An agency acquisition has an awkward moment built into it. Someone buys a business because its founder has made something valuable. Then comes the temptation to tell that founder how to do everything. Dax Cornelius built Bastion’s early American expansion around a different arrangement: keep the people who made the business, keep them invested, and give them more people to work with.
It is a quietly revealing choice for an executive whose earlier workplace was an F-16. The fighter pilot’s biography is the obvious opening act. The ownership arrangement tells us more about the businessperson who followed. Cornelius was interested in what a specialist could do with support, and in what might disappear if the support arrived carrying too many instructions.
He joined Bastion in October 2017 to establish its US operation. There was already an Australian business, founded by his nephews Fergus and Jack Watts. America offered a fresh set of relationships to build. His initial territory was Southern California, and his raw material was the independent agency: a business with expertise, clients and a founder who might appreciate some help with the machinery backstage.
A cockpit with an audience
Before the agency deals came a career in which machinery was rather more literal. Cornelius served for more than a decade in the US Air Force, reaching the rank of major and flying F-16s in the Bosnia and Iraq conflicts. His later commercial work passed through aviation, manufacturing, consulting and energy. Cessna, Piper Aircraft and Torrid Technologies Group all appear along that route.
One assignment helps explain why marketing was less of a detour than it first appears. He led the Air Force’s West Coast F-16 demonstration team and worked on branding initiatives tied to recruitment and retention. A demonstration aircraft has two jobs: fly the program and make an impression. The audience sees the aircraft; the organization hopes the audience remembers what it represents.
That experience put operational discipline and public communication in the same working day. An air display needs coordination before anyone looks up. A brand needs people to understand why it deserves their attention. Cornelius had worked where those responsibilities overlapped before he began assembling agencies that would sell versions of the same combination.
His aviation sales background also placed him close to expensive decisions. Selling an aircraft and selling a marketing program are different occupations, but both require understanding what a buyer intends to accomplish. By the time he joined Bastion, his experience included leading Torrid Technologies Group, a company supplying water-heating equipment for hydraulic fracturing. The résumé had acquired several industries before advertising acquired him.
The founder keeps a reason to care
Orange County was the American starting point. By January 2019, Cornelius described a US team of 14, grown from an operation that had begun with him. Irvine offered access to brands and agency talent. The proposition was to bring complementary businesses together, with shared administrative support and more opportunities to serve the same client.
The financial terms mattered to the human arrangement. Leaders of acquired agencies could remain shareholders while Bastion helped with finance and human resources. A founder would still participate in the growth of the business they had created. The buyer gained expertise without assuming that expertise could be detached from the people and relationships around it.
There is a small comedy in buying entrepreneurial energy and immediately issuing it a handbook. Cornelius’s approach tried to preserve a founder’s incentive to keep building. The administrative work could move; the appetite for the business had to stay. For someone whose job involved acquisitions, this was a practical concern about what survives the acquisition.
In November 2019, Bastion bought a majority interest in db5, the consumer insights and strategy agency based in Highland Park. Its original owners retained a significant stake. Research became another piece of the American business, alongside public relations and digital work. The deal gave the ownership theory a specific address and a specific discipline.
“We are very bullish on our expansion throughout Los Angeles,” Cornelius said at the time. He was looking for businesses in branded content, experiential events and merchandising. These were fairly precise gaps. The ambition involved acquiring capabilities that could work alongside each other, making it possible to carry a client’s question through more stages of the answer.
Four hires tell a smaller, better story
The visible progress was sometimes less grand than a deal announcement. In March 2021, the US operation reported new work from KFC, OREMORE Automotive Group’s Ontario Auto Centre, Unispace and Phillips 66. It also announced four hires. Accounts had created work; people were needed to do it. Agency growth eventually turns into someone’s Monday morning.
James Wharton joined as general manager of Bastion Elevate, bringing experience across integrated accounts and automotive marketing. Danial Aparicio joined db5 as an analyst. Olivia Riley arrived in public relations, and Jessie Write in social media and client success. The range of roles made the operating model visible: research, communication and ongoing client relationships, each requiring a person with a particular skill.
By 2023, Cornelius was adding leadership to that range. Steve Chavez became US chief creative officer, bringing experience from Garage Team Mazda, Leo Burnett and Doner. The brief put creative oversight alongside the services being assembled under Bastion Amplify. Acquiring a discipline and directing its work are separate tasks. A growing agency needs both.
Dean Heacock’s appointment as COO and CFO that March addressed another part of the same problem. His responsibilities included assessing acquisitions, due diligence, operations and human resources. Those are the unglamorous details that allow a growth strategy to survive contact with a calendar, a payroll and the next client deadline. Cornelius’s original offer to founders depended on someone doing them well.
Lunch is part of the job
Cornelius’s advice on culture includes a rule refreshingly easy to picture: a CEO should avoid eating lunch alone. He recommends learning about colleagues as individuals and understanding the work they actually do. His writing also asks leaders to define success clearly, understand how teams fit together and establish regular ways for people to communicate.
He is especially direct about excessive supervision: “Get out of the way.” That line carries a useful admission. He acknowledges experience of leaders becoming so involved in details that they make the work harder. The advice fits the acquisition model. A business cannot credibly promise founders room to operate while teaching every manager to hover.
“Get out of the way.”
Dax Cornelius, on trusting a team’s expertise
By November 2023, his public conversation about leadership included clarity, empowerment and mindset, the themes of his appearance on The Small Business Radio Show. These give the lunch rule a larger purpose. People need to understand the direction, have room to act and be prepared to adjust. A friendly meal cannot supply all three, though it may expose where one is missing.
That is the less theatrical part of a former fighter pilot’s management story. It concerns permissions, incentives and the ordinary quality of a conversation. The interesting question is how much a leader enables other people to decide. In an agency assembled from specialists, that question arrives with nearly every brief.
The lessons travel back
BeddownLDR takes Cornelius’s experience in the other direction. He is its co-founder and partner alongside Mark Redgrave, with Nick Mackeson-Smith serving as chief learning officer. The organization brings corporate leadership thinking to military audiences and works with employers on selecting and bringing former military leaders into civilian organizations.
Its two programs recognize that both sides have learning to do. Military leaders examine how businesses operate through uncertainty. Employers consider how to recognize and use military experience in a corporate setting. Cornelius’s career gives him a practical place in that exchange: he has worked inside the military and then held executive responsibilities across several commercial industries.
He has also described delivering a three-day leadership course at Aviano Air Base in Italy with his BeddownLDR colleagues. The participants included officers, enlisted leaders and civilians. The return to an Air Force setting gives his career a satisfying turn. Business experience, gathered after military service, becomes material for people still serving.
A new name above the American door
The Bastion chapter has continued to change. Jeff Browe was appointed US CEO in June 2024. In August 2026, Bastion USA and Nashville-based BUNTIN merged, with Browe leading the American business as BastionBUNTIN. The network connected US offices with operations in Australia and New Zealand. Cornelius’s founding US role belongs to the earlier work that helped establish that American presence.
His response to the merger returned to the people involved. He described a process more than two years in the making and emphasized the fit between the teams and their capabilities. “Great partnerships are built between people,” he wrote. After years of acquisitions and integration, the vocabulary remained close to the original arrangement: find people worth working with, then make the relationship useful.
There is plenty of movement in this life: aircraft, industries, acquisitions, and now lessons crossing between military and civilian rooms. The recurring concern is how a team gets enough direction to act and enough freedom to contribute. It leads from a founder keeping a stake in an agency to a military leader examining a business problem. Somewhere in the middle, there is a lunch table with an empty chair. Cornelius’s advice is to sit down.