Why Crestone
Built in Colorado. Run on filings, not sales scripts.
The name comes from the Crestone peaks in our home range, the Sangre de Cristos. The business is simpler to explain: we read the government data this industry would rather you never see, and we put it to work on your side of the table.
The straight story
The market has a referee problem.
Crestone Associates exists because the PEO market has a referee problem. PEOs price renewals on information clients never see. Most brokers place a client once, collect forever, and never re-shop the book. The data to referee this market has been sitting in public filings the whole time: federal Form 5500 rosters, state workers’ comp files, license registries. Somebody just had to build the machine that reads it. We did. Then we pointed it at the only side of the table that was not armed: yours.
We are aggressive on your number because the other side already is on theirs. The polite version of this industry mails you a renewal letter with 45 days on the clock and calls it partnership. We would rather tell you the truth loudly and let the filings back it up.
Founder
Lucas Siegel
Lucas spent his career building data-driven growth systems, most recently as Head of Growth at a health-tech company, where his team built account intelligence engines that found the right buyer at the right moment across tens of thousands of companies. Crestone is that discipline aimed at the PEO market: public filings in, leverage out, applied for the mid-sized employer who never had a data team on their side of a renewal.
He splits the year between Colorado and Austin, which explains the photography.
“Every renewal has a number the client never sees. My whole job is printing it.”
How we get paid
The short version.
The PEO that wins your business pays us a share of its admin fee, monthly, for as long as you stay. You never pay us. Your rate is the same either way. If we do not beat your deal, we make nothing and you keep the audit. The long version, including the uncomfortable questions, lives on the How it works page. We answer all of them.
The Ellingwood line
Better method, applied.
Crestone Associates is an Ellingwood Holdings company, named for Albert Ellingwood, who put up the first routes on the Crestones in 1916 with rope technique nobody in America had bothered to learn yet. Better method, applied where everyone else free-soloed on confidence. That is the whole company philosophy, one century later.
Talk to the person who built the machine.
Twenty minutes. Bring one invoice.
Free. No obligation. We only get paid when you save.