About the author
Ben H Roberts
Husband. Father of five. Co-founder of LoanPro. And someone who had to figure out this framework 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 process — discover, refine, build, 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, and it grew from an idea in the back office of a car dealership into a financial technology company valued at more than $1 billion. After more than fifteen years helping lead it, I stepped away from day-to-day operations to focus more of my time on faith, family, mentoring, and service. 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 framework 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, a nonprofit with initiatives in Cambodia and the United States. In Cambodia we partner with rural villages to help communities move from extreme poverty toward long-term self-reliance. In the United States the work focuses on personal fulfillment and helping young adults build their futures with greater clarity and intention. 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 giving the same framework 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 intentionally build lives of purpose and fulfillment.
Ben co-founded LoanPro and helped grow it from a startup in the back office of a car dealership into a financial technology company valued at more than $1 billion. After more than fifteen years helping lead the company, he stepped away from its day-to-day operations to focus more of his time on his faith, family, mentoring, and service.
Ben was recognized as a 2023 Utah Business 40 Under 40 honoree and nominated for the Wasatch Innovation Network’s WIN100, the 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 with initiatives in Cambodia and the United States. In Cambodia, Become More 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 build their futures with greater clarity and intention.
For more than twenty years, Ben has mentored young adults through some of life’s most defining seasons. His experiences in entrepreneurship, faith, family, service, and mentoring helped shape the four-step process at the heart of Welcome Home, Elder. Now What? — Discover, Refine, Build, and Strive.
Ben wrote the book to help returned missionaries understand their eternal identity, define the man they are committed to becoming, and use that clarity to guide the decisions shaping their future. Through the Identity Standard and the Four Steps, young men learn how to create a practical plan, put it into action, and build a life their future selves will thank them for.
Ben lives in Utah with his wife, Trina, and their five children.