Lakeshore Capital is a private investment company, the investment office of a single family. We invest our own capital in operating businesses, real estate, natural resources, and special situations, principally in Western Canada. We have no outside investors, no funds to raise, and nothing to sell.
Lakeshore was built by an entrepreneur trained as an institutional investor. The path ran through energy investment banking, principal investing at a global financial group, and the co-founding of a private equity platform backed by sovereign and institutional capital, where the transactions ran to ten figures. It has since run through the operating chair: founding companies and leading one from a standing start through its public listing, building businesses around some of Canada’s largest infrastructure projects, developing residential real estate in Western Canada’s mountain communities, and investing on behalf of one of the world’s most established energy families. The capital raised along the way is measured in billions; the judgment came from putting our own alongside it.
We buy and back middle market companies, particularly founder-led and family-owned businesses facing a succession, a transition, or a situation that calls for patient capital and a fast, certain close. We underwrite quickly, close with certainty, and back management teams who want to stay. We are a family buying from families, and we act like it.
We found businesses. Some we start ourselves, from a blank page; others we build alongside entrepreneurs we believe in, putting early risk capital to work at the stage where conviction matters most.
And we take companies public. We maintain a set of vehicles that hold full public reporting status and stand ready to carry a private business through to a listing. We have used them repeatedly and recently, we know where the process breaks, and we carry the file ourselves.
Our capital is our own, so we answer to no committee and no fund clock. We do our own underwriting, we move when conviction and terms align, and we hold what we buy. We work alongside a small circle of long-standing partners: operators, financiers, and counsel we have transacted with for years.
If you have a business to sell, a situation that needs a principal rather than an intermediary, or a company that belongs in the public markets, write to us.