On April 13, Republic Business Credit announced the appointment of Robert Meyers as chief executive officer. Meyers, who has served as the company’s president and chief commercial officer for the past decade, succeeds co-founder Stewart Chesters, who will assume the role of president and serve as interim chief credit officer.

Throughout his career, Meyers has consistently driven meaningful results that elevated the teams and organizations around him. At Bibby Financial Services, he quickly rose to the position of head of Sales and interim managing director. He earned his MBA from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in 2017, simultaneously partnering with a family office to lead a buyout of Republic alongside Chesters in April of 2016. With a focus on growth initiatives, Robert joined as chief commercial officer and managing member and was appointed president in 2017. His influence extends throughout the industry; he served as the President of the Secured Finance Network in 2025 and was a member of SFNet’s inaugural 40 Under 40 Awards class.

TSL: Tell us about some highlights and milestones, either you personally or Republic has experienced during your time as president with Republic?

Meyers: Personally, I've gotten married, blessed with three kids, and graduated from Kellogg in the last 10 years since I joined Republic, which has been a lot of fun. 

Professionally, I would tell you Republic's had a similar round of milestones. As president, a lot of my focus is on the growth side and on the people side of our business. Ten years ago, we had just one product in recourse factoring.  Now we have both recourse factoring and non‑recourse factoring as well as an entire Asset-based lending business (along with our e‑commerce asset-based lending product). So, we've gone from one product to four products. We've also gone from having a largely Gulf Coast-based presence with New Orleans and Houston, to adding on a great team in Southern California, and launching offices in both Chicago, Atlanta and Detroit. 

On the people front, we've also really been in a talent-building mode. We’ve built out our team by recruiting establishing experienced secured lending professionals to head Field Exam, Legal and Underwriting teams to complement our high potential hires across all areas of the business. Additionally, we’ve established our Corporate Development Team structure across our department heads along with regional management structure across some of our sales teams, empowering our leaders across the organization.  We were lucky to recruit Sue Duckett as head of our recourse factoring business. This year, we’ve already hired nine people and expect that number to keep growing. In fact, we've doubled the number of people in the last decade, which is pretty cool.

We’ve learned that as your business becomes more complex, you need to broaden and deepen your entire team, and it necessitates the need for strong talent and the right people.  People power our success and future growth; it’s how we better serve our current and future customers.

As we’ve grown, our deal size has increased, and our industry expertise has deepened. Early on, we did a lot of oil field service and temporary staffing. Now we've broadened that with more in the consumer-packaged goods category, such as apparel and textile, furniture, food, beverage, manufacturing, automotive and distribution.  We've always been a big proponent of government contractors as well. Ten years ago, we primarily funded receivables, and now we fund receivables, inventory, equipment, and some real estate.

We were lucky to enter into an agreement with Renasant Bank in 2023. Becoming a full-owned subsidiary under Renasant opened a lot of doors for us, both with capital and opportunities. Less than three years in, we’ve only tapped the surface of our potential and we’re building the company now to be ready for the growth we expect to achieve with Renasant.

What are your top strategic priorities for Republic over the next 12 to 18 months, and how do they reflect current borrower needs?

Meyers: Leaders need to recognize where the friction points and the limitations are of your organization. As I step into the CEO role, I become one of our biggest limiting factors, while I simultaneously could be its biggest driver.  We are in the period of growth where we're realizing some of the economies of scale for the business that we've built. All of that comes with responsibility and, in some cases, privilege, because I must empower our leaders to be able to make those decisions. We must evolve from a few people trying to do everything to really trusting and encouraging our team to focus on becoming deeper and trust their experience. When people are in asset-based lending, they need to be asset-based lending experts. When they're in recourse factoring or they're in non‑recourse factoring, they need to be experts in that space. And that mindset is equally as important when we think about the industries we serve. One of the responses to our borrowers is to get deeper experience in our industry verticals, which allows us to better support a client, not only today, but more importantly, better support that client through all the waves of change, whether it's tariffs or supply chain disruption, price of fuel, or the future uncertainty that will always exist.  The better we understand our client’s industry and the business, the better we, as a lender or factor, can support our clients, not only today, but our future clients also, who we haven't even met yet.

How will your role as CEO differ from your role as president?

Meyers: Fun Fact: Stewart actually hired me out of college 20 years ago and has championed me throughout my career. From a recent college graduate through my time at Republic, he always valued me as a partner. We’ve always run the business with an understanding that our goals were the same despite focusing on different sections of the business. While Stewart was more internally focused, I was able to focus externally, whether that was new clients, development projects or our recruitment efforts.  Now, with our partnership still firmly in place, Stewart’s focus shifts to new ways to grow our business (AI, M&A, etc.) while I focus on our broader growth.

One of the biggest adjustments for me is knowing I can't be everywhere, I can't do everything, and I won't have as much information necessarily about some of the decisions that ultimately get made. But I can tell you the thing I can control is hiring the best team of people, developing them and empowering them to make decisions so that they need me less. And if I do this really well, people then need me less in the day‑to‑day, and I can focus more and more on where we're going and who we want to be in the next 5, 10, even 20 years.

I also find myself relying more on my peers in the industry. You need peers who are maybe 10 years ahead of you; at the same time, you need peers who are 10 years younger, and you need to keep asking questions. I think there's a danger of people getting into these “ivory tower” roles, and getting disconnected from the people who manage the clients, while also getting disconnected from the clients themselves.

Honestly, I was always taught that you tend to do a job before you get a job. I’ve been working on developing myself with Stewart’s support to be the CEO Republic needs me to be for our next 15 years.

Asset-based lending continues to evolve, with increased competition and more customized capital solutions. Where do you see the greatest opportunities for differentiation in secured finance, and how is Republic positioning itself to capitalize on it?

Meyers: I always say the true differentiator of Republic is the people we have and the decisions they make. We can differentiate ourselves in how we recruit, how we develop, how we retain, and how we promote ourselves. That's one of the things that's in our control. We can absolutely deepen our industry and our product experience. Essentially, we can be a better version of ourselves.

What's interesting now is that a lot of other lenders are leaving our market. A lot of the people that used to be $2 - $20 million dollar lenders are now doing $30 to $300 million dollar deals, and that's not the space we're going to go in. We are here to help the small and the medium‑sized borrowers, whether they're very healthy and they're looking to grow, or whether they've had some changes or some tough moments.   We have the sophistication, and I would like to think the intelligence, to successfully deliver multiple products across our area of the market. We understand in today's world, what makes sense for larger organizations doesn’t need to make sense for us. I think the opportunity for us is knowing who we are and who we're here to support and staying within our lane. It can be tempting to “hook the big fish,” but that doesn’t stay true to who we are and who we want to be. We're building a company that is focused on generating risk-adjusted returns from good clients, not caring about assets under management or the size of our firm. We don't need the glory of doing a $30-million-dollar deal; we're just as happy, whether it's a $5-million-dollar asset-based loan, or it's a $15-million-dollar factoring deal. Maybe it's someone who only needs to be with us for a couple of years or a decade.

By being ourselves, we have the greatest opportunity for growth.

How are you balancing growth objectives with risk management?

Meyers: As much as I've said the word growth, I believe we're actually more in a risk management business. We've always taken the mindset of, “it's great, let's do this deal, but if it doesn't go according to plan, what do we do? How do we collect? How do we get our money back? Most importantly, how do we structure it in a way that allows us to be a good partner to this client?”

At Republic, we have a philosophy and we have precedent. When we get ourselves into similar situations, we all take a moment and say, okay, what's happened in the past, what have we seen some others do, and what have we learned from our peers. We take that into account to make the best decision possible with all of the information we can put together.

At the end of the day, we just enjoy being part of our clients' stories and doing it in a way in which it makes sense for both of us. We watch people trade growth over common sense, and I would tell you, for us, we really focus on who we are, who we can help, and we accept that we can't help everyone and we shouldn't try.

What is keeping you up at night right now?

Meyers: I think about managing my own energy levels, and my ability to differentiate between noise and substance. There's a lot of inputs, whether it's from AI and its impact, from tariffs, or geopolitical events. You've got to be careful what you're focusing on. You've got to be careful that you don't change the core values and the core fundamentals of what you're building just because there's an unknown now in play.

What keeps me up at night, specifically in regard to Republic, is losing our discipline. It keeps me up wondering if we're not focused on the right areas and on the right things. I think knowing our focus and ensuring that our people are not only ready today, but also ready for tomorrow's clients and tomorrow's challenges is the best way to avoid potential issues. I can't be everywhere and I can't be everything to everyone. I can't be in every meeting, I can't be on every call, but I can, to the best of my ability, get our team together. We've launched what we call our corporate development team, which is made up of 14 people who all have direct reports within our business. Building this team and giving them the responsibility to take ownership of their piece of Republic is a way in which we are trying to make sure we stay focused on the right things. One of the things I'm excited for in the future is to broaden our leadership and to broaden our contributors while in turn, I think will make us more agile, more adaptable, and more focused on where we're going together.  We are a team that works towards the same goal.

Is there anything in the general industry that's keeping you up? Things that are affecting other lenders also?

Meyers: Evolution. I'd say this goes back to philosophy for me. When you're underwriting a new client, you have to accept that there is a point in time when client's going to change and/or the industry's going to change. You need to put your clients in a spot to be successful from the first funding.  If you’re not really helping a client, creating new liquidity and availability from our facility, you’re not necessarily going to be able to help them mitigate risk in the future. Because it will happen. Change will come. At Republic, we try to make sure that all of our new clients pass the viability test, but more importantly, we put a plan in place that we're working on together. And when things aren't going to plan, we have the ability, not only through our factoring groups, but through our asset-based lending groups, to monitor collateral more closely, to do more field exams, to do more verifications, to do more “let's look at these invoices in detail instead of in bulk.” Sometimes it's better to partner than try to do the whole thing yourself, too. I think it starts with the client and what's best for the client, not only today, but what's best for that client six months from now.

Any closing remarks?

There is immense opportunity in secured lending right now. Our products exist to solve the obstacles businesses face in the current market climate. If you remain committed to doing the right thing for the right reason and to building a team that understands the value in your solutions, the possibilities are endless.

Looking back on where this industry was 20 years ago compared to when I joined Republic a decade ago to even now, the transformation is staggering. I am excited to be Republic’s next steward as we make another mark on Republic’s history and I hope our company continues to advance our industry for the benefit of our entire community.