Do you have a purpose, or just a busy calendar? Marine veteran Joe Forlines walked away from the top of the finance industry to answer that question, and what he found will save you decades of running on empty.

Joe Forlines is the President and Founder of Team Honor, a Michigan nonprofit supporting Gold and Blue Star families and veterans. A Marine Corps veteran of Desert Storm, he spent nearly 30 years in financial services at firms including Merrill Lynch, UBS, and Principal before leaving the industry to care for his dying father. Since 2017 he has coached Navy Seals, Green Berets, and Recon Marines through The Honor Foundation as they make the jump to civilian life.

In this episode, he explains:

🡒 The Micro Purpose Trap: why a good career, a loving family, and a full calendar can keep the car moving while you quietly run out of fuel.

🡒 The Last Reading: the note his great grandmother left inside a military Bible, and the page it opened to on the morning his father died.

🡒 The Two Things: the only qualities Joe tells terrified Navy Seals they need to get hired, proven by a man whose associate's degree kept landing him jobs that required a bachelor's.

🡒 The $10,000 Bike He Sent Back: the decision that made one donor say Joe was the only person who ever cared about his money, and the machine his friends built instead.

🡒 The 42,000 Problem: why America's veteran nonprofits aren't talking to each other, and the plan that started with 12 strangers flying into a Kansas boardroom to admit their weaknesses.

Chapters

0:00 Welcome and how Team Honor began

6:35 Micro purposes and the internal compass

8:00 Captain Phillips and a chaplain found 30 years later

13:06 Leaving finance to care for his father

19:09 The Bible reading on his father's last day

27:37 The 42,000 veteran nonprofit problem

31:15 Twelve nonprofits in a Kansas boardroom

48:40 Dickey and the trike built for dignity

58:56 Coachable and trainable, his advice for veterans

1:05:28 Team Honor five years from now

Connect with Joe

https://www.linkedin.com/in/joe-forlines-iv-4511726/

https://www.linkedin.com/company/the-honor-foundation

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This podcast is sponsored by Michigan Retirement Advisors.

https://miretire.com/

Prefer to listen?

https://pod.link/6812062863

Cam Elrod runs a dental group with 140 employees across 11 locations, plus DDSmatch Michigan, where he helps dentists sell and transition their practices. He's never advertised either business.

He spent 22 years in corporate dental distribution before his family of entrepreneurs pushed him out of the nest. Then he built something private equity couldn't: a co-op model that pools private dentists so they can compete with corporate dentistry without losing their culture.

This episode is a masterclass in buying, building, and exiting a practice. Here’s some of what was covered:

→ The five year window: Start planning your exit five years out.

→ The death plan: A practice loses about half its value every month after an owner dies so leave your spouse a plan in place.

→ Advice for buyers: Banks want proof of liquidity, so save the cash and track your production.

→ The real estate trap: Money deployed into practices outperforms money locked in a building.

→ Retention through equity: Cameron’s dentists earn ownership every year they stay.

Chapters

00:00 Welcome and meet Cameron Elrod

01:26 Building the dental group private equity can't touch

03:15 Keeping 140 employees happy across 11 locations

09:45 Bullied out of corporate America at the Thanksgiving table

13:26 The five year window every dentist ignores

19:17 What happens when a dentist dies without a plan

23:13 Advice for young buyers: save cash, don't pay down debt

31:04 Paying dentists in equity so they never leave

35:38 Choosing growth means choosing to be poor

43:36 Why Cam rents the building instead of buying it

Connect with Cameron

https://www.linkedin.com/in/cameronelrod/

https://www.instagram.com/ddsmatchmichigan/

https://michigan.ddsmatch.com/

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This podcast is sponsored by Michigan Retirement Advisors.

https://miretire.com/

Prefer to listen?

https://pod.link/6812062863

Most business owners insure the trucks, the buildings, and the cyber risk without blinking. Almost none of them insure the people who make the place run.

Jack Leavy has spent 30 years designing executive benefit plans. The main takeaway: you can promise a key employee real money for staying and skip most of the rules that make 401ks so rigid.

Here’s what you'll learn:

→ How non-qualified plans work and why they sit outside the 401k rules

→ The stay bonus. If they stay five years, they get paid. If they leave, you owe nothing.

→ Why 10 to 15% of someone's pay is the number that changes behavior

→ Deferring income at your highest tax rate and taking it at your lowest

→ The math on losing a key employee: 3 to 4 times their pay if the seat sits empty a year

→ Why your buy-sell agreement is only as good as your last valuation

Chapters

0:00 Intro

1:00 Why a retirement plan can protect a business

5:00 What keeps owners up at night

7:55 The dealership that dropped its match

15:40 The five alarm fire and the $100,000 promise

21:20 Save till it hurts. The ski jacket rule.

28:15 The real cost of losing a key employee

34:35 The fine print. Three risks to know.

39:40 Financing your own exit

45:10 Keep it simple, valuations, and Tommy Boy

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This podcast is sponsored by Michigan Retirement Advisors.

https://miretire.com/

Prefer to listen?

https://pod.link/6812062863