Scott Ellam does not talk about Bitcoin in the language of price targets or overnight fortunes.
When we speak, his framing is deliberately sober. 'It's not a get rich quick opportunity,' he says. 'It's about not getting poor slowly.'
It is a neat line, and it captures both his view of money and the pitch behind Connecting Excellence (XCE), the recently listed Bitcoin treasury-backed international executive recruitment group he leads.
The group arrived on Aquis last month, on 11 December 2025, with relatively little fanfare but a track record of a growing, cash-generating business and a serious long-term Bitcoin strategy, which feels almost wilfully unfashionable in a market that has a habit of treating crypto as sentiment-dependent hype.
Only weeks earlier, Bitcoin had briefly traded above $120,000 before sliding back again, another reminder that the asset can still move like a risk-on trade even as its supporters insist it should be understood as something closer to an alternative form of long-term savings.
Ellam's argument, shared by long-term advocates, is that Bitcoin works best when it is approached as a store of value rather than a vehicle for trading.
The comparison most often made is with gold, though he is careful to stress the differences in terms of custody, transportability, divisibility and verifiability as he analogises a digital version of gold.
Bitcoin, he argues, is resistant to the familiar hazards that come with holding value inside the conventional financial system: it cannot be printed in response to political pressure, it is not diluted by discretionary monetary policy, and it is not exposed in the same way to the failure of a bank.
Underneath the rhetoric is an architecture that is easy to describe and hard to ignore.
Bitcoin's supply is capped at 21 million coins, enforced by code rather than policy. Its ledger is maintained by a decentralised network secured through proof-of-work mining, a mechanism designed to make the system costly to attack and difficult to capture.
None of this prevents volatility, and Ellam does not pretend it does. Retail flows, institutional positioning and leveraged speculation can still produce sharp rallies and painful drawdowns.
His point is that the noise does not change the underlying proposition: over a long enough timeframe, scarcity, security and predictable issuance matter more than sentiment.
That is where his slogan about 'not getting poor slowly' comes in. Even without a crisis that triggers fiscal stimulus, the arithmetic of cash can be unforgiving.
For illustration, £1 million left on deposit at a 3 per cent interest rate would have an inflation-adjusted value of about £902,000 after five years if the cost of living rose at 5 per cent a year.
In other words, you can do everything 'sensibly' and still move backwards.
Ellam took that idea out of theory and into his own business. In 2021, he decided to hold the cash reserves and allocate surplus cash of Spencer Riley, the executive recruitment firm he founded and now XCE's flagship, into building a Bitcoin balance sheet rather than accept what he considered negative long-term returns on bank deposits.
The strategy has, so far, worked on its own terms and shown resilience over the long term. Before the initial public offering (IPO), the group held 9.27 Bitcoin bought at an average price of £37,500, with consistent purchases throughout an 80 per cent drawdown in the Bitcoin price.
With Bitcoin now around £68,000, the balance sheet tells a story that would have been harder to write with term deposits.
That experience and conviction is the foundation of XCE-Connecting Excellence Group. It is a Bitcoin treasury strategy designed to both access capital markets and further increase revenues and profits in the operating business to acquire more Bitcoin.
In a sector where firms sell expertise and relationships rather than plant and machinery, that framing matters. XCE is trying to put a hard number under an asset-light, people-led model, and then use the active Bitcoin balance sheet as a deliberate strategy to increase cash flow rather than as a by-product.
The Aquis listing added fuel, and the public status is key to the strategy. The oversubscribed float raised £3.3 million to accelerate the approach, taking the Bitcoin treasury to 41.35 Bitcoin, worth just under £2.77 million.
Yet the flotation was not only about buying more Bitcoin. It also created a quoted currency for hiring and expanding the group.
Ellam's view is that recruitment is a talent business where companies grow as a result of their ability to attract revenue-generating executive recruiters.
It follows, then, that the addition of equity-backed, performance-based incentives can be used to attract high performers, giving them the upside of a growing Bitcoin reserve and long-dated alignment with shareholders. Share options, he argues, should be more than compensation. They should be a reason to join, perform and stay.
The underlying executive recruitment economics help. XCE's flagship firm, Spencer Riley, places senior- and director-level candidates and serves a diverse client base across global leaders in professional services, AI intelligence, business advisory, logistics, engineering and integrated services.
Most recently, it launched a Bitcoin division with clients already including Bitcoin investment funds. It operates across the UK, US, Europe and the Middle East and last year generated 70% of its revenues from overseas placements.
Recruiters tend to earn a modest basic salary, with the bulk of remuneration coming from commission on successful placements. That makes the cost base inherently flexible, rising and falling with sales revenue.
It is a useful attribute for any business, but particularly for one that wants to be disciplined about turning surplus cash into a treasury asset.
From here, XCE's growth plan is to attract revenue-generating talent and to bolt on other profitable, low or no-debt recruitment companies so they can route their cash generation into the same framework.
'If you are a low or no-debt private executive recruitment company with growing revenues, growing profits and a cash reserve, you could join the group,' Ellam says.
'Cash reserves are converted into Bitcoin, future profits are directed into Bitcoin, the bolt-on business can then also leverage share options to attract more talent, and the owners earn equity based on their business's performance and contribution to the group's top-line cash flow used to acquire Bitcoin.'
The incentives are designed to be long-dated. 'You also receive share options over the long term, for example over three, five and seven years. When you reach the point where you want to exit, we already have share option and performance-linked equity agreements in place,' he says.
'These can be structured around the success of succession planning and the results achieved as you transition out of the business. In effect, we provide a structured vehicle for privately owned firms to grow, monetise and ultimately exit, while retaining long-term exposure to Bitcoin.'
Ellam explains that the operating business is adaptable to market opportunities, which is why they now do 70 per cent of their revenues overseas, and the group's growth via talent attraction and industry consolidation is both sector- and region-agnostic.
Fuelling the operational growth, the company has a sophisticated and disciplined Bitcoin treasury strategy, focused on increasing its Bitcoin per share metric.
The company launched the XCE BTC Bond 2026, a Bitcoin-denominated convertible bond programme, on 5 January. It is designed to increase the Bitcoin reserve while protecting existing shareholders.
Bonds are issued in Bitcoin. They are zero-coupon bonds, which can only convert into shares at a 130% premium and only when conversion increases Bitcoin per share.
XCE can request early conversion when the share price outperforms BTC. The first 10 Bitcoin 'XCE BTC Bond' has attracted institutional investors, having been fully subscribed on New Year's Eve, with all investors gaining the right to participate in future bond issuances. The proceeds of the XCE bond programme will be used entirely for the execution of the Bitcoin treasury strategy.
The names around the table are part of the signal
Among the bond investors is Adam Back, best known as the inventor of Hashcash, the technology that underpins Bitcoin's proof-of-work system. He was the first person to receive an email from Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin's inventor.
Back is the co-founder and chief executive of both Blockstream and the US-based BSTR, which styles itself as the 'Berkshire Hathaway of Bitcoin' and will soon list on Nasdaq with around 35,000 BTC in treasury. Back is also a key strategic shareholder in XCE.
Other Bitcoin industry figures include former Goldman Sachs alumnus Vijay Selvam and Richard Byworth, managing partner of a Swiss alternative investment firm and a former Nomura managing director. The non-executive chairman, Sam Roberts, brings an investment and pensions background and is known for leading the first British pension fund allocation to Bitcoin.
Together, they provide the kind of robust governance, board oversight and credibility a company like this needs if it is to persuade sceptics that it is building an institution rather than riding a trend.
Ellam's ambition for XCE is not small. He says the longer-term aim is to uplist to the main market, but only once XCE's Bitcoin holding reaches 500. The stated initial goal is 1,000+ Bitcoin. That is a bold target for a company with a market capitalisation of less than £10 million.
The cautionary notes write themselves. Small-caps carry liquidity and execution risk. Bitcoin-adjacent strategies can be volatile, and regulatory climates can change quickly.
Even if political winds currently feel broadly supportive, sentiment can still turn, and a treasury asset that can move sharply over short periods demands a level head over the long term.
Yet what makes XCE interesting is not the promise of a windfall. It is the attempt to turn a philosophical critique of cash into a Bitcoin standard corporate operating model with a scalable and replicable business model.
In an era when many businesses sit on idle cash reserves and call it prudence, Ellam is making a more confrontational claim: that leaving money in the system is not neutral, it is a slow leak, and corporate Bitcoin adoption is a solution available to all businesses. If he is right, then XCE is not really selling Bitcoin as a dream of getting rich, but as an institutional answer to a quieter fear: getting poor slowly.
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