How We Measure Ourselves — And Why the Numbers Matter

How a Fishing Boat Led to a Finance Desk

I spent eight years on commercial fishing boats off the Gaspé coast. Snow crab, lobster, cod — whatever was in season. It was brutal, physical, honest work. You learned to read weather, manage risk, and respect the fact that the ocean doesn't care about your plans. Then my back gave out — L4-L5 disc herniation — and suddenly I was sitting in a Rimouski apartment wondering what came next. I was thirty-one years old, and the only career I'd ever known was over.

During recovery, I started reading. Finance textbooks, market history, tax code — everything the Rimouski public library had on the shelf. Not because I planned a career change — I just needed something to do that didn't involve lifting anything heavier than a coffee mug. The more I read, the more patterns I recognized. Risk management on a fishing boat and risk management in a portfolio aren't as different as you'd think. Both require discipline, situational awareness, and the humility to know what you can't control.

Turns out, being an outsider was the advantage. I didn't know how things had "always been done," so I asked "why" instead of "how." Every assumption I questioned revealed a gap — in fee structures, in service models, in who was being served and who wasn't. The biggest gap? Nobody was serving startups properly. Banks saw them as too small. Traditional brokers applied retirement-portfolio logic to companies burning $150K a month. Wealth managers wanted minimum account sizes that excluded anyone still building something.

I enrolled at HEC Montréal. Got the CFA. Spent nine years at National Bank Financial, the last four managing institutional accounts worth hundreds of millions. I learned how the big machines work — the execution, the compliance frameworks, the portfolio construction methodologies. But the itch never went away — the startups falling through the cracks, the founders making treasury decisions by guesswork because nobody would take their call.

In September 2007, I registered IBKR Invest from a rented desk in Old Montréal. Six hundred square feet, one phone, and a conviction that startup treasuries deserved the same attention as institutional portfolios. By the end of 2008 — the worst year to launch anything in finance — we had seven clients and $11 million placed. The financial crisis proved the thesis: the startups that survived were the ones with someone paying close attention to their treasury. Our clients had liquidity when they needed it. Their competitors didn't. You can read the full case studies for the details.

Eighteen years later, we're still in Old Montréal — now at 1035 Rue Hermine, with a team of six and over 120 emerging company clients across Quebec. Still hungry. Still proving that a small firm that outworks and outthinks the big ones belongs at the table. We've built out five core services specifically because we watched startups get burned by the alternative, and we've developed stage-specific strategies because a pre-seed company and a post-exit holdco need fundamentally different approaches.