About P5 Consulting Services

P5 Consulting Services is owned and operated in Partnership by Don and Marylou Pritchard.  Don was raised and worked on his family's grain and commercial cattle ranch in the Carrisa Plains and Bitterwater Valley areas of San Luis Obispo and Kern Counties.   He attended Cal Poly San Luis Obispo where he obtained his Bachelor's degree in Agricultural and Farm Management.  At that time, Central California was in a significant drought period and returning to the ranch was not an option. Don moved to Inyo County where he became a Deputy Sheriff (and met Marylou who was a 911 Dispatcher at the time) covering areas between Bishop and Death Valley. All along, Don maintained his partnership status with the  BarB6 Ranch (now cattle and hunting only - no grain operations) and in 2001 he and Marylou moved back to San Luis Obispo County after Don was injured on duty and forced to retire from law enforcement. While working with the ranch, Don knew he had to maintain a separate enterprise to make ends meet so he and Marylou started an agriculture focused management recruiting business that has been growing ever since. Now P5's services include Background Investigations, Grant Writing and Grant Program Management. In some ways parallel to Don, Marylou was born and raised in the Owen's Valley at the base of the Eastern Sierra Mountains in Lone Pine California. Accustomed to hard work at an early age, she was raised and worked on her family's horse breeding facility which on average consisted of about 30 horses. Her father also had interests in Mobile service stations and when the first gas crisis hit, her family was forced to sell the service stations and breeding enterprise. Her father successfully became active in local and state politics. Marylou helped write her father's first campaign speeches while in high school and also won four regional speech contests throughout that period. She earned an Associates Degree in Business Administration and has over 20 years of public sector work experience which includes Public Works, Planning, Water Quality and Law Enforcement communications. A latent talent for persuasive writing, combined with over 20 years of government work experience provide significant contributions to the focus and success of P5's Grant Writing /Program Management services. Don's backgrounds in agriculture and law enforcement anchor the foundation for a credible and successful Ag support business. Marylou's backgrounds in public administration, communications, human resources, business development and project management serve the goals of P5 for superb quality assurance. P5 takes great pride in it's reputation for quality client service. As P5 grows and increases its reach, Don and Marylou also maintain a commitment to high performance and unsurpassed industry knowledge by offering candidates and client companies personal service, confidentiality, and the most ethical standards in the industry. As a result, P5 has placed quality candidates with some of the best known names on a national, regional and entrepreneurial level. Don and Marylou measure P5's success by repeat business which weighs in at an impressively high rate. In recruitment, P5 does more than merely match candidates to job openings. Other agencies accomplish this through scripted questions and a checklist. In contrast, we at P5 possess the education and professional backgrounds within each field to ensure quality candidates who have not exaggerated their capabilities. Candidates and references are interviewed extensively and then our own practical industry experience is applied to ensure that the candidate's experience and needs are appropriate for the job and culture offered by the client. We stay involved through the client interview, negotiations and final follow-up/notifications. Our objective is to launch long-term, successful relationships between the individuals we place and our clients. In grant support services, P5 provides Ag expertise for your specific program. We have a quality assurance team that has decades of experience in grant management for State Ag practices and regulations, vector control and rural land-use planning. This is a service that many generalists cannot provide.   Every candidate, background check and grant service is different, as are each client's needs. Organizations, company cultures, funding requirements and other factors come into play for different reasons and maintaining a wide perspective for all of our services is important. The strength in our industry knowledge, functional expertise, and a strong desire to provide premier customer service and personal attention, separates P5 Consulting Services from other firms.