'I'm putting my Yorkshire recruitment firm's money into Bitcoin - every business should consider it too'
Scott Ellam’s Leeds-based executive recruitment company has an innovative strategy to drive growth through the ‘digital gold’ of Bitcoin. Chris Burn reports.
When Scott Ellam made the bold decision to start investing his Yorkshire recruitment company’s reserves into Bitcoin, he was immediately faced with a true test of his resolve as the value of the digital currency began plummeting.
But he not only stayed the course to see the investments recover and then far outstrip their original value, less than five years later he has just taken “the first Bitcoin-powered international executive recruitment company” public with the support of a board of world-leading experts in the field.
Bitcoin is essentially a computer file stored in a ‘digital wallet’ with no central point of control after being created by an anonymous person or group using the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto.
Since launching as the first decentralised digital currency back in 2009, critics have cited concerns about it being used for criminal activities such as money laundering as well as its substantial price fluctations. But it has become increasingly accepted by global politicians, major companies and financial institutions and markets in recent years.
Ellam, who went to university in Leeds before working in executive recruitment and then taking the leap to set up Spencer Riley as managing director in 2014, says the tough start to the company’s Bitcoin treasury strategy ultimately proved to be a blessing.
“We started buying in October 2021 and it was around £50,000,” he recalls. “A few months later, it drew down 80 per cent to £16,000 and we were buying consistently throughout that period.”
The value of an individual Bitcoin ended up surpassing £90,000 in October 2025 but has fallen since to sit at a current £66,000.
“The price in Bitcoin tends to be volatile in the short-term and up over the long-term,” Ellam says. “If you look at the daily, weekly, monthly and yearly price it can change quite a lot. But if you look at a 200-week moving average it tends to just go up.
“It really did help people were seeing this strategy go into place not in an environment of euphoria and ‘everyone is doing this’, they were seeing me doing this in the opposite environment. It built trust over the long-term. It is why when we’ve moved towards IPO, we’ve built such an incredible board.”
Spencer Riley is now the main subsidiary of Connecting Excellence Group (XCE), the company which was listed on Aquis Stock Exchange last month and has raised millions to double down on the Bitcoin investment strategy.
Its board is chaired by Sam Roberts, director of investment consulting at Cartwright Pension Trusts, and also includes former Goldman Sach lawyer Vijay Selvam, who is the author of book Principles of Bitcoin, as well as leading Bitcoin strategy specialist Richard Byworth.
Investors include Adam Back, the inventor of the proof-of-work system behind Bitcoin and future CEO of the US-based Bitcoin Standard Treasury Company which is due to list in America with a valuation of around $3.5bn.
XCE raised £3.3m from its IPO and by the first week of January, had gone on to buy £2.7m worth of Bitcoin at an average purchase price of just over £60,000. It has also launched a convertible bond programme as a further capital-raising tool.
Mr Ellam says the Bitcoin investment strategy and core executive recruitment business are mutually complementary. The firm wants to become a global leader in recruiting executives who work in the Bitcoin field, with share options being used as a way to recruit and retain talented recruiters and further build the wider business.
While he is sceptical about other cryptocurrencies, Mr Ellam says he has deep faith in Bitcoin thanks to the ability to send it anywhere in the world, its non-confiscability and the 21 million limit set on the amount that will be created.
“I’m pretty sure that is the first time in human history there has ever been a mathematically finite asset that nobody else can print and control the issuance of,” he says. “It gave me the conclusion that most people get to once they move past the sceptic stage; if enough people decide they want to allocate to this asset, the price will go up over the long-term. The best way of thinking of Bitcoin is digital gold."
He says that it was seeing the response of global governments to Covid which prompted him to pursue a Bitcoin treasury strategy.
“Governments and central banks had a choice and they chose to print more money and effectively pay people to stay at home and not produce anything. I understand why they did that but the short-term pain of that economic shock was delayed over probably a decade.
“I’d been running a cash-resilient, profitable business for nearly a decade. The problem for service-based businesses that don’t hold assets or have capital equipment is what do you do with the cash reserves you are saving. I’d watched them devalue in purchase power over the time I’ve been building them up.
“I came to the conclusion that an allocation to Bitcoin instead of a cash reserve would be the best way to secure the future of the business for the staff.
“I firmly believe that all private businesses should study Bitcoin, understand it and without saying they should allocate to it, they should do a risk assessment. The risk isn’t owning Bitcoin, the risk is not understanding Bitcoin.
“This is not a ‘get rich quick’ scheme, this is a ‘don’t get poor slowly’ scheme with a four, eight or ten-year minimum timeframe.
“We have watched the birth of an asset class over 15 years. If you zoomed out on a chart in the year 2200 and looked at this 15 years it would just be a line that goes up. You are going to get volatility with a new asset class. If we had discovered gold in 2009, the gold price would have been volatile over the last 15 years but it has been around for 3,000 years so it is quite stable.
“The volatility of Bitcoin will tamper down and get lower and people will become more comfortable allocating to it. It is a natural adoption curve.”
Mr Ellam says Yorkshire very much remains the best home for his global business. “Leeds is a real international hub for executive recruitment. There is a serious amount of talent in Leeds and that’s why we are here. We do 70 per cent of our revenue internationally but we can do all of that from the greatest timezone - Yorkshire."
He adds: “I started with an intention to build a business that lasts beyond me. Like a lot of British business owners, it is hard to see that possibility when you are fighting against the effects of inflation and currency debasement.
"That is why I’m so passionate about having the conversation about Bitcoin within businesses, because they allow a business an opportunity to build a balance sheet that increases in value over the long-term and supports not just their business now but for the next generation taking over and the generation following that."