Gregory Smith and the businesses you notice when they stop

A forest seedling is an unlikely place to begin a story about private equity. It is small, vulnerable to bad timing and unimpressed by an investor’s business card. Before it becomes part of a forest, someone must grow it, store it and get it to the right place. Gregory Smith’s investment career makes room for precisely this sort of work: the systems behind the things everyone else takes for granted.

Smith is the founder, President and CEO of Toronto-based Instar Asset Management. The firm’s world includes energy, transportation, logistics and environmental businesses. Its portfolio has included a passenger terminal, mushroom production and forest seedlings. Put them together and the familiar picture of infrastructure acquires some curious neighbours. Concrete has company.

There is a personal thread running through those investments. Smith talks about employees, management teams and communities as part of the business itself. His career has taken him through large financial institutions, industry associations and his own firm. Along the way, some relationships have travelled with him. To understand his approach, it helps to look at both the machinery and the people standing beside it.

Before the name on the door

Smith was born and raised in Western Canada. He earned an Honours Bachelor of Commerce at Queen’s University and became a Chartered Professional Accountant and a Chartered Business Valuator. The qualifications suit the work: understand the accounts, then understand what a business is worth. Those can be rather different conversations.

He held managing director positions at Deloitte and RBC Capital Partners. At RBC, his background included co-leading a mezzanine fund, working in the layer of financing between conventional debt and equity. He later became President of Macquarie Capital Funds Canada, responsible for its Canadian listed and unlisted funds business and Canadian assets held by offshore funds.

At Brookfield Financial, he was managing partner and head of the global infrastructure advisory group. His advisory work connected capital with businesses and public infrastructure needs. These were jobs that required an understanding of ownership, financing and operations, rather than a single view of an asset from across a trading desk.

The entrepreneurial chapter followed. Smith’s current biography dates Instar’s founding to 2014; in a statement announcing the firm’s 2021 rebranding, he described founding it in 2013. The early venture developed into the investment manager now bearing the Instar name. The underlying ambition was to provide private capital for essential infrastructure and help the businesses delivering it grow.

Two closes, carefully labelled

The first flagship infrastructure fund reached its final close in June 2017 with CAD$740 million in aggregate equity commitments. Investors came from Canada, Europe, the United Kingdom and the United States. InstarAGF was then a joint venture involving Instar Group and AGF. For Smith, building an investment firm meant persuading other people to entrust it with capital before the long work of ownership could proceed.

The second fund closed in June 2020 with approximately US$1.2 billion in commitments, exceeding its US$1 billion target. Existing investors participated at a reported rate of 80 percent. The geography widened to include the Middle East and Asia. Those details describe the fund’s capital base and investor relationships. The two fund totals use different currencies and should be read separately.

A commitment gives a manager the capacity to invest. It also creates an obligation to the people providing the money. Smith’s public account of Instar’s work links that financial responsibility to strategic advice, operating expertise and support for management teams. The amount raised is an opening milestone; a portfolio company still needs to open its doors the next morning.

The attraction of a smaller company

In his November 2023 interview about the middle market, Smith explained why Instar had chosen to remain a specialist there. He saw room to help smaller businesses develop competitive advantages through culture, talent and technology. The attraction was the work available inside a company as well as the price paid to acquire it.

That makes the owner’s task fairly concrete. A business may need stronger systems, a different approach to recruiting or a way to expand without losing the capabilities customers already value. An acquisition can provide another route to growth. Each route asks something of the managers who must turn a plan into a functioning operation.

Smith’s September 2023 account set out four areas of attention: purpose, people, process and technology. Purpose describes whom the company serves. People do the serving. Processes allow good work to be repeated. Technology can change how that work gets done. The formulation is simple enough to remember, which is helpful when the company being discussed is more complicated than four boxes on a page.

A nursery, a gas plant, a city’s heat

In April 2021, InstarAGF acquired PRT Growing Services from TriWest Capital Partners. Based in Victoria, British Columbia, PRT combined seedling cultivation with cold storage, logistics and technology. Its management team continued to lead the business. The investment put a reforestation supplier inside Smith’s essential-business universe, linking long-term environmental needs with a company already doing the practical work.

Two months later, PRT announced CAD$90 million in green loan facilities, led by Royal Bank of Canada and HSBC Bank Canada, to support the acquisition and future growth. At that point it described a network of 21 growing and cold storage facilities across Canada and the United States. Forest restoration requires seedlings, but seedlings require an operating network and financing. Even a future forest has an administrative side.

Steel Reef offers a different example. In April 2016, InstarAGF’s fund invested CAD$75 million in the Canadian midstream company, taking a 20.6 percent interest. Smith joined its board. Processing and transportation facilities sat at the centre of the transaction, with the investment supporting the company’s development of its asset base. It was a minority investment with an explicit governance role.

Creative Energy brought the story into downtown Vancouver. In 2018, the district energy company entered a 50/50 partnership with InstarAGF. Its downtown steam system had begun service in 1968. By its fiftieth year, the central plant supplied more than 210 customer buildings through a network of pipes. An ordinary warm room could have a surprisingly elaborate business history beneath it.

These companies have very different customers and operating demands. A nursery cannot borrow a gas plant’s timetable. A heating network has its own obligations to the buildings it serves. The connection is the essential service each provides. Following those services reveals a career concerned with the less visible arrangements that allow other activities to happen.

The engine in the office

A public tribute to Iris Roesler offers a more intimate view of Smith’s working life. He recalled a relationship spanning two decades and three firms: Macquarie, Brookfield and Instar. He credited her with helping the business run smoothly and with influencing both the team and the person he had become.

The image he chose was mechanical: “Iris is the engine that keeps our business running smoothly from day to day.” In a career devoted to essential systems, the metaphor fits. Here the essential system was inside the office, sustained by a colleague whose work made other people’s work possible.

Smith described gratitude for the partnership and friendship. The tribute gave the relationship a place alongside the formal career record. A list of employers tells us where someone worked. Remembering a colleague across those employers tells us something about what endured while the letterhead changed.

“Iris is the engine that keeps our business running smoothly from day to day.”Gregory Smith, in his public tribute to Iris Roesler

A return to the first business lesson

Smith’s interest in developing entrepreneurs has an early connection. As a high school student, he participated in Junior Achievement. Later, he returned as a guest speaker for students in a program supported by Instar, sharing experiences from his own career. There is a pleasing reversal in that journey: the student eventually becomes someone the students can question.

From November 2022 to April 2023, 14 students from seven Ontario high schools visited Instar’s office each week for the Junior Achievement Company Program. Team members contributed more than 300 volunteer hours to mentoring them as they developed ideas, business plans and an operating company. The exercise gave the students a small, practical version of the decisions entrepreneurs face.

Smith also helped found Young Leaders in Infrastructure, an organization connecting the next generation of Canadian infrastructure professionals through networking, education and development. He served for years on the board of Canada’s Venture Capital & Private Equity Association, including as chair and president. These activities extend his career beyond the companies in a fund, into the people who might build or finance the next ones.

The next chapter has a Québec address

In January 2026, Instar announced its acquisition of Groupe Somavrac through a consortium including Investissement Québec and the Fonds de solidarité FTQ. Built by the Paquin family over six decades, the company serves industrial supply chains, particularly along the St. Lawrence Seaway. Its work includes port operations, bulk storage, chemical distribution and transportation.

The announcement emphasized keeping the head office in Trois-Rivières and maintaining the company’s employees in Québec and Ontario. Marc Paquin would remain CEO during a transition period. Instar was acquiring an operating business with a local history, an existing workforce and relationships that could not simply be packed into a moving van.

That month, Smith welcomed Mathieu Ouellet as a Montréal-based partner to lead Instar’s Québec strategy. The appointment gave the expansion a person on the ground, responsible for investment opportunities, transactions and work across the portfolio. In the same announcement, Instar described approximately $3 billion of equity under management.

The next part of this story will be written in those businesses’ daily decisions. Smith’s stated ambition is to help essential companies adapt and develop over time. The portfolio supplies a useful reminder of what that involves: seedlings reaching their destination, materials moving through a terminal, energy reaching a building. Everyday life has a great many moving parts. Someone has to take an interest in how they keep moving.