I try not to start anything I can’t see myself doing for the next ten to twenty years.

How I got started on this path

Some kids spend their time playing basketball, other kids get absorbed by video games. As a kid, I spent my time imagining the future in vivid detail.

The future felt like a long way away when I was fifteen, but to me that was a good thing, because it meant I had time to build something truly significant.

And that’s where my obsession with investing began.

A few dollars earned here and there, small scraps of allowance put into a lock-box. Eventually, I had enough to open a trading account under my father’s name, and I never looked back.

Things didn’t always go well. They rarely do. But when you’re focused on the next thirty to fifty years, a hiccup in the economy, the bursting of a bubble, and a market crash won’t stop you for long.

A few years after I started investing, I applied to one of Canada’s most notoriously selective universities: the Royal Military College of Canada. I spent four years there honing the skills that I knew would help me in the world of business: communication, leadership, discipline, and focus.

But I didn’t truly understand the importance of those skills until after I’d left the military sixteen years later and started my own company, BTC. Faced with the challenge of growing a business, I turned back to a skill I’d developed over the years: investing.

It quickly became obvious that the fastest road to scale was through mergers and acquisitions. And this is the road I find myself on today: building a portfolio of great businesses, whether public or private, with the goal of creating long-term wealth for all parties involved. And what a road it’s been.

Dorian