Ari Taub

At 22, Ari Taub was told that if he kept wrestling he could end up a quadriplegic.

He’d been at it since he was a teenager by then — 5th at Junior World Championships, 2nd Junior World Cup, Canadian Senior National Champion — but a diagnosis of bone spurs and a narrowing of the spinal canal ended all of that.

The doctors said stop, and he listened.

For the next ten years he built a different life. He went through law school at UBC, started a practice in Calgary, and he and his wife raised four kids. Wrestling was behind him.

Then he found out the diagnosis had been wrong all along.

So he went back.

Over the next few years he worked his way back into form and then past it, taking the Canadian Greco-Roman title in 2004 and adding bronze at the Pan American Games and gold at the Commonwealth Championship in 2007. In 2008, at 37 — an age when most wrestlers are long retired — he made the Canadian team and competed at the Beijing Olympics.

That story isn’t really about wrestling.

It’s about what happens when someone refuses to accept a bad answer, looks at the problem again from the ground up, and gets it right the second time.

That’s how Ari approaches his clients’ work too.

The Lawyer

Ari Taub has practiced tax, corporate and business law since graduating from UBC’s Faculty of Law in 1996. He began by working in some of Canada’s biggest and most prestigious law firms — articling at Ladner Downs (now BLG) and then working at Gowlings.

Once Ari found out he could wrestle again, he left the big firms and founded Taub Law, which he established in 2001 and has grown over 25 years on the strength of his client relationships.

His practice covers the full life of a business. He advises on incorporation and corporate structuring, drafts and negotiates shareholders’ agreements, and handles the purchase and sale of businesses — from a company’s formation through to the owner’s eventual exit. This breadth has given him a clear sense of how a well-designed structure serves an owner over time, and of the difficulties that arise when one is not.

Ari’s work concentrates at the intersection of corporate law, tax planning, and estate planning. It is an area few advisors cover in full, and one where the decisions an owner makes have a lasting effect on the value and security of what they have built.

The Entrepreneur

Ari doesn’t only advise business owners. He’s been one for most of his career.

In 2009 he co-founded Hard Knocks Fighting Championship, Calgary’s first professional MMA organization and now one of the longest-running fight promotions in the country. Running it taught him what a business demands day to day: managing operations and partnerships, generating revenue, weighing risk, and staying with it through the stretches when it would be easier to walk away.

He went on to found MediaFi Services, which structures and administers Canadian film and television tax credits — a complex, heavily regulated field where financial structuring, legal compliance, and deal-making all meet. MediaFi has worked on productions in Alberta, British Columbia, Ontario, and Manitoba.

Most recently, Ari partnered with financial planner Dave Watson to form WFS Partners Ltd, which brings legal, tax, financial, and insurance planning together under one roof. It’s the structural expression of how Ari believes this work should be done: the disciplines that most affect a business owner’s wealth, coordinated from the start rather than handled separately and stitched together afterward.

What connects all of it is a way of working he brings to his clients as much as his own ventures — looking past the default answer to find the structure that genuinely fits, and building it properly the first time.

Why Armor

Armor developed out of a pattern Ari saw repeatedly over his years in practice: business owners who had worked hard and built considerable wealth, only to lose a meaningful portion of it to tax because structures that had never been properly designed. Income was taxed more heavily than it needed to be. Estates passed in ways that did not reflect the owner’s intentions. Each advisor gave sound counsel within their own discipline, but no one held responsibility for how those decisions worked as a whole.

Ari created Armor to address that gap. His background in corporate and tax law allows him to assess the underlying structure, his experience as a business owner informs how he understands each client’s situation, and his established relationships with accountants, financial planners, and other lawyers allow him to coordinate everyone around a single, coherent plan.

The aim is simple.

Every client who works with Taub Law should come away with a plan built specifically for their circumstances.

Ari Taub is the founder of Taub Law Office and the creator of Armor. He is also the founder and CEO of Hard Knocks Fighting Championship, MediaFi, and the co-founder of WFS Partners. He lives in Cochrane, Alberta with his wife Sarah and their four children.