About John G. Kent

I’m John G. Kent. I finished a Bachelor of Commerce at the University of Toronto in three years, then spent the next two decades doing things the hard way — which turned out to be the right way.

I worked in credit, then returned to the family farm, a joint venture on equal terms with family partners, for close to a decade. When mad cow disease hit, cattle prices collapsed overnight. We lost a million dollars in a single day. That kind of loss either breaks you or clarifies you. We kept going.

I started my banking career as a Business Advisor, working with small business owners across a wide range of industries — farmers, tradespeople, professionals, and family-run operations.

Along the way, I completed the Canadian Securities Course and earned my Personal Financial Planner designation. On paper, that training is about financial products and planning. In reality, it teaches you something more useful: how to read a balance sheet the way a lender does, not the way a business owner hopes it looks.

I ended up winning Best of the Best for small-business banking and finished the year at more than double my sales target. There was even a day when I brought in $8.5 million in a single account switch. That kind of move isn’t about rates — every bank will offer something similar. It’s about trust. Deposits follow relationships. Lending follows numbers. Knowing the difference between those two things changes how you walk into every conversation.

Then came a role as a parts manager at a New Holland tractor dealership. Then we bought a property in Bath, Ontario, and the kennel that came with it had to start paying the mortgage.