Steve King and the price of keeping the keys

The keys to a business weigh very little until somebody asks you to hand them over. Then they seem to contain everything: the right to hire, the freedom to expand, the familiar faces at work, the choice of when to leave. Steve King has built much of his working life around the awkward moment when an entrepreneur needs money but would rather keep those keys.

King is the co-founder and chief executive of Calgary-based Alaris Equity Partners. The proposition he helped establish in 2004 was aimed at owners with profitable businesses and unfinished plans. They might need to buy out a shareholder, make an acquisition or take some money off the table. They could welcome an investor while still wanting to run the place. An owner’s attachment to a company can look sentimental from a spreadsheet. From the owner’s chair, it looks rather practical.

That tension gives King’s career its shape. His work involves preferred shares, distributions and negotiated limits on growth participation. Underneath the vocabulary sits a question that requires no finance qualification: after the money arrives, whose business is it? The answer has changed as Alaris has grown. Following those changes is more revealing than treating its founding idea as a slogan that never needed revision.

A banker crosses the table

Before Alaris, King spent 12 years in investment banking in Toronto and Calgary, advising public and private company entrepreneurs on raising capital. He had a working view of the choices available to an owner, and of the distance between a financing proposal and the person expected to accept it. In 2004 he crossed from advising on those choices to helping build an investment company of his own.

An idea still needs someone willing to finance its first steps. For Alaris, an important early backer was Clay Riddell, the energy entrepreneur who became the predecessor company’s majority shareholder and chairman. Riddell chaired it from 2004 to 2008 and remained a director of the public company until 2013. Alaris went public in 2008; King joined its board that year.

When King paid tribute to Riddell in 2018, he remembered support for an idea that had yet to prove itself and steadiness during turbulent times. His account dwelt on loyalty and family as much as business judgement. It suggests the kind of backing King valued: money accompanied by someone prepared to remain present when the original plan met the world.

There is a useful symmetry here. A founder seeking patient capital helped build a company offering patient capital to other founders. That observation does not make every later decision inevitable. It does make the original problem easy to recognise. King had become an entrepreneur himself, with an investment business to operate and relationships to maintain. The banker was now responsible for what happened after the transaction closed.

The arithmetic of leaving room

Alaris’s preferred-equity structure makes the discussion about control tangible. In its described non-control arrangements, the firm takes non-voting shares and does not require a board seat. The owner continues directing operations. Alaris receives distributions, with annual changes linked to an agreed financial measure such as revenue or gross profit. The investor can earn cash returns while the business remains in private hands.

A collar places limits on how much those distributions can change in a year. Suppose, purely as an illustration, that the agreed ceiling is five per cent and the relevant business measure grows by twelve. The preferred distribution rises only to the ceiling. The owner retains the benefit of growth above the investor’s capped participation. Different agreements have different terms; the point is the division of the next increment of success.

That arrangement can matter to someone who expects to spend another decade building a company. Giving away a slice of every future improvement may feel rather different from agreeing a payment whose growth has a boundary. The commercial bargain is visible in the paperwork. So is an assumption about who will be doing the work.

The structure also addresses time. In its standard non-control description, Alaris does not give itself a put option requiring the owner to buy it out. Common shareholders have a call option after three years to repurchase the investment. These provisions place choices about a future sale or repurchase with the owner, subject to the agreement. Patience, in this setting, has clauses.

None of this removes commercial pressure. A preferred distribution is a claim on the company’s cash. Alaris uses consent rights and protective covenants, and a struggling partner remains a struggling business. The interesting choice is how much day-to-day authority the investor needs in exchange for its capital. King’s firm made a business out of negotiating that question.

A goodbye with numbers attached

A long relationship can end well. In October 2016, Solowave sold its children’s play division, prompting the repurchase of Alaris’s preferred units. Alaris had first invested in December 2010 and added capital in November 2014. By the exit, its total contributions were C$42.5 million.

The company reported C$31.4 million of distributions collected and C$44.6 million of redemption proceeds. Together, less the capital invested, those amounts produced roughly C$33.5 million of total return, or 79 per cent. The reported internal rate of return was approximately 17 per cent. These are historical results from one investment, with different measures answering different questions.

King’s response had room for the people alongside the arithmetic. The managers, he said, had become friends. He was pleased they had found a situation that suited their goals, while recognising that an ending could still be difficult. It is an unusually human detail to find beside a redemption table. The account department could reconcile the proceeds; friendship had no corresponding column.

Solowave is useful because it gives the idea of long-term partnership an ending. Alaris received regular distributions along the way, then recovered its investment when the partner’s ownership circumstances changed. An indefinite horizon had left room for an eventual sale. Permanence was an option available to the relationship, rather than a demand that it never conclude.

For King, that distinction matters. Owners need freedom to keep building, but they also need freedom to decide they are finished with a particular arrangement. A financing model that respects the first choice has to reckon with the second. Solowave’s exit supplies a concrete example of both, with a financial result and a farewell occupying the same announcement.

“they have become friends over that period of time as well.”

Steve King, on Solowave, October 2016

The idea grows up

It would be convenient to stop the story at non-control preferred equity. Alaris’s later transactions make that ending too tidy. The firm now describes investments that combine preferred and common equity, and it has moved into managing third-party capital. Those developments broaden what it can do for a business owner. They also require a more careful account of who ultimately holds control.

Ohana provides the turning point. In December 2024, Alaris announced its second asset-management transaction involving Ohana Growth Partners and a third-party private equity investor. Taking its own investment together with the third-party investment it managed, Alaris became a control investor for the first time. That was a change worth stating plainly, even for a business whose original proposition emphasised staying out of the owner’s chair.

By October 2025, King was discussing the relationship in a company video. The partnership had lasted more than a decade. The significance for his story is the distance travelled: an existing relationship supported a new ownership arrangement, rather than being frozen in its first form. Long-term partners can eventually ask one another to do something different.

The distinction between operational freedom and shareholder control becomes especially useful here. A management team can remain central to a business while its capital structure changes. Whether the arrangement serves that team depends on the specific rights, economics and plans agreed. The label on the investor’s website cannot do that work by itself.

King’s career is more interesting with this complication included. He has stayed at the head of Alaris since its founding while its available tools have expanded. A company built around an ownership problem can outgrow its first solution. The test becomes whether its newer solutions still answer the owners in front of it, with their particular ambitions and particular reasons for wanting to stay.

Who gets the next set of keys?

Continuity has also become a question inside Alaris. In 2021, longtime chief financial officer Darren Driscoll announced his retirement. He had been with the business from its early days. King spoke of going through the ups and downs of building a company with a friend, and praised the values and positivity Driscoll had brought to the team.

Amanda Frazer was named to succeed him. King described her years of involvement with Alaris and expressed confidence that she had earned the opportunity. Succession is often discussed as a product an investor supplies to other companies. Here it was a decision about a colleague leaving and another colleague taking responsibility. The subject had arrived at Alaris’s own desk.

King’s official biography describes a married father of three who is a sports fan, player and coach. Those details supply a modest glimpse beyond the transactions. His professional role remains hands-on: he is involved throughout the investment process and in the relationships with partner companies. The continuity of the chief executive is therefore part of the service the firm offers.

The work continues. In September 2026, Alaris published a conversation with The Shipyard’s chairman and chief executive, Rick Milenthal, about choosing the firm as a partner. That same month, Alaris announced the closing of a C$115 million bought-deal offering. One development concerned the experience of a business owner; the other concerned the capital needed to keep investing. King’s job sits between those two conversations.

There is no need to make preferred shares romantic. They will resist. What gives this story its human interest is the owner trying to make a financial decision without accidentally making every future decision at once. King has spent more than two decades building and adapting a company around that concern. The keys are still small. The terms on which someone gets to keep them remain the larger matter.