Experience adds up

Neeraj Monga.

Neeraj Monga, a forensic accountant and financial analyst who works in equity research and corporate governance, came to Canada in 1998 to study at the Richard Ivey School of Business at the University of Western Ontario.

“Mainly because it offered the same world-class education as Harvard, and I could afford the first-year tuition with my limited financial resources,” he says. “I could then apply for Canadian residency after five months and get a student loan to cover the second year.”

Apart from the course itself, he found almost everything challenging.

He’d rented a room in a basement apartment that was mere minutes away from the bus stop from where it was a straight ride to the university. Until one morning Monga opened the door and stepped into three feet of snow. With no winter boots, nor a proper winter jacket, that walk is still etched in his memory.

“It took me 25 minutes to wade through the snow! Finding the kind of food I was used to was also hard. But it was learning by experience.”

Monga was offered an internship by his professor in his very first summer. Straight out of management school, he landed a job with Bain & Company. He then joined Veritas as their first employee and would go on to become executive vice-president and head of research before leaving to launch his own company, Antya. His firm offers discretionary investment management services to Canadian investors, helping them preserve and enhance capital through focused and disciplined wealth management.

Some of the most respected institutional investors globally seek his advice on corporate governance and security valuation, and in performance from portfolio, Antya is probably in the top one per cent of money managers in North America, based on its returns in the equity growth portfolio.

He tells those who seek his guidance on finding success in Canada that they have to first know where they are headed.

“Know your True North. Then stay the course. Take a professional path and keep working hard to make it happen. And take calculated risk. People think that an accent can come in the way and it might, but everyone here is competing on an equal intellectual basis. In Canada, 99 per cent of the people are as educated, or more, than you. When I graduated 20 years ago, most people had two degrees. There was a doctor or a CA doing his MBA with me. Now, three or four degrees are the norm.

“Think of it as a marginal return on investment. The marginal return on education diminishes as more and more people attain the same education. So you have to pull yourself above the crowd.”

 Monga pursued success because he wanted to be the best in what he did, he says.

“I managed to do that, but what continues to drive me is that now I have a more tempered outlook. Earlier, I was cocky, now I know I can be wrong, that I don’t know everything. It’s important to keep learning. To change your position as facts change.”