The Town of Tecumseh had to change a bylaw to make it legit when teenager Matt Shalhoub began hawking shaved ice at local sporting events at municipal parks.

Shalhoub is still only 30 years old, but he now sits atop a multimillion-dollar private investment fund that is helping build Canada’s nascent cannabis industry. Green Acre Capital, based in Toronto and Calgary, is named after the park in the neighbourhood where the young entrepreneur was raised and where he got his start in business.

We’re going to see the Canadian players dominate the market

Shalhoub, the Toronto-based managing director of Green Acre, helped launch the country’s first investment fund devoted exclusively to cannabis in January 2017. The $25 million raised at the time went into 13 different ventures, and a second fund, with just over $80 million raised, was launched two months ago.

“We’re in the early stages of what will be a very long game,” he said of Canada’s budding new industry. On Oct. 17, Canada became the world’s first major economy to legalize recreational pot, but Shalhoub is absolutely convinced that the U.S. — where a growing number of states are already taking the plunge — will have recreational cannabis use legalized federally within the next decade.

“We’re going to see the Canadian players dominate the market,” he said.

It’s a young industry also in the age of those who are involved. Shalhoub sits on a number of corporate boards and deals with numerous companies in the cannabis sector as potential investment targets, and he said their directors tend to be much more youthful than what’s typically found sitting around traditional corporate board tables.

“It’s unique in that regard — it’s a space dominated by a younger demographic,” he said.

Shalhoub was born with business and entrepreneurship genes, with both his father and grandfather having run companies in the Windsor area. Growing up, he was expected to help out at his dad’s Holland Cleaning Solutions, but he’d strike out on his own after the work there was done.

On a family vacation, he fell in love with shaved ice, with carvings off a block of ice covered with flavourings and enjoyed with a spoon. At 15, he’d hit Green Acres Optimist Park after school and sell the treat to those at the little league baseball and soccer games. Soon, he was at the Cornfest and Strawberry Festival and then hiring friends and family and expanding to fresh lemonade and cotton candy.

It helped get him through business school at the University of Western Ontario before he decided he needed experience in “the real world” and did a summer internship at a Toronto investment bank. Working up to 100 hours a week and ending up making less than in his old shaved ice business, “I asked myself, ‘What am I doing here?’”

He declined an offer of a full-time job with the investment banker and began, with partners, becoming an investor himself. Within months of Justin Trudeau forming a Liberal government in 2015, Shalhoub said he saw the opportunity and started investigating the potential of cannabis.

“I always thought of myself as entrepreneurial, I never imagined myself managing a pool of capital. But meeting with hundreds of entrepreneurs and hearing their stories and their ambitions — it’s been great,” he said. “I’m very bullish — I see the rest of my career investing in cannabis.”

Shalhoub will be speaking in Leamington on Tuesday as part of the finance panel at WE Cann 2018, the area’s first cannabis trade conference. Some of North America’s leaders in cannabis research, cultivation, production, processing and investing will be among the 200 delegates at the day-long event at the Roma Club.

Organizers of the conference — being co-hosted by TheCannalysts Inc. and Grant Thornton Canada — say the Windsor-Essex region “is on the trajectory to become Canada’s cannabis production capital.” Tickets are $250 (plus tax) and keynote speaker is Vic Neufeld, CEO of Leamington-based licensed producer Aphria Inc.

Initial estimates have pegged Canada’s recreational cannabis market at more than $8 billion annually.

Craig Wiggins, the Tecumseh-based managing director of TheCannalysts, said the new industry will create “a ton of entrepreneurs” and that the cultivation side, already a multibillion-dollar sector, represents the mere “tip of the spear” in jobs and investment opportunities for local entrepreneurs and companies.

dschmidt@postmedia.com

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