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Who's who: Alfie Pena

Alfie Pena is the kind of person who never gives up. He's the type who's always excited and ready to meet a challenge head-on. From Vietnam to triathlons to breaking into the ATM business, Pena has learned how to make his talents work for him.

April 18, 2005

Alfie Pena has competed in more than 200 triathlons - grueling contests of swimming, biking and running. And the 55-year-old believes he's got at least one more in him.

"I want to go to Hawaii and race some more," he said, referring to the annual Ironman event that takes place there. It's been more than a decade since his last Ironman, and Pena has since had surgery to repair torn cartilage in both knees a few years ago.

But the director of ISO sales for Colorado-based Rocky Mountain ATM recently ordered a new pair of training shoes and has resumed running three times a week, in hopes of entering his fourth - and likely last - Ironman. "I think my knees will give me one more," he said.

Pena is a self-professed "triple A personality" who once played on the professional racquetball circuit and has a black belt in tae kwon do.

"Alfie is a world-class athlete," said Harry Popeil, chief operating officer of Rocky Mountain ATM, "and he uses the same drive and motivation in business as he uses in his athletics."

Pena has only worked for Rocky Mountain ATM for a month, but he's is already making deals happen. "We're expecting a lot from him," said Popeil, noting that the company, which has about 1,100 ATMs under contract, is in an expansion mode.

An iron will

A native of San Antonio, Texas, Pena moved to the Boulder, Colo., area in 1968, then did a tour in Vietnam, during which he earned a Purple Heart after suffering a severe leg injury. His athleticism helped motivate him to complete physical therapy.

After Vietnam, Pena managed athletic clubs for a time before founding a personal fitness training business. "I was in training for triathlons all the time and people were always asking me questions, so I decided I might as well charge them for the information," he said.

The new business allowed him to focus even more on his training. "I didn't just stand around telling people what to do. If my client cycled, I cycled with him. If he swam, I swam with him."

But Pena decided he wanted a steadier stream of income and considered returning to athletic clubs - but realized he didn't want to do so unless he could afford to open his own club. Instead, he hooked up with some friends who had gotten into the merchant processing business with a company called True Merchant Services.

From left are Alfie Pena's son, Austin, his wife, Anne, and his daughter, Ashley.

It was 1995, and with the growth of ATM surcharging, Pena wanted to get into the booming business. He convinced the principals of True Merchant Services to take on ATMs as a complementary product line.

While Pena experienced some success, he found that practically every potential ATM location he visited had already been called on by somebody else - a guy named Sam Jonas who kept beating him to the punch. "I was thinking 'Man, who is this guy?' And then one day I got a call from him on the phone."

The call, during which Jonas tried - unsuccessfully - to recruit Pena to join his new ATM business, Cash Resources, was one of his standard business tactics. "Anytime anybody could take any deals away from me in my territory, I wanted him on my team," Jonas said.

Pena declined the offer but did it "with the right level of class," Jonas said.

The early bird gets the ... business

When True Merchant Services ran out of cash several months later, Pena knew who to call. He discovered a "kindred spirit" in Jonas. "Working at Cash Resources was like working in an E.R. You had this team of people with an incredible energy level who worked well together and really made things happen."

Pena learned to "wake up with the roosters" to hit the phones. Jonas liked to call prospects on the East Coast at 7 a.m., then place calls at similar times in different time zones. Once completed, the process began again and continued into the evening - when calls were placed to owners doing liquor counts and tending to housekeeping issues before their clubs opened.

Cash Resource became one of the country's largest and most successful ISOs before its sale to eFunds in 2002.

Pena worked for eFunds for about a year-and-a-half - long enough, he said, to learn that a large corporation was not for him. "I'm not interested in getting into a committee that has to have a committee to decide what the policy is going to be for committees."

He said smaller companies like Rocky Mountain ATM are inherently more flexible when it comes to serving customers. "I want to be able to count on the people working with me, to know that when I say to do something, they'll do it - and they won't waste any time."

Despite his competitiveness and type-A personality, Pena is "still a kid at heart" and the kind of father who is happy that his two children, 15-year-old Ashley and 13-year-old Austin, "still hug and kiss their daddy without embarrassment."

He said, "I'll ask them, 'Am I a dork yet?' They say 'No dad, not yet.'"