{"id":41638,"date":"2025-07-05T20:48:08","date_gmt":"2025-07-05T20:48:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/41638\/"},"modified":"2025-07-05T20:48:08","modified_gmt":"2025-07-05T20:48:08","slug":"i-still-dont-fly-business-class","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/41638\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018I still don\u2019t fly business class\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

After Tom Beahon\u2019s football career ended abruptly in his early twenties, he started channelling his energy into building a company of his\u00a0own. Together with his brother Phil, he co-founded premium sportswear brand Castore in 2016 from their parents\u2019 kitchen table in Liverpool.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

In spite of the company growing to 500 employees and rumoured to be valued at \u00a31bn in 2023, Beahon is careful about how he spends his money, and still flies economy. <\/p>\n

How well did a sports background prepare you for business?
<\/strong>The biggest thing for me was learning to lose.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In sport, it doesn\u2019t matter how good you are, you\u2019re going to lose a lot. And as an entrepreneur, you have to be similarly comfortable with losing. The big distinction I\u2019ve noticed among entrepreneurs isn\u2019t necessarily intellectual \u2014 it\u2019s just that we can keep going when things are not going well. It\u2019s relentless perseverance.<\/p>\n

CV<\/p>\n

Born<\/strong>: Merseyside, September 1989
Education<\/strong>: Wirral Grammar School for Boys
Career<\/strong>:
Sep 2012 \u2014 July 2015: Lloyds Bank \u2014 Manager Strategic Finance Associate<\/p>\n

2016 \u2014 Launched Castore with brother, Phil
2017 \u2014 2018 \u2014 Business made its first million
2018 \u2014 \u00a33.2mn fundraise from private investors
2019 \u2014 Signed Andy Murray, who joined as an investor
2020 \u2014 Move into team sports partnerships
2021 \u2014 Signed international teams, including England cricket and McLaren Formula 1 team
2023 \u2014 \u00a3150mn fundraising round from The Raine Groupe, Hanaco Ventures and Felix Capital \u2014 valuing the business at \u00a31bn
2024 \u2014 Umbro licence deal<\/p>\n

Lives<\/strong>: Cheshire, with fianc\u00e9 Francesca<\/p>\n

In my case, I really had to pick myself up as a footballer when the Tranmere Rovers manager told me they weren\u2019t going to renew my contract. You\u2019re in your late teens or early 20s, and this is something you\u2019ve done literally your whole life. Suddenly you walk out of that room and you don\u2019t have a salary, you don\u2019t have a job, you don\u2019t have a purpose.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s 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 \u201cno\u201d 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\u2019t have a spare \u00a340,000 lying around; my mum was a teacher, my dad worked in construction. They made a huge sacrifice.<\/p>\n

How did your upbringing influence your approach to money and risk?
<\/strong>I grew up proudly working class. We lived in the north without a lot of money \u2014 we didn\u2019t go on holiday, and I don\u2019t think we went to a restaurant before the age of 18. But my mum\u2019s family from the south were middle-class. So we\u2019d go to my cousin\u2019s house and they had a big trampoline in the garden which, as a kid, feels like heaven on earth. You\u2019re aware that people are better off than you. <\/p>\n

When we started Castore, I vividly remember meeting other entrepreneurs and thinking \u2014 there\u2019s very few people like us<\/a>. Everyone else had a safety net \u2014 their parents had spare cash and, if it didn\u2019t go well, they\u2019d do something else and it would be OK. I didn\u2019t feel like that. I didn\u2019t think it would be OK \u2014 there was no plan B. A \u201cfriends and family\u201d round just wasn\u2019t an option for us.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

How did you get your business off the ground with such a small amount of capital?
<\/strong>We paid ourselves \u00a31,000 a month for three years. I\u2019d moved back in with my parents, and my brother\u2019s now wife paid his rent. These were tough times, financially.\u00a0<\/p>\n

At the start, we had just about enough money to build a website and get the first batch of products in. We\u2019d gone to a factory in Portugal and somehow the owner \u2014 who spoke no English \u2014 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 \u00a310,000 in the first week, and we sold all of the first batch within a few months.<\/p>\n

It grew by word of mouth. I\u2019d 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 \u201cGoldman Sachs guy\u201d, and it worked.<\/p>\n

Brexit didn\u2019t make it straightforward, but we managed to create a supply chain. The headquarters was my mum and dad\u2019s kitchen. We eventually got our first external unit after 18 months.<\/p>\n

Things really changed with the 2019 Andy Murray deal. We\u2019d given his trainer a Castore shirt and we managed to get a meeting. We couldn\u2019t 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 \u2014 that discount gap was what his sponsorship fee should have been. That was genuinely innovative at the time.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t have bothered.<\/p>\n

The real moment of financial relief for us personally was 2021, when [billionaires] Mohsin and Zuber Issa invested \u00a310mn. They\u2019re entrepreneurs themselves and they said to us \u201ctake some for yourself\u201d. That was the first time we took money off the table, and I thought: this has been worth it. We paid off our parents\u2019 mortgage, which was a nice circle of life moment.\u00a0<\/p>\n

You pitched yourself as a premium brand, but that wasn\u2019t always easy to maintain one you started scaling at speed. What happened, and where are you now?
<\/strong>Without being premium, Castore doesn\u2019t have a reason to exist. Of course, being a British brand has some validity \u2014 you think of Dyson, McLaren, Bentley and Burberry. But it\u2019s 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\u2019s what set us apart from Nike or Adidas.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Yet the challenge when you\u2019re driving millions in revenue is it\u2019s physically impossible to manufacture that quantum of product in Portugal \u2014 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The vision remained the same, to be a British premium brand. But to get there, we needed to be flexible. Otherwise, we\u2019d never leave Portugal and never get to a billion. Scaling with that vision was one of the biggest challenges.\u00a0A lot of brands have the same issue and if you dilute the quality you dilute the community.<\/p>\n

Still, when we did the fundraise 18 months ago, we bought time to reset. The brand had grown very broadly, very quickly \u2014 the retailers, the partners, the suppliers. My brother and I realised it didn\u2019t 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\u2019s fine \u2014 I\u2019m building and protecting long-term brand equity; we want this to be a 100-year brand.<\/p>\n

Do you have a pension?<\/strong>
No, I\u2019m not an angel investor \u2014 I just don\u2019t have the time. Most of my non-Castore wealth is in public equities. I don\u2019t even have a financial adviser. I like to do it myself. Even if I don\u2019t beat the market, at least I\u2019ll learn something along the way.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve gone from earning \u00a31,000 per month to running a company rumoured to be worth \u00a31bn. What do you like to spend your money on now?
<\/strong>I honestly don\u2019t. I\u2019ve never bought an expensive watch, I don\u2019t spend lots of money on clothes. I don\u2019t fly business class\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009even to Australia, I flew economy! We\u2019ve got 500 staff now, and I want to set the tone. The whole concept of spending also just doesn\u2019t make me happy. I bought a nice house just outside Manchester, but it\u2019s not particularly extravagant.<\/p>\n

I did go through a period where I thought \u201cI should do something nice\u201d, but I have always just been a saver rather than a spender. I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s 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\u2019s deeply branded on my soul \u2014 that day-to-day focus on cash, that paranoia.<\/p>\n

I do spend on my parents \u2014 I\u2019ll buy them a nice holiday and send them business class, but they\u2019re at a different stage in their lives. They\u2019re in the \u201cgetting to enjoy it\u201d stage, whereas I\u2019m in the building stage. I still work very long hours \u2014 I\u2019m a big believer that intensity is the price of excellence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"After Tom Beahon\u2019s football career ended abruptly in his early twenties, he started channelling his energy into building…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":41639,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[64,607,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-41638","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entrepreneurship","8":"tag-business","9":"tag-entrepreneurship","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114802596688601488","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41638","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=41638"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/41638\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/41639"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=41638"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=41638"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=41638"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}