The Accidental Founder: How a Sudden Job Loss Became Steven Bowles’ Best Career Move

Steven Bowles

For a few years, Steven Bowles had been thinking about starting his own firm. He was working inside a family office advisory group, helping wealthy families with wealth transfer and estate planning, and knew this was the space where he wanted to build something on his own terms. But he kept finding reasons to wait. Another credential first. More experience. Better timing.

Then his employer unexpectedly closed its doors, and the decision he thought was still a few years away was suddenly right in front of him.

“I’d been saying ‘someday’ for a while,” Steven recalls. “My wife kept encouraging me to start building toward it, getting the credentials, broadening my responsibilities. But I kept thinking I wasn’t quite ready. When the company closed, I realized I’d been more ready than I gave myself credit for.”

He launched Catalyst Advisory in the fall of 2022. It was a leap of faith, but not a blind one.

The long runway

Steven didn’t take a straight path to entrepreneurship. He graduated from Cairn University in 2003 with a degree in business administration and then spent the next nine years in sales and business development. He was good at it. But he also recognized that he was spending his energy building other people’s businesses.

The turn came when he moved into wealth transfer planning, joining a family office advisory group where he spent seven years working directly with ultra-high-net-worth families. It was an education he couldn’t have gotten anywhere else. He saw how the wealthiest families in the country structured their finances, protected their assets, and moved wealth across generations. He learned the technical side, but he says the clients themselves taught him the most.

“I was constantly looking at balance sheets, and after a while I started noticing things,” he says. “The families that were growing the fastest weren’t doing it in the stock market. They were building through businesses and real estate. And a lot of them were underserved because the big private banks are really set up for liquid, investable assets. If your wealth is tied up in a company or a portfolio of properties, you kind of fall through the cracks.”

During those years, Steven earned his Chartered Life Underwriter designation and took on broader responsibilities within the firm. The plan was to go independent eventually. He just hadn’t committed to a date.

The push

When his employer closed, Steven had a choice. He had the relationships, the credentials, and a clear read on a gap in the market. What he didn’t have was a business plan, a website, or any guarantee that it would work.

He self-funded the launch. For a service-based business like his, the startup costs were manageable: legal and regulatory setup, technology, and enough working capital to stay afloat before revenue kicked in. The real investment, as Steven sees it, had already been made over the previous decade through the expertise and relationships he’d built.

“It was fun, but it was also intimidating,” he admits. “When I was at the family office, I just focused on clients and strategy. I didn’t think about marketing or compliance or managing the books. All of a sudden, I was the CEO, the CFO, and the head of marketing all at once.”

He started generating revenue within the first few months, largely through referrals from attorneys, CPAs, and other advisors who had worked with him for years and trusted his capabilities. He wasn’t starting from scratch, even though the business itself was brand new.

Building on his own terms

The choices Steven made in structuring Catalyst reflect what he’d observed over a decade of watching both wealthy families and the advisors who serve them.

He chose to be completely independent. He’s not captive to any insurance carrier or broker-dealer, which means his recommendations aren’t shaped by commission structures or product quotas. That was a deliberate decision. “In this industry, trust is everything,” he says. “Clients need to know that what I’m recommending is based on their situation, not on what pays me the most.”

He chose to operate lean. No full-time employees, with contractors handling supporting tasks. It keeps overhead low and lets him spend his time on the work that actually moves the needle.

He chose to go niche rather than broad. Catalyst focuses on entrepreneurs, business owners, and real estate investors who have built significant wealth in illiquid assets and need help with business protection, succession planning, and wealth transfer. It’s the exact market segment he watched go underserved during his family office years.

And he chose to grow through relationships rather than ad spend. He’s a member of ProVisors and has been intentional about building connections with complementary professionals like estate planning attorneys and wealth management advisors. The result has been a referral-driven practice built on trust rather than volume.

“I’ve also learned the value of saying no,” Steven adds. “Not every opportunity is the right fit. Not every potential client is someone I can serve the way they need to be served. Being selective about where I spend my time has actually led to better outcomes for everyone.”

What he’d tell his younger self

Steven is candid about the one thing he’d change if he could go back: he’d take the risk sooner.

“I spent too long thinking I needed one more year, one more credential, one more thing before I was ready,” he says. “The truth is, you’re never going to feel 100% prepared for the next level. There’s always going to be something else you think you should do first.”

He credits his father as his biggest mentor, though he says his dad probably doesn’t realize it. “He set the example for work ethic and integrity. Doing things the right way, even when nobody’s watching. That’s the foundation for how I try to run this business.”

It’s a lesson he’s now passing forward. Steven is a father of three sons, and he talks openly about wanting to build something that lasts beyond him. His oldest recently chose “entrepreneur” as the subject of a school project, specifically because of what he sees his dad doing every day.

“I’m not going to force my kids into anything,” Bowles says. “But I’d love for them to want to be part of this someday. I’m trying to build something they’d be proud to carry forward.”

The accidental founder, it turns out, had been building toward this all along. He just didn’t know when the moment would come.