence and Sunrise Technologies kept their commitments to the new hires. Then, as companies across the world shifted to remote work, Sunrise Technologies’ business picked up. “By the end of 2020, we needed all 15 of those people that we retained our commitment to,” Pence explained. “We didn’t know it at the time, but it was an example of how doing the honorable thing actually turned out to be a very good business decision.”
Looking back at accepting that first programming job and founding Sunrise Technologies, Pence said he wouldn’t change anything about his career in technology and supply chain: “When I fell into technology, I fell into what I was meant to do. I’ve been doing this for 45 years, and it is as fascinating and interesting and evolving today—more so than it’s ever been.”
As he wrapped up his remarks to students, he shared, “My recommendation is to always take that journey one day at a time, one month at a time, and do your best. And when those doors of opportunity open, go through them, and be open to whatever is on the other side. Do your best with that hand you just got dealt, and if you do, you’ll get another hand that maybe is better, but take it one step at a time.”
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Written by Stephanie Bentley