Justin Bakes once described an unusually ambitious morning commute. In his imagined Boston, employees emerged from the train and hurried past the dawdlers, eager to get into the office. For most employers, a punctual arrival would be a satisfactory miracle. Bakes wanted enthusiasm on the stairs.
He told the story in 2019, seven years after co-founding Forward Financing. The business supplied working capital to small companies across the United States. But when he spoke about what he was proud of, keeping good people came ahead of growth. His picture of a successful workplace began before anyone reached a desk.
The image is revealing because it makes his ambition so ordinary and so demanding. A funding total fits neatly into a presentation. Wanting to come to work is harder to put in a spreadsheet. Bakes was trying to build both kinds of business at once. Eventually, that meant reconsidering his own place inside it.
An education in other people’s companies
Originally from South Florida, Bakes graduated from Boston College in 2003 with a finance degree. His early career took him into investment banking at UBS, advising financial institutions, private equity firms, and multinational companies on transactions in Europe and Latin America. He learned finance at the scale where the organizations already exist and the questions concern what to buy, combine, or fund.
At Watsco, the distributor of air conditioning, heating, and refrigeration equipment, he became director of mergers and acquisitions. From 2008 to 2011, he led acquisitions that helped the company double its revenue. It was an education in expansion through established businesses, well before he would have to create an organization of his own.
One intermediate stop is easy to miss. In May 2011, an industry appointment notice announced him as CEO of Florida-based 1st Merchant Funding. Small-business finance was already part of his working life before Forward arrived. The move from corporate transactions to merchant funding gives his founding story a more practical shape than a sudden flash of inspiration.
Boston was the beginning, not the boundary
Forward launched in Boston in 2012. Its customers were American small businesses seeking capital, including companies that traditional financing had left underserved. The basic problem was recognizable: a business can have revenue coming in and still need money before its next opportunity or obligation arrives. The schedule of running a company rarely consults the schedule of collecting from customers.
Bakes also brought a useful personal skill to the company’s expansion: he speaks Spanish fluently. When Forward needed more operational support, he reached out to a connection in Santiago, Dominican Republic. The resulting office became part of the organization’s service operation. Forward dates that expansion to 2014.
There is something pleasingly concrete about that episode. A language, a relationship, an office. Growing an organization can sound abstract until somebody has to decide where the next team will sit and who can help make it happen. The company’s Boston identity and its Dominican Republic operation developed together, serving a customer base in the United States.
The machinery behind a quick answer
By 2016, Forward was already investing in its own software. Its underwriting tools gathered information from multiple sources before a file reached an underwriter. A banking application helped the company analyze transactions. For Bakes, making a financing decision faster involved building the machinery that made the decision possible.
That distinction matters in understanding his work. A promise of speed is easy to advertise. Delivering it repeatedly requires information to move through a business without being lost, retyped, or left waiting for someone’s attention. The early technology investment shows how much of this founder’s job involved the unglamorous middle of the process.
He was similarly pragmatic about finding customers. In 2016, he described a hybrid approach that combined direct origination with broker relationships. Forward wanted to build its own customer pipeline while maintaining partnerships. Distribution and underwriting had to develop together; a capable funding operation still needs a way for a business owner to reach it.
First, ask a better question
Bakes’s approach to sales placed considerable weight on understanding the person across the conversation. In a 2018 discussion of sales training, he advocated a defined process. The point was to understand a customer’s operation and choose an appropriate financing option. Organization was part of earning trust.
A year later, he returned to the subject of consultative selling. “It’s a process,” he said. Forward used technology to maintain contact with customers between funding requests, rather than appearing only when another transaction was possible. Conversations could help the company understand how a business had used its capital and what it needed next.
That is a less theatrical account of entrepreneurship than the founder who can sell anything to anyone. It asks for patience, questions, and a memory. A business owner has a particular company, a particular set of expenses, and a particular reason for answering the phone. Treating those details as useful information was central to the sales approach Bakes described.
A ranking arrives. So does a bigger responsibility.
In 2017, Forward appeared at No. 15 on the Inc. 5000 list. Its fourth consecutive appearance, in 2020, came with a three-year revenue growth figure of 320 percent. These were company achievements under Bakes’s leadership, measures of an operation that had expanded substantially beyond its beginnings.
He received individual recognition too: EY named him a New England finalist for its 2019 Entrepreneur Of The Year award. Finalist is the precise distinction. The interesting part of his public record is how often this conventional language of growth sits beside a conversation about the working environment that supports it.
By the end of 2022, Forward reported adding more than 100 employees during the year. Bakes’s message in the company’s annual lookback emphasized maintaining its culture as the team grew. Recruitment changes the arithmetic of a workplace. Every new colleague needs more than a laptop and a welcome message; expectations have to survive being explained by someone other than the founder.
Ten minutes at 9:20
In a conversation published in January 2021, Bakes described a leadership rhythm influenced by Patrick Lencioni’s Death by Meeting: an hour on Monday, then ten-minute check-ins at 9:20 on the remaining mornings. Yesterday’s progress and today’s plans had a regular appointment.
He also described a more difficult adjustment. Decision-making had once revolved around him. As the company grew, he needed to leave smaller decisions with his colleagues and make room for longer-term work. He used elephants and squirrels to distinguish consequential choices from the smaller matters that did not require his involvement.
The animal kingdom had acquired an organizational chart. Behind the amusing shorthand lay a serious question: how can colleagues develop judgment if the founder keeps exercising it for them? Bakes acknowledged that accepting different approaches was something he was still learning. Leadership, in this account, included the discipline of allowing another person’s answer to stand.
Capital, with some homework attached
In February 2023, Forward announced a partnership with the Initiative for a Competitive Inner City, the Boston nonprofit known as ICIC. It offered customers tuition-free executive education, including programs aimed at helping business owners build capacity and pursue sustainable growth.
The arrangement included an unusually tangible encouragement to finish: qualifying customers could receive up to a $1,000 reduction on an existing balance or a future round of funding after completing a program. The education had a financial incentive attached, a practical recognition that a busy owner’s attention is already heavily subscribed.
It extended the consultative instinct beyond the sales call. A company that provides money has an interest in what happens after the money arrives. Bakes argued that better-equipped entrepreneurs would benefit both their businesses and Forward. The ambition was straightforward enough to be useful: help customers become more capable operators, alongside supplying capital.
“It’s a process.”
Justin Bakes, on consultative selling, 2019
The founder changes seats
On August 7, 2024, Forward announced that Jason Mullins would succeed Bakes as CEO at the end of the year. Bakes would become executive chairman. The announcement described a search for the next leader and a transition the two would prepare together over the following months.
Mullins came from goeasy, the Canadian consumer lender. His experience was relevant to a company seeking to grow beyond its earlier scale. Bakes endorsed the appointment and the opportunity to reach more small businesses. Having spent years building the company’s organization, he was now changing the job at its center.
The transition was confirmed on January 2, 2025. Mullins became president and CEO; Bakes assumed the executive chairman role, continuing to provide strategic guidance. This was a concrete change in responsibility after twelve years as chief executive. The founder remained involved while another executive took on running the company.
Justin Bakes · Executive Chairman
A longer clock
By September 2026, Forward said it had delivered $5.4 billion in funding to more than 100,000 small businesses since 2012. It also announced an agreement under which a private credit fund committed to purchasing up to $1.8 billion of advances over three years. These describe the company’s funding activity and capacity, with Mullins now serving as CEO.
Bakes had set out a more distant ambition in a September 2024 interview: helping one million American small businesses. He also spoke about investing in people, processes, and technology, and about Boston’s supply of talent. The goal was much larger than the customer total he was discussing at the time.
His career now offers two ways of reading progress. One is the cumulative total: businesses funded, dollars delivered, years in operation. The other is organizational: an office opened through a relationship, a conversation improved by asking questions, a successor installed. For a founder, learning to count the second kind may be part of earning the first.
The commuter on the stairs remains a useful image. Bakes wanted people to arrive with purpose. Building a company that can give them that purpose, and the authority to act on it, requires a founder to make room. After twelve years in the chief executive’s chair, he moved to a different one.