Lee-Chin spent two years at the Investors Group, in the Hamilton, Ontario, office and in 1979, moved to Regal Capital Planners and became a regional manager. Whilst at the company, in 1983, he secured a loan from the Continental Bank of Canada for C$500,000 to purchase a stake in Mackenzie Financial Group and formed Kicks Athletics with Andrew Gayle. By 1987, the investment was worth C$3.5 million.
In 1987, Lee-Chin took the proceeds from his Mackenzie investment and he bought a Kitchener-based company called the Advantage Investment Council (a division of AIC Limited) for $200,000. At the time, the company had holdings of around C$800,000. He renamed the company AIC, and developed it to a fund that today controls around C$6 billion, with hundreds of thousands of investors, states blackenterprise.com.
