Golf and grandkids are two fine pillars of retirement, filling plenty of days with leisure and excitement. But for career veterans used to chasing trends, closing deals, and staying in the know, two pillars alone won’t hold. At least, not according to longtime Richmond businessmen Stan Maupin and Gary LeClair, who built a Boomer-focused speaker series around the motto: “Golf and grandchildren are not enough.”
From Boardroom to Boomerhood
When he retired, Maupin, now 75, “wasn’t going to just stay home and not do anything,” he says. A business consultant for Richmond-area entrepreneurs for more than 30 years, he often worked alongside LeClair, a corporate attorney. Together, they founded the Richmond Venture Forum and the Greater Richmond Technology Council.
“We’d always been out there on the evolving edge of things,” says LeClair, 70—and that wasn’t about to stop just because they were getting older. As they neared retirement in the early 2010s, the question turned to: “What’s next?”
That phrase nearly became the name of the group they formed to help Baby Boomers stay connected, informed, and fulfilled in post-career life. Over the pair’s periodic lunches, the idea for their breakfast speaker series gradually took shape, and they eventually landed on the label “Encorepreneur”—a fitting name for a second act (credit to Maupin).
Encorepreneur Takes the Stage
Their first meeting in 2013 was held in Richmond’s Corrugated Box Building, an office space reimagined from a 1920s warehouse in Manchester. Matt Thornhill, founder of the marketing research and consulting firm Boomer Project, was the inaugural speaker. About 60 people attended, but it wasn’t the number that impressed Maupin and LeClair so much as who showed up. Sitting in the front row was Jim Ukrop, Richmond business icon and former CEO of Ukrop’s Supermarkets…