Brandon spent twenty years in commercial banking, specializing in distressed assets and corporate turnarounds, before leaving that career to become CEO of Sovereign, a Bitcoin consulting and advisory firm. He explains how diagnosing failing businesses taught him negotiation, empathy, and a deep understanding of how every part of a company functions, skills that transferred directly into helping businesses and individuals adopt Bitcoin. Brandon traces his own Bitcoin journey back to 2017 and 2018, when watching companies borrow their way out of margin problems convinced him that Bitcoin could offer long term insulation against inflation. He describes how Sovereign started as an institutional consulting firm but pivoted toward serving individuals seeking better hardware and security setups, since most business owners are simply not ready to be orange pilled. Brandon is candid about the sacrifices of leaving stable corporate life, including lost income, uncertainty, and a disappointing bull market, while also reflecting on what he gained. He shares how his turnaround experience revealed that Bitcoin only helps businesses that are already profitable and thinking long term, not those in crisis.
A former distressed assets banker on leaving corporate life to help businesses and individuals actually use Bitcoin.
Can you tell me a little bit about Sovereign?
I joined as CEO in March of last year with the idea we'd be the exclusive Bitcoin consulting firm helping businesses adopt and deploy Bitcoin. We still do that, but we've found most demand actually comes from individuals, often business owners or high net worth people, who want help improving their personal Bitcoin hardware and software setups. So we've shifted from big institutional packages toward smaller packages for more individual customers.
You spent most of your career in distressed assets and turnarounds. What does that work teach you that a normal operating role never would?
First, negotiating with people who start off disliking each other but still need to reach agreement teaches you incredible people skills you cannot get anywhere else. Second, you understand every single part of a business, not just one department, because you have to figure out how everything ties together to make a company profitable again or position it for sale, or sometimes accept it has to be liquidated.
When you were deep in fixing broken businesses, what was the first moment Bitcoin showed up on your radar as more than just a headline?
It was 2018, after Bitcoin ran up to 20k in 2017. The scarcity concept hit me right away since I understood gold and had traded baseball cards as a kid. I kept seeing businesses borrow their way out of eroding margins with cheap debt, sometimes under 3 percent, and realized Bitcoin could insulate a business over a five to ten year horizon if they allocated part of their treasury to it.
What's the through line between turning around distressed companies and helping a business adopt Bitcoin?
Turnaround work is about diagnosing pain points, and every business has the same underlying pain, which is inflation. I'd tell old family businesses, some passed down for generations, to imagine if their ancestors had a tool like Bitcoin decades ago to insulate them. Business owners who actually care about their legacy respond to that framing, because they want the company to survive for future generations.
A lot of people quit fiat corporate life and romanticize it. What did you actually have to give up, and what did you not expect?
I left a great paycheck, benefits, and stock options, expecting a huge bull market that never really delivered, since people bought ETFs and treasury stocks instead of actual Bitcoin. There's no safety net and I work harder now than I ever did before. I compare it to people who romanticize mission work, then realize it's much harder than they imagined once they're actually in it.
Was there a moment you realized people don't have a Bitcoin knowledge problem, they have an adoption and trust problem?
When we hired a sales team and went to market, we found trying to orange pill business owners who weren't already curious was nearly impossible, almost a one in a thousand situation. Instead we kept finding people already further along their Bitcoin journey who wanted help with multisig setups, running nodes, or distributing seed phrases, so we shifted our focus to serving them.
Do businesses even care about long term inflation when they're focused on making payroll this month?
That's a real problem, similar to what I saw in turnaround work managing thirteen week cash flows just to figure out which bills not to pay. If a business is already in that much distress, it's too late for Bitcoin to help. But businesses with margin issues who streamline operations first, like a printing company I helped cut unprofitable lines, can then reasonably consider a Bitcoin position.
When did you know helping companies adopt Bitcoin was a real professional services category nobody was serving well?
It was around the end of 2024. I'd always wanted to do Bitcoin consulting and had done it informally for friends and family. I realized no one was really servicing the business community properly, and then I found Sovereign, which matched exactly my skill set and understanding of how businesses actually work.
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