Alisha Shoates James built her career on the hard version of leadership first — the kind where you can’t hide behind a title. She started as a police officer, then a federal probation officer, before rising to Assistant Commissioner for the Tennessee Department of Correction. There, she ran statewide operations for 1,200 staff supervising 77,000 individuals under state supervision and managed a $100M budget. That’s not a résumé line. That’s a decade of high-stakes decisions in a system with almost no margin for error — and it’s also where she learned to operate at the legislative level, testifying before the Tennessee General Assembly and advising the Governor’s Office directly.

When she moved into the private sector, she brought that same instinct for hard operational problems — and went straight to building. She founded TenFour Clothing, an apparel line for women in law enforcement, and took it to a profitable exit. Then she founded QwickTouch Technologies, a mobile platform built to improve communication between justice-involved individuals and the agencies supervising them — her first real bet that technology, not just policy, was the lever for change in this space.

That bet is what she’s spent the years since proving out. Today, Alisha is Senior Vice President at Aventiv Technologies, running one of the largest public-sector technology portfolios in the country — a book of business worth hundreds of millions of dollars — serving government and justice agencies nationwide. In three years, she grew that portfolio substantially, holding full P&L ownership the entire time — budgeting, forecasting, margin, all of it. Before that, she built Aventiv’s Post-Incarceration business unit from a blank page: strategy, product, sales, go-to-market — the kind of zero-to-one work most SVPs never get their hands on.

She still advises through James Group Consulting, working with executive teams across government, technology, and professional services on growth strategy and transformation. Outside of corrections technology, she’s also an active investor across spirits, sports, entertainment, banking, and real estate — a range that reflects how she thinks about opportunity well beyond any single industry.

The throughline: she’s run large-scale operations, built and sold a company, built and scaled a tech platform, and now leads a major technology business — with real P&L ownership at every single stop. Operator, founder, investor, and enterprise executive. She’s served on both corporate and nonprofit boards, and welcomes conversations about board opportunities. That’s what she brings to the table.