First Capital · Who We Work With
Apprentice Academy
Learn how to live before you learn how to lead.
Before you build something great, become someone who can carry it.Begin a Conversation
Who this is for
Emerging young leaders with significant potential.
Apprentice Academy is a one-year formation experience for emerging young leaders with significant potential—young men preparing to build businesses, lead organizations, raise families, create wealth, and carry meaningful influence in the world.
We believe most leadership development starts too late. The world teaches people how to build a career, grow a company, make money, develop a platform, and lead other people, but rarely teaches them how to build the person who will eventually have to carry all of it. Apprentice Academy starts there.
The First Capital Team has designed Apprentice Academy to fit the college-aged years, with a track built around the real-life challenges young men face in this season of life.
Who leads it
A father and his son.
Apprentice Academy is led by Dr. Chad Norris and his son, Sam Norris. Their shared passion is to equip young men to build the person before they build the life.
Chad brings a lifetime of leading, teaching, and walking with people through formation. Sam brings the perspective of the next generation—the same season, pressures, and ambitions the apprentices are carrying.
Together they walk alongside each apprentice through intentional coaching, honest conversation, challenging books, and practical spiritual rhythms—and out into the Canadian wilderness, where formation becomes real.
The First Capital Pathway
Four practices for a lifetime.
A simple framework for the journey—and the practices apprentices carry long after the Academy ends.
Tell the Truth
Name what is really happening inside you—the pressure, the fear, the ambition—before it quietly runs your life.
Get Quiet
Step away from the noise long enough to hear God, hear yourself, and notice what hurry has been hiding.
Build the Rhythms
Establish practices of prayer, Scripture, rest, and honest friendship that hold you steady when life speeds up.
Let Go of the Outcome
Do the faithful work in front of you and release what you were never meant to control.
We aren’t trying to produce impressive young leaders for a year. We are trying to help form men and women who know how to live for the next fifty.
Why we start here
Formation before acceleration.
There will be plenty of time for all of it.
- Build the company.
- Make the money.
- Lead the organization.
- Raise the family.
- Pursue the dream.
But first, the interior life capable of carrying those things without being destroyed by them.
The goal
The goal isn’t simply success.
It is to become a person of
- Peace
- Integrity
- Courage
- Generosity
- Deep connection with God
who can carry success without losing what matters most.
Be before do.
The other pathway