About the author
Ben H Roberts
Husband. Father of five. Co-founder of LoanPro. And someone who had to figure out the Now What Method the hard way, because nobody handed it to me.
Ben H Roberts
I wasn’t able to serve a mission
I stepped straight into adult life with responsibilities, pressure, and consequences before I fully understood who I was becoming. I felt lost far more often than I felt confident.
There was a Sunday I still remember clearly. I was sitting in my car outside the chapel, hands on the wheel, trying to decide whether to walk in or go home. Staying home felt easier. I wasn’t sure I belonged.
And then it hit me: if I let how I felt in that moment decide my choices, I would become the kind of man who follows convenience instead of conviction.
I opened the car door and walked inside.
So I got to work
I started studying what actually created stability, spiritual strength, strong marriages, financial freedom, and long-term fulfillment. I watched the people who had built lives worth wanting, and I watched the people who hadn’t. Slowly, patterns emerged.
What came out of it was a method — seek, study, shape, strive — that I lived long before I could name it. It shaped my faith, my marriage, my career, and my money.
The part that gets people’s attention
I grew up in a small farming community where hard work wasn’t optional. We hauled hay, fixed fences, irrigated fields, dug trenches. From there it was a $300 truck named Rusty and more than a hundred lawns a week.
Eventually my brothers and I built a financial technology company called LoanPro — I served as its COO — and it grew from an idea in the back office of a car dealership into a leader in lending technology valued at more than $1 billion. That’s the line people usually repeat back to me.
But it isn’t the point, and the road there wasn’t a straight line. It was a decade of wrong turns, painful losses, near collapses, and decisions that only made sense years later. What held it together wasn’t luck, brilliance, or timing. It was a method that kept me moving with direction instead of drift.
Why I stopped at 40
The process created enough freedom that by 40 I could step away from traditional work. Not to coast — to reinvest my time in the things that actually mattered: my faith, my wife Trina, our five children, and the young adults I mentor.
Trina and I cofounded Become More. In the United States, its work includes mentoring young adults through life-defining decisions and supporting personal growth and fulfillment. In Cambodia, it partners with rural villages, working alongside residents as they pursue long-term self-reliance. That work is the clearest answer I have to the question the last chapter of this book asks: what is all of this actually for?
Why I wrote this book
For more than twenty years I’ve mentored young adults through this exact season. The same questions come up every time, and I kept finding myself walking through the same method across a lunch table.
I wrote it down because a returned missionary shouldn’t have to spend a decade discovering by trial and error what someone could have handed him at 22.
The short version
Ben H Roberts is a husband, father of five, entrepreneur, mentor, and nonprofit leader committed to helping people build meaningful lives.
Ben co-founded LoanPro and served as its COO for more than fifteen years, helping grow it from a startup in the back office of a car dealership into a financial technology company valued at more than $1 billion. He stepped away from day-to-day operations and now serves on LoanPro’s board, giving more of his time to his faith, family, mentoring, and service.
His entrepreneurial leadership earned him recognition as a 2023 Utah Business 40 Under 40 honoree. He was a finalist for the 2022 Mountain West EY Entrepreneur Of The Year Award and the Silicon Slopes COO of the Year Award.
Today, Ben dedicates much of his time to Become More, the nonprofit he co-founded to help people build lives of greater strength, purpose, and independence. The organization pursues that mission through initiatives in Cambodia and the United States. In Cambodia, it partners with rural villages to help communities move from extreme poverty toward long-term self-reliance. In the United States, its work focuses on personal fulfillment and helping young adults intentionally build meaningful lives.
For more than twenty years, Ben has mentored young adults, especially returned missionaries, through decisions that shape their faith, relationships, careers, finances, health, and future. Those experiences led him to develop The Now What Method, a repeatable four-step process for choosing your direction and building a meaningful life: SEEK, STUDY, SHAPE, and STRIVE.
In Welcome Home, Elder. Now What?, Ben brings the Identity Standard and the Now What Method together to help young men understand their eternal identity, define the man they are committed to becoming, and turn that clarity into decisions and actions that build a meaningful life their future selves will thank them for.
Ben lives in Utah with his wife, Trina, and their five children.