Explore every episode of the podcast Pentimento Podcast

Jay Ballinger came home to help his father for six months in 1982. He never left.

Forty-four years later, Jay is still with the same family-owned company — moving from sales rep to division manager to his current role as Director of Leadership Development, and earning the unofficial title of "culture cop" along the way. It's a career he never planned, in a field he never studied, that turned out to be exactly right.

But the path there wasn't straight. There were seasons of genuine lostness — moments of standing at a crossroads with no clear sign, asking the kind of question that only comes when you've run out of your own answers.

In this first conversation, Michael Carey sits down with Jay — a former student, a longtime friend, and the first guest of the Pentimento Podcast — to talk about what it looks like to build a life with intention, and what you discover when you finally stop and look beneath the surface.

An introduction to the Pentimento Podcast — what it is, what it asks, and what it hopes to find. Narrated by Michael Carey.