Joshua Herrington

The backbone

Before any of this, there was the mission.

U.S. Air Force. The Minuteman III missile field, a deployment, and the unglamorous logistics that let everything else run. Shots I took, and proof it was me.

Chase plane. F-16 off the wing — shot over Ohio.

Formation. Three vipers above the clouds, Ohio.

The kitchen. Running chow at a Missile Alert Facility — in the base paper.

Deployed. Morale, in cardboard.

Eighteen. The standard I'd been looking for.

Blues. The men who held a standard.

The call to service

A check. Not a maybe.

My work is protecting Americans — the middle class, the mass affluent, the next-door millionaire — with guarantees and risk-based planning. On the worst day of someone's life, the diagnosis or the breadwinner who doesn't come home, I want to show up with a check. Not a market-dependent figure. A check.

A man of two worlds: I served the world — Japan, Europe, Canada — and came home to protect the people who build this country. The American taxpayer, the mass-affluent resident, the expat and the immigrant whose money is American-taxed. If it protects a family, that's my front.

The throughline

Plenty of advisors reach elite production. A few build software. Almost none also write the book. I do all three — and the work is the throughline.

Operator

Protection-first: guarantees and risk-based planning for the American middle class and mass affluent — plus the cross-border lives whose wealth is U.S.-taxed. Court of the Table production.

Builder

A hard drive full of working tools, dashboards, and shipped sites — most built with AI, all built to solve a real problem.

Writer

A six-volume values series and an ongoing field journal. I document the becoming as it happens.

The work

What I've built

Not screenshots of ideas — working systems, designed and built by hand. Here's the shape of what I make and the skillset behind it.

Planning engines

Product & planning systems

Private-placement planning engines that teach the product, model any scenario, map revenue to every party, carry the operational flow, and monitor compliance end to end — built by hand, far past a tabular illustration.

Underwriting

Cross-border underwriting

Routers for the cases most advisors call “uninsurable” — mapping a client’s citizenship, residency, and U.S. ties to the carriers who will actually write them, with the field resources to close.

Economics

Deal & partnership models

Interactive economic models — pull the levers on architecture, earnout, market, and scale and watch gross revenue, net, and unit economics move in real time. The math made legible the moment an assumption changes.

Leadership

Sales-leadership OS

A sales-leadership operating system: positioning that flexes to the advisor, one advisor plugged into the whole platform. The systems I design, coach, and run — recruiting, pipeline, and process as one engine.

Data

Growth dashboards

Interactive boards for distribution growth by type and channel — the kind of data viz I build to think, and to show a team where revenue actually comes from.

Enablement

Training & enablement

PPLI/PPVA primers and partner decks that bring RIAs and broker-dealers up to speed fast — the education layer that makes a complex product usable in the field.

Next.jsPrismaTypeScriptFull-stack buildData visualizationFinancial modelingPPLI / PPVACross-border underwritingRevenue architectureSales leadershipCompliance

The becoming

From the missile field to the Court of the Table.

I left home at twelve and have been building myself ever since — a ranch, the United States Air Force, a kitchen, a sales floor. The Air Force gave me a standard and a set of men who held it. The rest I earned the hard way.

What I do now is move people, money, and systems forward — and I write it all down as it happens. Not the polished retrospective. The field notes of someone still in it.

I tasted the world and came home to serve the people who build this country. The debt stops here — for my daughters, and for me.

Guided by five values: Mahalo, Aloha, Ohana, Pono, Imua.

Credentials & speaking

The record

MDRT Academy 2022 → first MDRT qualification 2025 → Court of the Table 2026
MDRT EDGE 2026 — invited speaker (signed contract)
Lincoln Distributors annual meeting — speaker: partnership mentality & culture as a system
NAIFA National Artificial Intelligence Task Force
Leads five global MDRT AI study groups
NAIFA-Indiana Board of Trustees — Membership & Communications Chair
U.S. Air Force veteran — Minuteman III missile field
Board of Trustees — Jammin for the Camp (Hoosier Burn Camp)
B.S. Business Administration, SFSU — Magna Cum Laude