Unlocking Retirement Funds for Small-Business Financing

Guidant CEO Jeremy Ames and OmniAI CEO Tyler Maran discuss alternative capital, venture capital pitfalls, and the human side of automation.

When it comes to starting or acquiring a small business, most entrepreneurs assume the options are limited to debt or venture funding. But as Jeremy Ames, Co-Founder of Guidant Financial, and Tyler Maran, Co-Founder of OmniAI, revealed in their conversation, a lesser-known but powerful tool is gaining traction: using retirement funds to self-invest and essentially be your own angel investor.

Retirement Funds as Startup Capital

Guidant helps clients use their retirement accounts to purchase or fund businesses without incurring penalties.

“The way that we structure it is such that the retirement account becomes a shareholder in the business. It’s essentially a way to become your own angel investor.” Jeremy Ames, Co-Founder, Guidant Financial

Guidant’s model relies on setting up a C Corporation that your retirement plan invests in. Unlike borrowing from your 401(k), this method incurs no repayment obligation or interest as it is an equity investment by your own plan.

“Instead of your 401(k) investing in Nvidia stock, it’s investing in Tyler Maran Inc.” - Jeremy

This approach sidesteps the hassle and downsides of traditional debt financing while enabling control and upside. People have varied reactions when they learn this is possible:

“Some people say, ‘You can do that? That’s amazing.’ Others say, ‘Why on earth would you want to use your retirement fund?’” - Jeremy

Guidant’s clients are exclusively small businesses where the owners aim to buy or build an enduring income stream and examples run from campgrounds to metal shops. Their goal isn’t unicorn growth (like it is at OmniAI - who are on the VC funding track), but long-term ownership and income.

From Real Estate to Retirement Capital

Guidant didn’t start as a financing company. Jeremy was originally a real estate entrepreneur developing land near a naval base.

“We learned about self-directed retirement accounts from a group of attorneys. Two-thirds of our investors used retirement funds. That was our aha moment.” Jeremy

Recognizing the complexity and knowledge gap in the space, Jeremy and team pivoted from real estate to retirement-based small-business funding. Alongside unlocking this new insight and building a product around it, another inflection point was a marketing discovery which Guidant were able to jump on in the early 2000's while it was in its infancy - Google Ads.

“One of our buddies said, ‘Hey, you should start marketing on Google.’ That changed everything.”

Online marketing remains a big part of Guidant's growth today, and is supported by various forms of content, ranging from infographics to white papers - check out their Learning Centre which includes all the digital assets.

Solving real problems for customers

Much of the discussion centered on resilience and iteration, especially critical for founders bootstrapping with their own capital where runway is top of mind.

“The macro skill of all entrepreneurs that succeed is their ability to manage uncertainty. It’s going to happen.” Jeremy

“We’re not even on the third plan we started with. You have to adapt constantly.” Tyler

Both agreed: success is about building clarity on the customer, the problems you can solve for them, and of course disciplined cash management to ensure you stay in the game long enough to find what works.

“People come in with money and want to spend big with inventory, buildouts, the full works. But they haven’t proven demand.” Jeremy

“Don’t spend a dollar until you know where your money levers are. And those levers change over time.” Tyler

Financial services AI adoption

While many firms focus on cutting costs, Jeremy and Tyler agree on a different mindset.

“Using AI purely to reduce headcount is incredibly short-sighted. The second people think innovation leads to job loss is the second they stop supporting innovation.” Jeremy

Instead of reducing headcount, Jeremy sees AI as a tool to free up human capital, creating space for team members to focus on work that is best done by humans, such as customer and partner relationships, content creation and more.

“What we’re trying to figure out is: what’s going to be uniquely human in 5, 10, 20 years? That’s where we need to invest.” Jeremy

It has become increasingly easy for companies to test the waters with AI and build MVP's of simple tools in-house, but spinning up a quick MVP is very different to building out a fully functional, reliable tool that maintains quality at scale.

In-house teams will often hit the 80/20 rule pretty quickly and projects grind to a halt as edge cases emerge. Solving for every edge case a wide customer base can throw at you while you're a 50-500 person company with a small tech team isn't a great use of time:

“Most AI tools solve 80% of the problem quickly. That last 20% takes two years. Reliable rollouts are where the real work begins.” Tyler

Jeremy doesn't see AI as a plug and play fix for most problems, and prefers a more considered approach that moves slowly at the beginning, bringing everyone involved into the process to ensure that 1) choosing the right problem to work on and 2) everyone's bought in.

“In our culture, we talk about the cost of collaboration. You either pay it in the planning stage or pay it in adoption failure.” Jeremy

Key Takeaways

• Retirement funds can be invested penalty-free into a C Corp you own, providing equity capital without debt.

• This alternative is ideal for those with $100K+ in retirement and a desire for control over their business.

• Startups and small businesses succeed by navigating uncertainty, testing manually, and focusing on their customer before scaling.

• Financial-services AI adoption that sticks will focus on augmenting and repositioning, rather than replacing humans