‘I still don’t fly business class’

After Tom Beahon’s football career ended abruptly in his early twenties, he started channelling his energy into building a company of his own. Together with his brother Phil, he co-founded premium sportswear brand Castore in 2016 from their parents’ kitchen table in Liverpool.

Nine years later, Castore now produces 10mn units annually and makes kits for Andy Murray, the now-retired British tennis star, and Newcastle United, with the mission of taking on Adidas and Nike. The brothers still control the three-person board, but no longer own a majority stake.

In spite of the company growing to 500 employees and rumoured to be valued at £1bn in 2023, Beahon is careful about how he spends his money, and still flies economy.

How well did a sports background prepare you for business?
The biggest thing for me was learning to lose. 

In sport, it doesn’t matter how good you are, you’re going to lose a lot. And as an entrepreneur, you have to be similarly comfortable with losing. The big distinction I’ve noticed among entrepreneurs isn’t necessarily intellectual — it’s just that we can keep going when things are not going well. It’s relentless perseverance.

In my case, I really had to pick myself up as a footballer when the Tranmere Rovers manager told me they weren’t going to renew my contract. You’re in your late teens or early 20s, and this is something you’ve done literally your whole life. Suddenly you walk out of that room and you don’t have a salary, you don’t have a job, you don’t have a purpose.

That’s not easy to go through, but it meant that when building the business, I could cope with the losses. I definitely had a chip on my shoulder and wanted to prove them wrong. Saying that, the hardest “no” was when we were trying to raise money to start Castore. Everyone said no. Eventually, our parents offered to remortgage the house to give us a loan. They didn’t have a spare £40,000 lying around; my mum was a teacher, my dad worked in construction. They made a huge sacrifice.

How did your upbringing influence your approach to money and risk?
I grew up proudly working class. We lived in the north without a lot of money — we didn’t go on holiday, and I don’t think we went to a restaurant before the age of 18. But my mum’s family from the south were middle-class. So we’d go to my cousin’s house and they had a big trampoline in the garden which, as a kid, feels like heaven on earth. You’re aware that people are better off than you.

When we started Castore, I vividly remember meeting other entrepreneurs and thinking — there’s very few people like us. Everyone else had a safety net — their parents had spare cash and, if it didn’t go well, they’d do something else and it would be OK. I didn’t feel like that. I didn’t think it would be OK — there was no plan B. A “friends and family” round just wasn’t an option for us.

More than wanting to make a certain amount of money, I was driven by the feeling of security. My dad was always nervous about being made redundant, and it affected the family. Being successful to the point of having security was always the goal. I knew I needed to build something that was meaningful, to make all this sacrifice worthwhile. 

How did you get your business off the ground with such a small amount of capital?
We paid ourselves £1,000 a month for three years. I’d moved back in with my parents, and my brother’s now wife paid his rent. These were tough times, financially. 

At the start, we had just about enough money to build a website and get the first batch of products in. We’d gone to a factory in Portugal and somehow the owner — who spoke no English — agreed to a minimum order of 400 units per product. There was a nice article written about us when we launched around the 2016 [Rio] Olympics and, suddenly, somebody made the first order. It was such a novelty to have a British brand. We did around £10,000 in the first week, and we sold all of the first batch within a few months.

It grew by word of mouth. I’d stand outside Equinox and Third Space gyms giving products to personal trainers to pass to their clients. We were going after the lawyers and bankers, the “Goldman Sachs guy”, and it worked.

Brexit didn’t make it straightforward, but we managed to create a supply chain. The headquarters was my mum and dad’s kitchen. We eventually got our first external unit after 18 months.

Things really changed with the 2019 Andy Murray deal. We’d given his trainer a Castore shirt and we managed to get a meeting. We couldn’t pay him the upfront fee to wear our merchandise, so he agreed to put his own money in for a discounted stake in the business — that discount gap was what his sponsorship fee should have been. That was genuinely innovative at the time.

The first day Andy wore Castore on court at the Australian Open, his image was everywhere. We did something like eight months of revenue in one day. That partnership was transformative. We only went for Andy because we were ambitious. Most people of our size wouldn’t have bothered.

The real moment of financial relief for us personally was 2021, when [billionaires] Mohsin and Zuber Issa invested £10mn. They’re entrepreneurs themselves and they said to us “take some for yourself”. That was the first time we took money off the table, and I thought: this has been worth it. We paid off our parents’ mortgage, which was a nice circle of life moment. 

You pitched yourself as a premium brand, but that wasn’t always easy to maintain one you started scaling at speed. What happened, and where are you now?
Without being premium, Castore doesn’t have a reason to exist. Of course, being a British brand has some validity — you think of Dyson, McLaren, Bentley and Burberry. But it’s more than that. You need a genuine differentiating quality, and we wanted that to be about the premium feel and performance (which originally came from our European manufacturing advantage). That’s what set us apart from Nike or Adidas. 

Yet the challenge when you’re driving millions in revenue is it’s physically impossible to manufacture that quantum of product in Portugal — those factories are not built for it. So then you look overseas and there is a trade-off. Do I want to get to a billion revenue? Yes. Can I do that in Europe? Realistically, no. 

The vision remained the same, to be a British premium brand. But to get there, we needed to be flexible. Otherwise, we’d never leave Portugal and never get to a billion. Scaling with that vision was one of the biggest challenges. A lot of brands have the same issue and if you dilute the quality you dilute the community.

Still, when we did the fundraise 18 months ago, we bought time to reset. The brand had grown very broadly, very quickly — the retailers, the partners, the suppliers. My brother and I realised it didn’t make a huge difference to us whether it took eight, 10 or 12 years to get to where we wanted to. Suddenly we had this capital buffer and we could afford, finally, to be patient. Even if revenue slows for a period, that’s fine — I’m building and protecting long-term brand equity; we want this to be a 100-year brand.

Do you have a pension?
No, I’m not an angel investor — I just don’t have the time. Most of my non-Castore wealth is in public equities. I don’t even have a financial adviser. I like to do it myself. Even if I don’t beat the market, at least I’ll learn something along the way.

You’ve gone from earning £1,000 per month to running a company rumoured to be worth £1bn. What do you like to spend your money on now?
I honestly don’t. I’ve never bought an expensive watch, I don’t spend lots of money on clothes. I don’t fly business class . . . even to Australia, I flew economy! We’ve got 500 staff now, and I want to set the tone. The whole concept of spending also just doesn’t make me happy. I bought a nice house just outside Manchester, but it’s not particularly extravagant.

I did go through a period where I thought “I should do something nice”, but I have always just been a saver rather than a spender. I don’t know if it’s because of my background or having lived through those three years where I was constantly in fear of running out of money. That fear never leaves you. It’s deeply branded on my soul — that day-to-day focus on cash, that paranoia.

I do spend on my parents — I’ll buy them a nice holiday and send them business class, but they’re at a different stage in their lives. They’re in the “getting to enjoy it” stage, whereas I’m in the building stage. I still work very long hours — I’m a big believer that intensity is the price of excellence.