Was it hard to shift from corporate grind to startup hustle? By mid-2013, I concluded that if I devoted myself to this, I could get it off the ground, so I left Sears. I would take investor meetings downtown and then have to rush back to the Sears office for a 4 p.m. I started to pull together a few people to do a skunk works project on the side. It was in chaos, and I saw the end coming. During the credit crisis around 2008, a lot of the players offering interest-free financing to retailers packed up and retreated from Canada, creating a market void in a space in which I’d worked my whole career. I always had an entrepreneurial spirit and as I got further in my career, I started to feel less like I needed or wanted a boss. What made you ditch the lucrative corporate job to start from the bottom again? Here, Kalen discusses why he wanted to be his own boss, how retail is changing, and why he takes inspiration from one of music’s biggest rule breakers. Its platform provides over 8,000 merchants, including The Brick, Birks and Staples, with point-of-sale consumer financing by instantly approving shoppers for interest-free credit. A decade later, Flexiti has a loan book that recently passed $1 billion. He founded retail financing company Flexiti from his kitchen table. After an 18-year career as a finance executive for brands that included Canada Trust, President’s Choice Financial, Citibank and Sears, Kalen hung up his corporate suit just a few months shy of his 40th birthday and struck out on his own. Peter Kalen isn’t your typical startup founder.
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