Jamelle spent over a decade playing professional basketball across four continents. What stayed with him was not the competition. It was what he watched happen to people when the income stopped. Talented, disciplined, hardworking people whose financial lives quietly unraveled not because they were careless, but because nobody had ever helped them build something that could hold without them. The paycheck ends. The business slows. The career shifts. And suddenly everything that took years to build is exposed in ways nobody prepared for. He watched that happen up close, repeatedly, and it never stopped bothering him. When his own playing career ended, he knew exactly what he wanted to build next and why. Purpose1st exists because that gap between earning and lasting security is where most financial stories go wrong.

Makinley graduated from Penn State one week before her father died. She had spent years preparing for a career in medicine, driven by the belief that she was meant to help people. That belief never left. But standing at the entrance of a hospital to begin her career, she could not walk through those doors. Grief made the decision. She found her way into wealth management, and over the years moved from advisor to Director of Operations at a firm managing private equity relationships and multimillionaire client portfolios. She learned this work from inside the rooms where it actually happens. But the experience that built her conviction was personal: after her father passed, his estate was not distributed the way he intended. She watched what that cost her family. It is the reason protection is never a secondary conversation at Purpose1st. It is always the first.