Mike Bontrager, the founder of Square Roots Collective in Kennett Square, is on a decades-long redemptive quest to achieve restoration through sacrifice, according to a staff report from The Praxis Journal.

Bontrager started his career at Chemical Bank (now JPMorgan Chase), where he realized that the imbalance of information on Wall Street encouraged exploitative behaviors. The industry rewarded whichever result turned out best to earn a bonus payout instead of what was actually better for the client.

However a profound spiritual experience prompted him to found his own derivatives consulting firm in Kennett Square in an effort to rectify that issue.

“The idea of Chatham [Financial] was to help level the playing field in terms of knowledge and skill in negotiation to help companies address risks properly, and then help manage everything from accounting to regulation to compliance and all those kinds of things along the way,” he said.

This approach paid off and became the standard in the market. Today, the firm successfully competes with companies that were exploiting the information imbalance.

After he retired, Bontrager unified various for-profit and nonprofit ventures he founded over the years to address challenges where he saw them under Square Roots Collective.

Read more about Mike Bontrager in The Praxis Journal.