Jeremy Ames is the Co-founder and CEO of Guidant Financial, a firm that helps entrepreneurs access capital via retirement-fund rollovers, SBA loans, and administrative services. He co-founded the company in 2003 with just $10,000 and a laptop. Over the years, Guidant has helped over 30,000 people start or buy small businesses and franchises across the US. Jeremy also has experience owning franchise operations himself and has launched additional ventures in media and business services.
Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Hear:
- [02:38] Jeremy Ames shares how growing up with limited resources fueled his drive to become an entrepreneur
- [04:11] What a bad management experience can teach about taking control of your career
- [08:49] Where Jeremy and his business partner discovered the opportunity to use retirement funds for investments
- [13:04] The breakthrough moment when Google ads helped Guidant take off with just $20 a day in ad spend
- [16:32] Why Jeremy calls one failed venture a “$500,000 education” and the lessons he learned
- [25:52] How Guidant’s hiring struggles inspired the creation of Doxa Talent
- [30:10] The role of AI in business and why experimenting daily is crucial for staying relevant
In this episode…
Many aspiring entrepreneurs dream of owning a business but feel stuck because of financial barriers. Between mortgages, family expenses, and the uncertainty of leaving a steady job, the leap to ownership can seem impossible. How can everyday people actually make the transition from employee to business owner?
According to Jeremy Ames, a seasoned entrepreneur and financing innovator, the key lies in smarter, more accessible funding strategies. He highlights how retirement funds and SBA loans can be leveraged to buy or start businesses without the traditional roadblocks of capital. By demystifying these financial tools, he shows how thousands of aspiring owners have turned savings into startups. The impact has been transformative, creating opportunities for people who never thought business ownership was within reach.
Tune in to this episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast as John Corcoran interviews Jeremy Ames, Co-founder and CEO of Guidant Financial, to talk about empowering everyday people through smart financing. You will learn how retirement funds can unlock business ownership, why SBA loans remain powerful, and how innovative financing structures fuel growth. Jeremy also shares lessons on scaling, resilience, and the future of AI in entrepreneurship.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
Special Mention(s):
- David Nilssen on LinkedIn
- Mark Moses on LinkedIn
- Warren Rustand on LinkedIn
- Doxa Talent
- Dave Parker on LinkedIn
- Stephan Roche on LinkedIn
- Entrepreneurs’ Organization (EO)
Related episode(s):
Quotable Moments:
- “I was always willing to work hard enough so that I wouldn’t have to worry about money.”
- “With business, it’s bullshit, you don’t build it and they come.”
- “If you don’t know who your customer is, then it’s very likely you’re building the wrong thing.”
- “Anytime someone’s looking for a business, you’re looking for the rising tide that’s out there.”
- “If you’re not experimenting with AI daily, you’re going to be the people who become expendable.”
Action Steps:
- Leverage retirement funds for business ownership: Unlocking existing savings as startup capital helps aspiring entrepreneurs overcome traditional financing barriers.
- Start small with marketing experiments: Testing low-cost channels like pay-per-click ads validates demand before committing large budgets and reduces financial risk.
- Validate business ideas with real customers: Gathering early feedback ensures there’s a true market need and prevents wasted investment in untested assumptions.
- Build global teams strategically: Tapping into offshore talent can ease hiring challenges, reduce costs, and strengthen scalability when paired with strong cultural integration.
- Embrace AI as a daily practice: Actively experimenting with new tools helps teams stay competitive, innovative, and prepared for future market shifts.
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Episode Transcript
Today we’re talking about how to become a business owner. Even if you are in the middle of your life, if you got a mortgage to pay, if you got kids, you got to pay for. And specifically how to finance a business acquisition. My guest today is Jeremy Ames. I’ll tell you more about him in a second, so stay tuned.
John Corcoran: 00:18
Welcome to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast, where we feature top entrepreneurs, business leaders, and thought leaders and ask them how they built key relationships to get where they are today. Now let’s get started with the show.
John Corcoran: 00:35
All right. Welcome, everyone. John Corcoran here. I’m the host of this show. And you know, every week we have smart CEOs, founders and entrepreneurs from all kinds of companies.
And if you check out the archives, we’ve got Netflix and Grubhub, Redfin, gusto Kinkos, lots of great episodes for you to check out. And this episode is brought to you by rise 25, where we help businesses to give to and connect to their dream relationships and partnerships. How do we do that? We do that by helping you to run your podcast and content marketing, you’re the easy button for any company to launch run a podcast. We do strategy, accountability, and full execution, and we’ve also built the Podcast Copilot platform, which is being called the Wix or Squarespace of B2B podcasting.
So to learn all about it, you can go to our website. rise25.com or email our team at support@rise25.com. All right. And I want to give a shout out first to David Nielsen, who’s a friend of the podcast who is business partners with today’s guest. His name is Jeremy Ames, and he is the Co-founder and CEO of Guidant Financial, which is a nationwide leader in small business and franchise financing.
Going back to 2003. Started with ten grand and a laptop, and transformed into a startup that has been a financing powerhouse. They’ve helped over 30,000 different businesses, and he’s a serial entrepreneur who started a bunch of different companies. So we’re going to talk about those different businesses here. And he hails from Beautiful full Idaho, which I was just in Idaho recently.
Actually, for the last two summers I’ve been in Idaho. Went to McCall, Idaho last summer. It’s such a beautiful part of the country. And Jeremy, such a pleasure to have you here today. Let’s start with your your background, your story.
We were chatting beforehand and you said that you weren’t raised with a lot of money, didn’t have a lot of money as a kid, and actually moved around from different schools. And I had a similar experience where my family moved around the country a number of different times. Let’s talk a little bit about how that shaped you, how that made who you are today, because I think that’s for me personally, one of the most foundational things is moving around to different schools. It definitely shapes who you are as an adult.
Jeremy Ames: 02:38
Yeah, my wife makes fun of me because the few times that we go to the movie theater, I insist that we buy snacks at the theater, even though they’re like $6 for a box of air, because I have trauma that came from being in a movie theater and hearing a soda can go off. Because my mom. Anytime we ever got the rare chance to go to the movie theater, we have to stop at 7-Eleven, pick up anything that we were going to have in there. And I just knew that soda can popping in the middle of the theater was like a big sign saying, hey, poor kid sitting in row three. So I think the way that it shaped me is just I always wanted to.
I was always willing to work hard enough so that I wouldn’t have to worry about whether I could afford to go to dinner, or whether I could afford to go to the movies, or whether I could afford to buy my kids a pair of jeans that they want. And I think that’s part of what I think led me to entrepreneurship, even though I really didn’t have anyone growing up as a role model to even think that that was a possibility.
John Corcoran: 03:43
That’s I hear that frequently from guests on this show that, you know, there’s kind of like two different categories. People that like hustling, selling stuff on their street at age six, you know, and then other people who maybe didn’t have an example of that. So they they didn’t even consider it until maybe later in life. And you were 25 when you decided to start a company. I understand it came from a bad management situation.
Tell us that story.
Jeremy Ames: 04:11
So I dropped out of college twice, and when I dropped out of college, I ended up getting a job at a restaurant, and I started as a busboy and really quickly worked up to being a server and then working, doing cocktail shifts and then bartending and then supervising and then managing.
John Corcoran: 04:26
Which, by the way, I waited tables in college. Also the best experience at all. Everyone should wait tables at some point in their life.
Jeremy Ames: 04:32
First of all, it’s super fun when you’re in your, you know, late teens, early 20s to work with all the people that age. Yeah, but also it just makes you into a better human. I think having to deal with so many different people.
John Corcoran: 04:45
Absolutely.
Jeremy Ames: 04:45
Do you still wake up with recurring dreams where you can never fast enough? Get to all the things that you need to get to?
John Corcoran: 04:51
I swear my brain still thinks of it because like, you learn your brain, like, cycles through all your tables and you’re thinking, catch up on this table, Diet Coke on this table. And they needed an extra set up on this table. And my brain’s still, like, functions like that sometimes.
Jeremy Ames: 05:05
Yep.
John Corcoran: 05:06
Yeah.
Jeremy Ames: 05:06
So before I knew it, I was moving around the country, opening new restaurants as part of opening management team. And I got lonely and I decided I wanted to move back home to Seattle. That’s where I grew up, at least most of the years, formative years for me. And so I took a job to go be a manager at this restaurant in Bellevue, Washington. And I got there and I was fired up all these new ideas of things I wanted to put in place, and I’m just kicking ass.
And about three months in, the assistant general manager says, hey, Jeremy, can I talk to you? And I said, sure. And she pulls me up to this. You know, we had this bar that was upstairs in the restaurant. She took me up there and she sat me down and she said, Jeremy, I know you have a lot of energy for this stuff, and you’re trying to do all these things, and it just makes it seem like you’re trying to make everybody look bad.
And I, you know, she’s a whole bunch of other stuff. At that point, I didn’t hear anything. And I’m, I’m crying in the middle of this restaurant. John I’m like a 23 or 24 year old guy in the middle of this restaurant that I manage at, and I am just in tears feeling so, I don’t know, violated or so small. It just felt like it sucked all the initiative out of my world, and I ended up putting in my two weeks.
I don’t know, it was a week or two later and I decided, well, I when I had been in Boise, Idaho originally because I had dropped out of college the first time here, I had bought a house, and I only lived here long enough before I moved out that I had to rent it. I couldn’t afford to sell it. And so at that point, I for, you know, three years had this rental home. So I thought, I’m kind of this real estate investor. Maybe I should do more with this real estate thing.
And my dad had recently gotten his real estate license and was doing some mortgages stuff. So I was like, maybe I’ll get that and I’ll start to think about, you know, how I could deal with real estate. And it ended up leading to the first business that I started. I think within four months, I met some people that were doing some interesting things on the investment side, and I thought to myself, when you go through training for real estate, the one thing they are adamant to tell you about is they say do not work with investors because all they’ll do is suck you for information and time, and then they’ll never do any business with you. They’ll go do it with somebody else.
And I thought about that for a second. I was like, well, but what about the people that want to be real estate investors but don’t know how they’re not going to suck you for information, that they need someone to help them do it. And so this idea was forming in my head, but I found out that you had to have your license for two years before you could become a broker. So I was like, well, I guess that idea doesn’t work. And then I was back in Boise for a weekend to visit.
My buddy and I ran into my ex-girlfriend. We started talking for a while, and she’d been in real estate for a couple of years. And next thing I know, she’s moving out to Seattle, Washington. She’s helping me set up this brokerage, and now we’ve been married for 21 years, so.
John Corcoran: 07:56
All right. Yeah, I guess so. And so that’s that’s the first business then the real estate business. How does that lead into Guidant or does it does it evolve into Guidant?
Jeremy Ames: 08:08
Yeah, it’s all connected, man. So I have this real estate company and we’re working with various investors and networks and stuff. And one of the guys I knew said, hey, you ought to meet this guy. I know, David, you guys are about the same age. You both like Michael Jackson music.
I think you’d really hit it off. And so I went and met David and we did. We liked each other. We had fun.
John Corcoran: 08:28
And I don’t know how tall you are. David is extremely tall, so that would be. That’d be a little.
Jeremy Ames: 08:33
They call me. They call me the Wee One. I’m only about six two, 190. So.
John Corcoran: 08:37
Okay, so you’re still pretty tall. Okay. So at least you’re not, like, looking up at him. I think he’s like six four or something like that.
Jeremy Ames: 08:43
Yeah, he used to be six five, but I think he’s shrinking as he’s getting older.
John Corcoran: 08:46
Yeah.
Jeremy Ames: 08:49
So anyway, I meet David, we hit it off, and we decide we’re going to do some investment projects together. And so we did a fix and flip and we did another sort of rental thing. And then, you know, David had been doing some land development and he had this project that he had secured over on the peninsula by the naval base. And he said, hey, you want to partner on this? I said, yeah, let’s do it.
And the whole strategy was, let’s take this plot of land, let’s subdivide it into smaller plots. And then we had a buddy who had a mobile home dealer’s license. And so the strategy was put down the concrete foundation strap, a mobile home to the concrete foundation. And when you do that, you can remove off title that it’s a mobile home. And now all of a sudden you can get traditional financing.
And so that was that was the shtick. Right. Is like you could take this less expensive home that can go up pretty quickly, and you can turn it into something where you can get typical, you know, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac financing. And so we go and meet with these attorneys to set up the entities for our fundraising efforts. And they said, hey, have you thought about using self-directed IRAs?
And we said, what are you talking about? Which was interesting because we were connected in all the local investor investment communities. And this wasn’t something anybody was talking about. And so we came to learn that for I mean, at that time, it was almost 30 years since ERISA was passed that you could use retirement funds to invest in all these alternative assets, including real estate. If you had the right custodian and the right person to help you do it.
And so we went back out to our network to do fundraising for this project, and we said, hey, by the way, if you want to use retirement funds, you know, we know how to use these self-directed IRAs and you can bring your retirement funds in and invest in it. And about two thirds of the funding commitments we got were from people who wanted to use retirement funds. And so then we had to scramble and figure out how do we actually do this. So we went back to these attorneys and we worked with them to put it together. And I think we walked away with two big learnings from that project.
One was nobody knew about this at the time. No one was talking about it, and people were super interested when they learned about it. And number two was it was really confusing to figure out what to do, like you’d call the same custodian and you’d get two different answers on two different days. And we just thought there has to be a better way. At the time, the only people that were really helping people with this were bank custodians and attorneys.
And you’re recovering attorney. So, you know, those are two people that don’t speak English. No they.