NextFin News - Connecting Excellence Group, a UK executive-recruitment company with a market capitalisation of about £6 million and a Bitcoin treasury of just under 73 coins, will speak at the Bitcoin Treasuries Conference in New York on September 28 — sharing the agenda with operators running treasuries worth billions. The invitation, published on the conference's speaker list, marks how far the corporate Bitcoin-treasury playbook has travelled from its mega-cap origins: a Leeds-based recruiter founded in 2014 now stands in the same institutional conversation as Strategy, Twenty One Capital and Metaplanet. But the same visibility that elevates XCE sharpens the question hanging over the small-cap fringe of the treasury trade — whether a balance sheet anchored to a volatile asset can carry a growth story when the equity base is this thin.
The Situation: Small Balance Sheet, Big Room
Scott Ellam, founder and chief executive of Connecting Excellence Group (AQSE:XCE, OTCQB:XCELF), appears on the speaker roster for the Bitcoin Treasuries Conference 2026, taking place at SECOND in Midtown Manhattan. The event, now in its second edition, is deliberately intimate: organisers cap attendance at roughly 300 to 350 allocators, operators and treasury advisers, and XCE is listed not only as a speaker but as a sponsor.
The numbers framing the company's presence are small by the standards of the room. XCE holds 72.9 Bitcoin, ranked 111th among public-company holders. Strategy alone holds more than 840,000 coins; Twenty One Capital, another conference speaker, holds 43,514; Metaplanet holds 43,000. XCE's equity value, measured at about £6 million in mid-September, means a single-digit move in Bitcoin can swing the balance sheet by a percentage that would take a large-cap peer weeks to accumulate through operations.
That scale is precisely why the appearance matters. The treasury model that Strategy pioneered in 2020 — buy and hold Bitcoin on the corporate balance sheet, fund it through equity and debt issuance, and let the market re-rate the shares — has migrated down the market-cap curve. What began as a large-cap capital-structure experiment is now being adopted by micro-caps that lack the earnings depth, the treasury reserves and the investor base to absorb a prolonged drawdown.
XCE's own roadmap makes the ambition explicit. Ellam has set medium-term targets of £10 million in revenue and more than 100 Bitcoin in the treasury, and he describes the company's approach as
accelerative growth through the acquisition of businesses and accretive growth through the hiring of revenue-generating talent.On September 22 the company announced a £600,000 institutional subscription — 39,999,999 new ordinary shares at 1.50 pence each, a 3.4 per cent premium to the prior closing price — with proceeds earmarked for the Bitcoin treasury, acquisitions and hiring. The new shares are expected to be admitted to trading on the Aquis Stock Exchange Growth Market on or around September 29, taking the total share count to 506,498,952.
The first acquisition is already in motion: heads of terms for a UK and US engineering-and-construction recruitment firm at an initial cost of £575,000. The target generated £1.79 million in revenue and £431,000 in EBITDA in the twelve months to June 2026, and the deal includes 8.216 Bitcoin to be acquired at market value. Ellam has described the company's objective as growing both
revenue per share and Bitcoin per share— a formulation that treats the treasury and the operating business as twin engines rather than treating Bitcoin as a passive reserve.
The Analysis
The Treasury Model Has Democratised — and That Changes the Risk Profile
The core mechanism of a Bitcoin treasury company is simple: issue equity or debt at a premium to net asset value, convert the proceeds into Bitcoin, and let the market capitalise the combined entity at a multiple that reflects both the operating business and the optionality on Bitcoin. At large scale this works because the issuer has a deep investor base, credible operating cash flow and enough market capitalisation that a 20 per cent fall in Bitcoin does not threaten its ability to operate, hire or service debt.
At XCE's scale, the same mechanism operates with far less cushion. A roughly £6 million equity base supporting about $5.7 million of Bitcoin — at around $78,500 per coin as of late September — leaves almost no room for the operating business to be valued independently. The market is effectively pricing the recruitment platform as a small premium, or in a risk-off mood as a discount, on top of the coin holdings. That is not a criticism of the strategy; it is a description of the leverage embedded in a small-cap wrapper.
The structural question is whether this democratisation is durable. Three conditions must hold for the small-cap treasury model to compound rather than oscillate: the company must be able to raise capital at a premium to Bitcoin net asset value; it must grow operating cash flow fast enough to dilute the fixed overhead of being a public company; and Bitcoin itself must trend upward over the holding period. Remove any one of those and the structure stops compounding and starts consuming equity.
Cyclical Wave Riding a Structural Shift — Keep Them Separate
The Bitcoin-treasury phenomenon contains two distinct forces that are too often blended. The cyclical leg is the liquidity and sentiment cycle around Bitcoin itself: when the coin rallies, treasury companies outperform on leverage, issuance windows open and acquisitions become easier to fund with overvalued paper. When the coin falls, the reverse happens — discounts to net asset value widen, issuance stalls and management attention shifts from growth to defence. This leg mean-reverts with the asset.
The structural leg is different, and it is the one that makes a small recruiter's presence in New York worth noting. Corporate treasurers now have a decade of evidence that Bitcoin can sit on a balance sheet without the governance, accounting and custody catastrophes that sceptics predicted in 2020. The infrastructure — regulated custodians, audit treatment, board-level oversight roles such as the Chief Bitcoin Officer position that XCE's chairman has advocated — has been built. That is a regime change, not a cycle. It means the treasury model will survive the next bear market because the institutional plumbing no longer has to be reinvented each time.
The error to avoid is treating the structural shift as a shield against the cyclical leg. XCE benefits from the permanent normalisation of Bitcoin on balance sheets, but its share price over the next twelve months will be driven mostly by the cyclical leg: the Bitcoin price, the next funding round and whether the first acquisition integrates without distracting management from the recruitment book.
The Second-Order Effect Nobody in the Room Is Pricing
The first-order read of XCE's conference invitation is flattering: recognition, access to allocators, a platform to recruit talent and source deal flow. The second-order effect runs the other way. Every public appearance that frames XCE as a "Bitcoin treasury company" tightens the correlation between its share price and the coin, regardless of how the recruitment business performs.
That correlation has a cost. If the shares trade as a Bitcoin proxy, then the operating business — the actual engine that is supposed to generate fee income, fund the treasury and justify the premium — becomes invisible to the marginal buyer. Management then faces a perverse incentive: short-term share performance is maximised by talking about Bitcoin, while long-term value is built by talking about placement fees, consultant productivity and retention. The company that solves this tension — that uses the treasury to fund the business without letting the treasury consume the narrative — is the one that compounds. The one that does not becomes a leveraged Bitcoin vehicle with a recruitment logo.
There is a further transmission channel. As more micro-caps adopt the model, the aggregate supply of "Bitcoin wrapper" equity increases. Each new issuer competes for the same pool of Bitcoin-allocating capital, which over time compresses the premium that any single small-cap treasury can command. The early movers in each market-cap tier captured the scarcity value; the late movers compete on execution. XCE is not early in the mega-cap tier, but it is early in the UK micro-cap tier — and that local scarcity is what its management is trying to monetise.
The Counter-Thesis: This Is a Distraction, Not a Strategy
The strongest case against XCE's approach is straightforward and deserves to be stated without softening. A recruitment company's comparative advantage is placing senior executives and building client relationships; its shareholders did not invest in it to gain leveraged Bitcoin exposure, which they can obtain more cheaply and transparently elsewhere. From this view, the treasury is a distraction that consumes management time, introduces balance-sheet volatility that has nothing to do with operating performance, and risks capital misallocation if Bitcoin enters a multi-year drawdown while the business needs cash to hire and acquire.
The counter-thesis is at its strongest when applied to companies that adopted Bitcoin as a substitute for a growth strategy rather than as a complement to one. The test is whether the treasury actually funds the business. XCE's own milestones are the right yardstick: the £600,000 raise is explicitly tied to acquisitions and hiring, the first acquisition is in due diligence, and the medium-term targets pair revenue growth with Bitcoin growth. If, eighteen months from now, revenue per share has not risen and the treasury has simply appreciated with the coin, the counter-thesis wins — the company is a wrapper, not a compounder.
The falsifying signal is quantifiable: if XCE's revenue per share fails to grow over the next four reporting periods while its share price remains more than 80 per cent correlated to Bitcoin's daily moves, the operating-business thesis is broken and the stock is a leveraged coin proxy. Conversely, if revenue per share grows and the correlation stays below that threshold, the twin-engine model is working.
Outlook: Three Horizons, One Experiment
The near-term catalysts are concrete. The new shares are expected to begin trading on the Aquis Growth Market on or around September 29; the first acquisition, subject to due diligence, funding and a definitive agreement, would add £1.79 million in trailing revenue and 8.216 Bitcoin; and Ellam's New York appearance is a positioning event for both capital and deal flow. Each of these is a test of whether the market will continue to fund the strategy at a premium.
The base case is that XCE executes the first acquisition, grows the treasury toward its 100-Bitcoin target through a mix of operating cash flow and selective issuance, and trades as a small-cap Bitcoin proxy with a modest operating premium. The upside case requires the recruitment platform to prove it can scale independently — revenue approaching the £10 million target with the treasury acting as a balance-sheet anchor rather than the whole story. The downside case is familiar to anyone who has watched small-cap capital raises in a risk-off environment: a falling Bitcoin price, a widening discount to net asset value, and a funding gap that forces dilutive issuance or a pause in the acquisition strategy.
Split by horizon: in the short term the shares will track Bitcoin and news flow; over the medium term the first acquisition's integration and the next capital raise will separate execution from aspiration; over the long term the question is whether a UK recruiter can build a durable premium on top of a Bitcoin floor, or whether the market ultimately prices it as the coin with a small operating appendage.
The closing judgment: XCE's seat in New York is less a verdict on the company than a signal about the market — the Bitcoin-treasury playbook has moved beyond the giants, and the next phase of the experiment will be decided not by who holds the most coins, but by who can run a real business underneath them.
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