Second- and Third-Act Entrepreneurs

Meet the NoMi startup founders who prove it’s never too late to launch a great idea

By Kierstin Gunsberg | Oct. 4, 2025

In the last decade, northern Michigan has grown its reputation as an entrepreneurial hub for college grads and their startups, thanks to events like the TCNewTech pitch competitions and incubators like 20Fathoms and Grove Community Incubator. But twenty-somethings aren’t the only ones bringing new ventures Up North.

According to the Kauffman Foundation, nearly a quarter of new entrepreneurs are between the ages of 55 and 64. And, true to the adage “with age comes wisdom,” research shows these founders are actually more likely to see success than their younger counterparts.

Northern Express caught up with five of them to find out what inspired their new(ish) businesses, where they see things heading next, and what advice they’d share with other folks considering a near-retirement rebrand.

Robert Gras, Manistee’s Mini-Mall Mogul

The busy, fluorescent-lit shopping mall experience we once knew may belong to a bygone era, but northern Michiganders (and its millions of annual visitors) have proven they’ll never stop loving a little retail therapy at locally owned boutiques or a warm reprieve during winter.

Those are two things Robert Gras’ new indoor mini-mall, River Street Marketplace, will bring to downtown Manistee when it opens this fall.

After a major ice-related injury ended his long career as a music educator in 2022, Gras, then in his mid-50s, needed a new plan. So when he and wife Cheryl saw a 16,000-square-foot midcentury building hit the market in summer 2023, they pulled together their savings and kicked off nearly two years of renovations, including removing lead-lined walls from the building’s former dental practice, tackling vintage wiring, and undoing some aesthetically questionable ’90s updates.

Even if the TLC exceeded Gras’ original cost and timeline calculations, he sees the 10 units and their tenants (including Cheryl, whose shop will feature custom aromatherapy blends and experiences) finding a quick following as they bring nearly a dozen new clothing, dining, and shopping options to River Street’s crowds.

A composer who also sells his sheet music online, Gras advises other would-be entrepreneurs to monetize their own hobbies through a mix of classes, events, and retail presence instead of relying on just one outlet, especially in our seasonal area. “If you’ve got an idea for something, think about how you can diversify that so there’s more than one way you can drive income from it,” he says.

Francis “Tex” Criqui’s Startup for Startups

At Traverse City’s chapter of SCORE (where new business owners can turn for free advice and education) volunteer mentor Francis “Tex” Criqui has seen an upside to launching a business later in life. His older mentees tend to be more discerning and practical about what it takes to really run a company, from funding limits to time commitments.

“They’re a little more cognizant of what’s in front of them,” he says. “You’ve been through the mill once or twice, you know, and you kind of have a feel for what’s feasible, what’s possible. You’re just a little more perceptive.”

Now, at “well past my 70s,” Criqui, who once helped launch an incubator at Southfield’s Lawrence Tech, is putting his years of experience with nearly 400 startups into his own new venture, The North Coast Jobs Factory.

Launching in 2026 as an offshoot of his Traverse City consulting firm Francis Criqui and Associates, the project will advise startups on building sustainable strategies that last beyond the initial idea. It’s easy to find support for that early stage, says Criqui, but many founders struggle with which steps to take next once the adrenaline of actually getting off the ground begins to settle.

His four-step plan—discover, define, develop, deploy—will help entrepreneurs answer the question of “now what?” by pinning down and reaching their main market before trying to jump ahead or scale too quickly.

Criqui is excited to work with founders in all fields but is especially focused on blue economy startups, an area he thinks will see huge growth and job production once the Freshwater Research and Innovation Center officially opens its doors in 2027.

Lori Kroger, The Accidental Elderberry Entrepreneur

“You’re never too old to learn,” says Lori Kroger, who launched her herbal supplement company, Northern Elderberry, in her mid-50s after a long bout of illness. “I caught a bacterial infection that made me very ill to the point where I was bedridden,” she recalls. “I lost a lot,” including her career as an ICU nurse.

In search of her own healing, and finding that traditional medicine wasn’t meeting all of her needs, Kroger turned back to the herbal skills her grandparents had shared with her when she was young.

“When modern medicine wasn’t working [for me], I thought, you know, maybe I need to go back to my roots, remember what my grandparents taught me,” she says. So, she started batching up elderberry syrups to boost her immune system, and as her health improved, friends and neighbors started asking to try them too.

What began as a personal project in the garden and kitchen became a crash course in business ownership. Ten years later, Kroger is in much better health and her family-run company now produces over 1,000 bottles of handcrafted elderberry syrup each year and is sold in independent retail outlets all over Traverse City, Cadillac, Grayling, and Suttons Bay (and online!).

A seasoned clinician, Kroger isn’t writing off modern remedies, but says she’s glad to offer another option for the medicine cabinet. And, after having to start over unexpectedly at a time when many are plotting retirement, she’s also glad to show it’s never too late to succeed.

“If you don’t try it, how do you know? The worst thing that could happen is you fail.” Even then, she says, reflecting on her own hiccups as an accidental entrepreneur, “When you fail, you’re also learning.”

Tom Gordon and John Velis Bring “Bright” Idea to Eldercare

(Left to right in photo: Valis, Gordon, DeLonge)

As familiar faces to decades of NMC alumni, retired professors Tom Gordon and John Velis know a thing or two about how students learn—and what trips them up.

About 10 years ago, Gordon noticed his history students stumbling over the names of “really dinky little European countries that you may or may not have heard of but you certainly can’t identify.” To help, he turned to flashcards with a digital twist, creating versions he could put in his students’ online classroom (“Moodles”) to study anytime.

The flashcards were part of Gordon’s experiment with the perceptual learning method (PLM), a teaching style he’d recently learned about that helps learners recognize patterns by experiencing them directly. Instead of slogging through lectures or textbooks, his students were visually reviewing map outlines of those obscure places like Andorra and Liechtenstein, and soon enough, confidently pointing them out too.

Thinking others could benefit from the method, Gordon teamed up with Velis, whose computer technology students helped create ThinkLocker, a web app that lets users build their own custom flashcard sets. Since then, it’s helped learners worldwide, from maritime students memorizing knots to med students spotting afib on an EKG. And, in partnership with NMC colleague Mark DeLonge (who Gordon and Velis joke absolutely does not make the age cut for this issue), they’ve reached hundreds of users.

Now Velis and Gordon have joined back up with DeLonge to launch MemoryBright, entering its pilot phase this fall. Built on the ThinkLocker model, this version is designed for caregivers supporting people with dementia and memory challenges, something that’s close to home for Velis, whose late father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. “He was starting to forget my kids, his grandkids,” says Velis.

For Velis and Gordon, this season of life means there’s freedom to build passion projects without the pressure of career stakes. “One of the advantages that we have to some extent is that our time and our age allows us to be a little more deliberate in how we proceed,” Velis says. “We’re old enough now that we can be more … introspective and retrospective about the process.”