Overwhelmed Business Owners: A Firm That Started Where You Are
We didn't study investment theory first and then go looking for clients. We ran a business, got burned by generic advice, and built the tools we wished existed. This page is that story — from a 22-acre greenhouse in the Fraser Valley to $127M in assets under advisement for owner-operated businesses across British Columbia.
The Industry Broke Something — and Kept Selling Anyway
You run a business. Revenue arrives in unpredictable surges — a settlement after harvest, a large contract payout in Q3, silence in January. You've accumulated investment accounts across a decade of well-meaning advisor meetings. One RRSP here, a corporate account there, a TFSA your spouse opened at a different institution. Nobody coordinates them. Nobody asks about your actual cash flow. Your portfolio was built for a dentist who contributes $5,000 monthly — not a trucking company owner whose income swings $400,000 between quarters. The conventional advisory model treats every client like a salaried professional with a predictable paycheque, and it has been doing so for decades with zero incentive to change.
Meanwhile, the largest investment firms in Canada are deploying artificial intelligence to build portfolios, analyze risk, and identify opportunities. Those tools aren't available to you. You receive a quarterly PDF, a phone call that lasts eleven minutes, and a recommendation to "stay the course." The technology gap between institutional investors and owner-operated businesses is not a feature of the industry — it's a failure. We started IA Investments in 2013 to close it.
The question that drove Naveen Kaur out of agriculture and into investment management was deceptively simple: why should AI-powered portfolio construction be reserved for pension funds and endowments with nine-figure mandates? The owner-operators who grow food, haul freight, pour concrete, and build communities — they face forecasting decisions every bit as consequential as any portfolio manager on Bay Street. They deserved better tools. So we built them. Our six core services exist because each one addresses a specific problem that conventional advisory firms couldn't — or wouldn't — solve.
"I had six different accounts with three different advisors and not one of them had ever spoken to the others." Harpreet Gill, Owner, Gill Demolition & Recycling, Surrey, BC
How We Think About AI and Your Capital
Custom Models, Not Questionnaires
Robo-advisors use risk-tolerance surveys to slot you into one of ten prefabricated portfolios. We refuse to work that way. Our models ingest your business financials, your tax structure, your seasonal patterns, and your family governance dynamics. The result is a portfolio that understands your specific constraints — not a template that hopes to approximate them. Every engagement begins with discovery: weeks of gathering account statements, tax returns, and business records before a single model is trained. That thoroughness is why our onboarding process takes 4–6 weeks, not 4–6 minutes.
For Pacific Prairie Grain Corp., Dr. Cheung's team trained a recurrent neural network on 11 years of actual transaction history — learning the cash flow cadence so precisely that the portfolio dynamically shifts allocation month-by-month around procurement and settlement cycles. The result: a Sharpe ratio improvement from 0.42 to 0.91, and two forced liquidation events avoided entirely. That level of specificity is the standard, not the exception. Read the full case study to see how cash-flow-aware modeling translates into measurable outcomes.
"When the market dropped in 2022, our drawdown stayed below 8% while friends of mine were down 15–20%." Eileen Nakamura, Director, NorKai Holdings
Human Judgment at Every Decision Point
Our AI generates recommendations, surfaces risks, and simulates thousands of scenarios. A CFA or CIM charterholder reviews every output before it reaches you. We treat AI as an analytical engine — not an autonomous agent. The models accelerate research and catch patterns humans miss — buried fee provisions in 200-page offering memoranda, regime shifts in market behaviour, liquidity mismatches across scattered accounts. The judgment, especially around context that doesn't live in a dataset — your family dynamics, your succession anxieties, your gut feeling about a business partner — remains stubbornly human.
Marcus Redfield, our Senior Investment Analyst, has spent 14 years translating complex analytical outputs into recommendations business owners actually understand. When he reviews a model's recommendation, he applies contextual knowledge no algorithm possesses: the phone call you had last week about selling a division, the regulatory change your accountant flagged, the fact that your daughter wants to join the business instead of pursuing medicine. That layer of human judgment is irreplaceable.
Radical Transparency About Uncertainty
Every report includes a "So What?" section in ordinary English. Every recommendation identifies where human judgment overrode the algorithm and why. We tell you where the model is confident and — critically — where it isn't. Naveen Kaur's greenhouse losses taught the firm early: hiding uncertainty from a client isn't protecting them. It's setting them up for a worse surprise. When a commodity price forecast has a wide confidence interval, we say so. When a regime-detection model suggests a transition but the signal is ambiguous, we present both scenarios and let you weigh in.
This philosophy extends to our published research. Every article we write identifies the limitations of the analysis alongside the conclusions. We'd rather publish a useful piece with honest caveats than a confident piece that misleads. Our clients deserve the same intellectual honesty we'd want if our own capital were on the line — which, in many ways, it is.
Zero Conflicts of Interest
We don't sell funds. We don't earn commissions. We don't accept referral fees from product manufacturers. Revenue comes from advisory fees (0.65%–1.10% of assets under advisement annually) and flat project fees ($1,500–$12,000 depending on scope) — period. When we recommend an investment, there is no financial incentive pulling us toward one product over another. That structural independence is rare in Canadian financial services, and we guard it fiercely.
This isn't a marketing distinction — it's an architectural one. When Ranjit Sidhu of Sidhu & Sons Transport sent us an offering memorandum his previous advisor was pushing, our AI flagged three buried fee provisions the advisor had missed. One would have cost $86,000 in exit penalties. His old advisor earned a commission on that product. We don't. That's why we caught what he didn't. Fee transparency and structural independence aren't nice-to-haves — they're the foundation everything else is built on. See our full fee structure for details.
"Four families, four opinions, zero resolution — until IA Investments gave us a shared set of facts."
Managing Partner, Fraser Valley Brewing Collective
A Timeline — Not of Growth, but of Stubbornness
2013 — present. Here's how we got here, one deliberate decision at a time. Every milestone below represents a choice to build deeper rather than wider — to serve existing clients better rather than chase new ones faster.
Built by People Who Understand What's at Stake
This is a family-run operation in spirit and in practice. Six people. Deep personal investment. Legacy and reputation on the line with every recommendation. When you call IA Investments, you reach the person who built your model — not a call centre, not an intake coordinator, not a voicemail tree that routes to someone who's never seen your file.
Naveen Kaur, CFA
Founder & Managing Director
Naveen ran a 22-acre greenhouse operation in the Fraser Valley before discovering that the algorithmic models he built to predict pepper pricing outperformed his produce broker's forecasts by a significant margin. That realization — that mathematical models could outperform human intuition in complex forecasting environments — changed the trajectory of his career. He sold the greenhouse in 2013, incorporated IA Investments, and set out to prove a contrarian thesis: AI tools reserved for institutional investors should belong to the owner-operators who grow food, haul freight, and build communities.
He holds a B.Sc. in Agricultural Sciences from UBC (2003) and earned his CFA charter in 2016 through three years of self-study while running the firm — studying on red-eye flights, early mornings, and weekends between coaching his daughter's field hockey team in South Surrey. He still grows Scotch bonnet peppers in a backyard greenhouse he refuses to dismantle, a reminder of where every forecasting instinct began. Naveen personally reviews every client model before it ships and maintains direct relationships with every family the firm serves.
"I learned forecasting by trying not to lose a season's worth of bell peppers. The stakes felt just as real as any portfolio." — Naveen Kaur
Dr. Elaine Cheung
Director of AI Research
Elaine earned her Ph.D. in Statistical Learning from Simon Fraser University in 2014, with a dissertation on ensemble methods for time-series financial data — the same mathematical framework that now powers the firm's cash-flow-aware allocation models. She spent four years at TELUS's analytics division building churn prediction models before joining IA Investments in 2017. Her arrival marked the beginning of the firm's proprietary model pipeline — the infrastructure that makes every service possible, from predictive cash flow modeling to NLP-driven due diligence on alternative investments.
She maintains a whiteboard in her office filled with equations that she claims are "almost finished." They have been almost finished since 2019. Her blunt assessments of vendor AI products are legendary internally and have saved clients from purchasing overpriced tools that deliver underwhelming results. When Elaine says a model is ready, it's ready. When she says it isn't, nobody argues. Her regime-detection algorithms flagged the shift into a high-volatility state in early 2022 — giving clients lead time to reduce equity exposure before the drawdown accelerated. That kind of signal is the difference between a smoke alarm and an annual fire inspection.
"Most vendor AI products are a logistic regression wearing a trench coat." — Dr. Elaine Cheung
Priya Dhaliwal, MBA
Client Engagement Lead
Priya earned her MBA from the Beedie School of Business at SFU in 2015 and spent five years in commercial banking at Coast Capital Savings, managing lending relationships with family enterprises across the Lower Mainland. She joined IA Investments in 2020, driven by frustration with how little technology her previous employer made available to small business clients. That frustration became fuel — she now ensures that every client, regardless of technical background, understands exactly what our AI models recommend and why.
Fluent in Punjabi, Hindi, and English, Priya is often the first person a prospective client speaks with — and the person who facilitates the most difficult family conversations around capital allocation. When the Fraser Valley Brewing Collective spent 14 months deadlocked on how to invest pooled capital, it was Priya who facilitated three in-person Monte Carlo scenario planning sessions that turned disagreement into unanimous consensus in six weeks. She organizes the firm's annual Vaisakhi client appreciation lunch and has a gift for translating complex AI outputs into language that makes families nod instead of squint.
"Priya sat with us through three sessions, and by the end, we'd reached unanimous agreement. I didn't think that was possible." Jens Kaiser, Managing Partner, Fraser Valley Brewing Collective
The Rest of the Team
Marcus Redfield, CIM — Senior Investment Analyst. Fourteen years in Canadian equity markets, including eight years at Raymond James Vancouver covering small-cap industrials. Marcus translates AI model outputs into portfolio construction advice that business owners actually understand. He commutes 38 km from New Westminster to Surrey by bicycle — every day, year-round — and brings the same disciplined consistency to client portfolios.
Tomasz Wójcik — Quantitative Developer. M.Sc. in Computational Mathematics from the University of Waterloo (2016). Built backtesting infrastructure at a Toronto hedge fund before relocating to BC in 2019. Tomasz maintains the proprietary model pipeline — the data ingestion, feature engineering, and deployment architecture that powers every analytical tool we use. A competitive chess player at BC Open level, he applies game theory principles to risk modeling.
Angela Forsythe — Operations & Compliance Manager. PDO compliance designation through the Canadian Securities Institute. Fifteen years in operations at Richardson Wealth and Canaccord Genuity before joining in 2021. Angela ensures our registration with the BC Securities Commission (PM-2013-07842, EMD-2013-07843) stays current, our compliance program meets every regulatory requirement, and — as she puts it — "the smart people don't accidentally break securities law."
The Numbers Behind the Convictions
We measure ourselves by what matters to our clients — savings found, relationships that endure, and trust that compounds year over year. These figures represent real outcomes for real families across British Columbia, from Dawson Creek to White Rock.
Important Disclosures
Past performance is not indicative of future results. All investment returns referenced on this site are historical and do not guarantee future performance.
Investing involves risk, including the possible loss of principal. The value of investments and the income derived from them may go down as well as up.
IA Investments Inc. is registered as a Portfolio Manager (Registration No. PM-2013-07842) and Exempt Market Dealer (Registration No. EMD-2013-07843) in British Columbia under the jurisdiction of the British Columbia Securities Commission (BCSC). Registration details are publicly available through the Canadian Securities Administrators' National Registration Database (NRD).
Licence No. BC-FIN-2013-4417. Member of the Mutual Fund Dealers Association of Canada (MFDA) — Membership No. 91562.