Pro Soccer Player - Entrepreneur - Investor
Brandon Miller
Brandon Miller spent ten years as a professional goalkeeper in the USL, winning a championship, earning All-League honors, and setting league records along the way. He built one of the most recognizable goalkeeper brands in the game while still competing. Today, he is the founder of Miller Woods Capital Partners, a PAC Speakers Bureau member, an active investor, and a speaker committed to showing athletes what is possible on the other side of sport.
From Charlotte to the pitch
Brandon Miller grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina. Before the championships, before the businesses, he was a goalkeeper who loved the game and wanted to be the best at it.
He played his collegiate career at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. When he graduated, he signed with the Rochester Rhinos in the USL. His breakout came in 2015, when he set USL records in shutouts with 13 and a goals-against average of 0.54, earning him the 2015 USL Goalkeeper of the Year Award. Over ten years in the league, he competed for four clubs: the Rochester Rhinos, the Orange County Blues, the Harrisburg City Islanders, and the Charlotte Independence where he finished his career in December 2021.
But even while competing, he was thinking beyond the field.
“I always wanted to start my own business. I had always thought about what being an entrepreneur would look like. So I jumped in.”
Building While Playing
In 2016, while still a professional, Brandon founded Prime Focus Goalkeeping. What started as a goalkeeper-specific glove and apparel brand grew into something bigger. By 2018, when he returned to Charlotte and joined the Independence, he had expanded Prime Focus into training services and was building the brand in full.
The origin story says a lot about how Brandon operates. He had a sponsor at the time, a well-known goalkeeper brand. But he never felt like a priority within the company. Instead of settling for that, he decided to create something where he could lead from the front.
“I was one of fifty, and I wanted to be the main one. So I looked into starting my own brand, and I did that.”
After retiring in December 2021, Brandon earned his MBA in Business Entrepreneurship through Bellevue University via a USL partnership, doing it while running Prime Focus full-time. He then co-founded a digital marketing agency where he served as Chief Operating Officer. Over roughly three years, the agency worked with brands across sports, home and living, and nutrition, including early-stage work with TikTok Shop when the platform was first developing its commerce capabilities.
“It was a huge learning curve for someone who had basically just come out of playing soccer. But that is where I learned the most.”
Failing Forward Into Investing
In 2025, Brandon and a business partner pursued an ambitious project: bringing a state-of-the-art sports tech facility to Charlotte, North Carolina. They were under contract on eight acres of land. They built a full pro forma, a pitch deck, and months of investor materials. They worked it hard for fourteen months.
In October 2025, they let it go.
The project had grown too large, too expensive, and too far from the original timeline.
“After that disappointment, that failure, I tried to figure out where I wanted to pivot.”
What came next only works if you keep showing up. At an industry event he almost skipped, Brandon connected with Diana Guerrero of Athlon Family Office. He met Chip Paucek. He was introduced to PAC. In that window of uncertainty, he found clarity about where he wanted to go.
Brandon launched Miller Woods Capital Partners as an investment vehicle for his family and as a platform for consulting and advisory work. By January 2026, after a rigorous due diligence process, he had made his first two investments, with a third set to close shortly after. His approach is not passive. He reviews data rooms, evaluates pitch decks, and actively pursues advisory and co-founder roles alongside the capital.
“How do we get involved as more than just the check? That is the question I ask every time.”
What the Game Taught Him
“I failed every single day. Made mistakes every single day. And I showed back up every single day. I think that is where there is a lot of difference between people in terms of success.”
That mindset now drives everything he does. The habits he maintains daily. The resilience he leaned on when the facility deal fell apart. The decision to keep building when the path was unclear. He has narrowed it to three core values: empathy, community, and resiliency. He thinks about all three every day.
Brandon found community during PAC Accelerate in Phoenix. He was there for connection and perspective, without a specific agenda.
It became something more.
Accelerate pushed him to articulate his values clearly and examine how he shows up around them. He describes it as getting back into a rhythm, finding a structure and accountability that had been missing since his playing career ended.
He is also working with Shon Hart through PAC’s Speakers Bureau pathway, building the craft of delivering his message with consistency. Public speaking is not new to him. Now he is making it deliberate.
For years, I didn’t really know what I was searching for. I realized a lot of it is community, a lot of it is support. PAC has provided that for me. I want to show guys who played the game and want to stay connected to it, but maybe not through coaching or being on the field, that there are other opportunities out there. I want to use my voice and my experience to share that. PAC has really strengthened a lot of what I have tried to build this year. In terms of resiliency, in terms of consistency. That is something I had been searching for.
Brandon Miller
Professional Soccer Player
For Brandon, showing other athletes that there are other opportunities out there is the throughline across everything he has built and everything he is building next. The goalkeeper who showed up every day, the entrepreneur who kept going after a failed project, and the investor who asks how to be more than just a check are all the same person. PAC is where he found the community that reflects that back to him.