CLASSIC EPISODE: Castore

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0:41We look forward to seeing you there. Here's the first ball of the Ashes. It's Australia's captain coming to London and bowls outside the Australian. Well,

0:57that answers a few questions. Oh, brilliant. The first ball of the Ashes in 2023. England v Australia at Edgbaston in Birmingham. One of the biggest and most highly anticipated sporting events of the year, as you can tell from that commentary from the BBC. The England cricket team are wearing shirts emblazoned with the logo of Castor. Castor was founded by brothers Tom and Philip Behan in Merseyside in 2015, agreeing a deal to make England's cricket kit has been part of the company's extraordinary rise. A rise that has seen the two brothers take on some of the biggest and best-known companies in the world.

1:44And win.

1:53I'm Graham Ruddick and this is Business Leader, a podcast that takes a second look at big business. stories and asks, did these stories really happen the way we think they did? And what can we learn from them today? In this episode, we speak to Tom Behan, the co-founder and chief executive of Castor, about the story behind the sportswear brand and how it has taken on Adidas and Nike. Plus, the challenges he has faced in growing and scaling up the company. At the end of 2023, Castor raised£150 million of new funding from investors in a deal that valued the company at around£950 million. That underlines the extraordinary success of the Behan brothers who are still in their early 30s.

2:46The story of Castor starts with Tom Behan failing to make it as a professional footballer.

2:56I think to a greater or lesser extent, we're all products of our environment. And I guess there's always a debate as I know about nature v. nurture. And particularly as an entrepreneur, which is clearly a niche area for people to go into, there is always going to be a debate. Are you a Richard Branson selling kind of sweets on the playground and you just innately had that desire to trade and make money within you? Or is that something that happens to you as you go through your life? And speaking for myself, it was absolutely the latter. So growing up in Merseyside, nothing uncommon about this.

3:34Sport is quasi-religion-like. So I grew up very much wanting to be a professional footballer, like pretty much everyone else. Growing up in Merseyside, my brother's sport was cricket. And I guess we were both similar in that we were probably good enough to make a living out of professional sport, but didn't have the talent to make it right to the highest level. But when you completely dedicate yourself to achieving a singular goal, particularly at a young age in life where you don't have any other benchmark or experiences, and then you fail to achieve that goal, and I've got no qualms about saying that.

4:14Often people say, oh, but you didn't fail. It was a learning experience. And I was like, it wasn't, I failed. And that instilled something in me where I didn't want to do something where I could be in that situation again. And I remember extremely vividly being called into the manager's office at Preston Park, which is the stadium of Tramia Rovers. I guess I would have been 20, 21 maybe. and being told that they're not going to renew your contract. And this risks sounding dramatic, but when you're 20, 21 years old, don't have a lot of life experience, you have literally dedicated your life up until that point to become a professional footballer.

4:55You've made huge sacrifices when your friends are going out drinking, partying, doing all the fun stuff that people should be doing and you didn't do any of that because you wanted to be a professional footballer. And then someone is sat across the table from you telling you that dream is no longer a reality, that's a big moment. And I think you can essentially go one of two ways. Either that pain hurts you so much and therefore you never want to be out of your comfort zone ever again. You want to do something where you're in control of the environment. You don't strive because if you don't strive, you can't fail.

5:29And I don't blame, I think a lot of people do that and I don't blame them at all. alternatively having experienced something that difficult and hard at such an early age which again I'm sure people are listening to this thinking sounds so dramatic but honestly if you want to achieve it and then it doesn't happen that is your world is crumbled but if you go the other way you say well the worst to my mind my little uneducated brain at 20 years old the worst has happened and you realize that the sun rises the next day so what that instilled in me was whatever I do with, I don't think I was thinking about the rest of my life, but it was the next stage of my life.

6:07I've no idea what I'm going to do. Whatever I do, I need to be in control of my own destiny. I'm not getting called into the manager's office. Failure doesn't scare me. I've failed. The worst has happened. What scares me is not being in control. Obviously you've gone on to have a successful time building a business, but do you look back at that moment as something you're glad happened or do you still look back and think you'd rather be a professional sportsman? No, I'm completely glad it happened. One, because I wasn't very good at football, so I never would have made it anywhere near to the equivalent level that we've been able to build cast or, but genuinely our experiences make us right.

6:45And I do think that grit and resilience and determination are just so important. Again, can only speak from personal experience, far more so than kind of piercing intellect or again, often there's this misconception about entrepreneurs that you have this light bulb moment and all of a sudden the world changes. And I think everyone knows it's very, very, very rarely like that. So to have the setback, that is probably the seminal moment in my life. I wouldn't change it for the world. How much has being part of sport and playing sport benefited you as a leader? Obviously, it's different for you as a company because you're working in it, but I don't really mean that.

7:27I mean, as in leadership, decision-making, teamwork, how much has it helped? I think it's really interesting the way you've asked the question about being an entrepreneur and starting a business and then being a leader. And they're very, very different things and very different skill sets. I think sport, and again, our experience has massively helped with the former. So having that grit and determination and desire and perseverance and that tunnel vision, just the work ethic, the endurance, the ability to get up at 5am and not leave the office until you achieve whatever it is you've set yourself to achieve that day.

8:02That mindset, I think, very much comes from sport and that self-discipline and focus. Leadership is a completely different kettle of fish. I wouldn't say that sport doesn't give you that because there is the ability to work as part of a team. But certainly as we've scaled Castor, and I don't think I put it down to arbitrary numbers, it's not necessarily that once you get past 10 million revenue or 50 or 100 or 200 but as you grow the business your role as the founder evolves and you do become a leader and that's something that I found quite difficult no one can tell you how to do it you can read books you can speak to people but you just have to work it out for yourself I'm not sure that was something that my past experience in football necessarily helped me with starting a business yes being a leader not necessarily so going back to starting the business when you you got the news about football in your career talk me through the next steps and when you started to think about finding the business so you firstly have a little cry and you feel really sorry for yourself so there's there's a period of I guess a real low and real difficulty and I remember for me it was a big thing of I've let my dad down like my dad had come to watch all of my games would leave he's sacked to a level he sacrificed his own career because he wouldn't work, be in the office long hours because he would take me to football and my brother to cricket.

9:27So there was this real thing of, oh my God, I've let my dad down. And I think for all of us as humans, that's quite a deeply ingrained and neat emotion of you want to make your parents proud and you definitely don't want to let them down. So there's that initial real difficult, hard moment. But then I very, very quickly turned my brain to, no one's going to give me anything. No one's given me anything up to this point in my life. I've learned a lesson that life is not roses and unicorns. It's a tough world out there. Anything you get, you're going to have to go and earn. So my mindset very quickly, I don't know if it was weeks or months, but very quickly flipped over, what am I going to do?

10:10And that wasn't, right, let's go and start Castor. There was an interim period. We were quite lucky that the two of us had been on a similar journey. the timings didn't align perfectly were broadly similar journey where Phil wanted to be a cricketer but wasn't going to make it either so we were kind of having our own individual journeys but I guess there was a level of parallel and we both moved down to London at a similar time so we were up in Merseyside at that point and I said which is probably a far broader topic but it felt to me at the time and I guess this is 15 or so years ago that if you want to make something of yourself you need to go to London I don't think that's necessarily the case anymore, but at that time it felt that that was the case to me.

10:52I didn't have any qualifications. I didn't have any experience. I didn't have a CV, but I wanted to be successful. I was very driven and very ambitious. And it was around about the time that the coalition government had come into power. They had introduced a policy, a big deal at the time, where student fees would go up from£3 ,000 a year to, I think,£9 ,000. and a lot of the big corporations in response to that policy had introduced I'm fairly certain this isn't a technical term but essentially non-graduate graduate programs and saying that look if you're from a certain background you don't need to go and get in x thousand pounds of debt come in and we'll train you up etc so I managed again kind of good old-fashioned saying you're the harder you work the lucky you get I was really lucky that those schemes existed as I was transitioning from football.

11:44So I went and got a job in a bank. I'm not particularly good with numbers. I didn't necessarily feel that I'd be successful long-term in the bank, but I knew that one, I wanted to save money because I was starting to think at that time about having my own business and Phil was the same. And secondly, I thought, well, if I'm not very good with numbers, being in a bank, I might get slightly better with numbers. So it was very much, I'm not going to feel sorry for myself. I'm just going to throw myself into something. I don't know what it is. I don't have a grand plan. Castor was a figment of our imagination at that point, not even embryonic, but I'm just going to put myself out in the world and work really hard and see what happens.

12:25Other people's career and life may have gone in a different direction at this point. Tom Behan says he enjoyed working in finance. There was a career there, but his desire to start of business was strong. He was able to learn more and more about finance and business through his job. And then in the mornings before work and the evenings after work, he would debate new business ideas with his brother. I don't like being told what to do and banks are very hierarchical for good reason and that didn't suit me. So I wasn't good at following the party line, so to speak. and my brother again was on a parallel journey where he went into corporate finance so we're doing not in different jobs we moved into a flat together we were like saving every penny that we had because we didn't have a specific idea about castor but we knew that where we were was not the end goal we would start something at some point so we're these like strange hermit characters where we'd be in the office for 12, 13, 14 hours a day, come back, talk about, could we start a business?

13:35I would not go and spend any money. So everyone said, oh, how's London? It must be amazing living down there. And I was like, yeah, well, I've been on the tube, but that's kind of about it. So again, it was a great experience, but my mindset from the beginning was, this is not going to be forever. So when did that figment of your imagination and those conversations become something more concrete? So we were living together, like I said, and it happened by osmosis. There wasn't a snapshot. I'm like, oh my God, we've got it. We're going to change the world with this idea. We, and I won't say them all because I'll embarrass myself, but we had some God awful ideas about businesses that we could start, but we were just discussing it every day.

14:14So again, I've always been an early bird and the alarm would go off at 5am and we'd just discuss stuff together before we went to the office each day, each evening we'd come back. and again discuss stuff and I'm a massive believer in passion and you find your passion and it just evolves in a way that you can never predict and I often hear kind of young people talking about career plans and I'm going to study this at university and I'm going to go to that particular university and take that particular course and then I'm going to go in in there into that type of role and in five years I'm going to move on to this and I don't know if that's right or wrong everyone's different but for me I was the complete opposite of that I had no idea what the future would look like but very much followed my passion and I do believe that if you let things sink in your head if you keep talking about them every evening after work and every morning when you wake up before you've had your coffee and you keep talking about sports and where there's a gap in the market and and how you could potentially capitalize on that you find that there's something in it other ideas start to float into the ether but the one that keeps coming back is the one that there's probably some legs to it.

15:23And what was the idea? Because obviously the business that you end up building, it's not just a high quality sportswear brand. You set out to take advantage of a specific gap in the market and weaknesses that you'd spotted. So could you just explain at that stage, I guess what the idea was, but then also the business today, how much it looks like that idea? Yeah, so I guess there's two parts to it as a starting point. One is that word I've already said, passion. you're not thinking about data you're not you're not looking at well how quickly is this market growing and can i get a report from mckinsey that validates this idea that i've had you just like what am i passionate about what am i going to wake up every day and be excited to do i don't think that's yet necessarily unique there's there's far more ways to skin a cat and be successful i'm sure there's many entrepreneurs that have founded businesses that just commercially make sense they're not necessarily passionate about them that wouldn't work for for phil and i we had to be passionate about it so the first part of that process was when i'm daydreaming when i'm thinking about the few what do i get excited about and the only thing for us was sport so once we locked that in and said well whatever we do here we're gonna have to work incredibly hard there's going to be so many setbacks so many hardships the only way i'm going to work hard enough and power through all of those is if i am deeply and genuinely passionate so once we'd lock that in which was sport we then started to think a bit more analytically and say well is there a gap in the market here it's fine to be passionate about it but if there's not a gap to fill you ain't gonna last very long so that's when we started to say the big three nike adidas puma certainly the big two, have always dominated this market.

17:11Why? Why is there not space either above them or below them for a cheaper, low-cost alternative or a more premium alternative? You look at any other sector, and the one I would always look at was the automotive market, where you have your Audi, BMW, Mercedes that cover the segment or the entire section of the market, the entry-level Mercedes A-Class all the way up to the premium S-Class or Maybach, whatever it is. you've got your vw's your renault's whatever and then of course you've got your premium cars at the top and we're like why why is there not the premium option in the sportswear market why do these guys dominate it so that was the initial i guess analysis and then we looked at other brands lululemon which is super successful really well known was founded in canada us listed premium afleisure brand they'd done something not dissimilar albeit focused on women's wear to begin with rather than menswear there was a brand called on running a swiss footwear brand which since listed in the us super successful kind of a billion dollars revenue again not dissimilar premium engineering performance focused alternative to the big guys but they were focused on footwear so we could see that other people were thinking along the same lines as us and more importantly other people were being successful with a not dissimilar idea and that's where you start to bridge the passion and this thing that you're going to be willing to do whatever it takes to be successful with the logic and say well this the market is proving that there's space here that this can work some people might listen to that and think ah but lulu lemon and on had already started doing it so were you were you too late but you actually you're saying actually that's proved that there was an opportunity correct and it's again everyone have i suppose it's the difference right between an entrepreneur and people there's always a reason not to do something and if there's any lesson that you're learning, like there will always be a reason to not do something.

19:07But what about this? There's risk in everything. There's risk in our bed in the morning. So absolutely a very logical, intelligent person will have said, ah, but you can't do that. But Lululemon didn't do menswear particularly well. On was footwear and didn't do apparel particularly well. There was other brands doing, again, slightly different things. But for us to be a premium British alternative to the mega brands, You've got either the big American kind of Nike New Balance, the big German Adidas Puma. Why is there not a premium British sportswear brand that competes on that global stage? And I was really inspired by brands like Aston Martin, McLaren, premium British engineering focused, performance, innovation focused that compete on the global stage that have become recognized and respected all over the world.

19:56We said, why can't Castor become that one day? And then so many entrepreneurs would then pretend, well, so many not entrepreneurs, actually, so many people may have an idea like this, then they wouldn't do the next step, which is quit your job and set about setting up the business. So when did you make that decision? And then if you talk about just raising that initial money to get started? Yeah, it's interesting. So I don't know if preordained is the right expression to use, that maybe gives the wrong impression, but there was never any question that we wouldn't, like once we decided, And again, I think that comes back to the football, the sporting experience, that failure that the world has told me I'm a failure and I'm going to prove the world wrong.

20:38Probably a little bit of a chip on your shoulder, more than a little bit, if I'm honest. I want to prove the world wrong. The world's told me I'm not good enough and I'm going to prove the world. I don't know who that person is, but you've got this perception in your own mind that I need to prove people wrong. and in my head I wasn't going to do that working in a bank so starting a business it was always going to happen it was just a case of when not if and then everything built through momentum those those early morning late night conversations it just built and again there wasn't this big bang light bulb moment we take our holidays to fly to Portugal to meet with factories to go to Italy to meet fabric suppliers.

21:18It just builds. We didn't have any experience about design, about fabrics, about sourcing, about manufacturing. We just worked out as we went along and it built through momentum. So when it came to, right, we're both going to have to quit our jobs and move home. Like I moved in with, back in with my mum and dad. I was 26. Phil moved in with his then girlfriend, now wife, and she paid us rent for three years, which again logically to many normal people is is a big big thing like you're sure that's the right thing to do but there was never any question there was no there was never any question about oh my god what if this goes wrong it was just tunnel vision we're going to do this and we're going to make it a success just a little side question but going and visiting the factories what would you say to those like how did you get into the factories what would you say to go and speak to them so there's there's two questions in that how do you get in front of them which firstly was hard and again i'm a i'm a big believer in back to that point earlier follow your passion you just we went and spoke spoke to anyone that would speak to us literally anyone there's no grand strategy i would find people on linkedin i'd ask 100 people to introduce me to 100 more people it's really time consuming it's really in many ways demoralizing because 95 of those 100 of people will even not want to meet you or have no value whatsoever.

22:40And if they make you buy them a coffee, that's quite a lot of money when you're starting out and you don't have a lot of money. So it does risk being really demoralizing. But through that mindset, I'm just going to keep speaking to more and more and more people. Someone will introduce you to a person at a factory. So you, again, through short, pure elbow grease, you eventually take that minor step and each minor step leads to the next minor step when we we got to the factories it has to remember it the so we were saying right got to be a premium alternative to the big guys so we're not going to have any marketing budget we're not going to be able to sponsor any athletes anything like that the only way we're going to be able to stand out from the big guys is through product quality our products have to be undisputably higher quality than the big brands that all starts with fabric and then it goes to where do you get the product manufactured so we the best factories in the world are in portugal or technical engineering the the types of factory for technical products that we make was in portugal so we managed to get a meeting with with this factory kind of about half an hour so outside of porto in the north of the country and i still remember it to this day this the factory owner didn't speak any english we definitely don't speak any portuguese so we kind of three hour meeting with him where we'd speak at him he didn't understand he'd speak back at us but I don't know what it was whether it was just the energy it was the way that you looked at him factories generally don't like taking on new brands because you represent a risk and if it doesn't go well you might not pay your bills you've got to go and convince someone that you're worth taking a chance on and without him understanding a word we said clearly we managed to do that did you have a name for the business at this point?

24:25So I it took us quite a long time to come up with the name and the initial name that we had was J.E. Carter Sporting Club like a lot of things at that time it felt really clever and intelligent at the time like we were two young guys I was 26 Phil was or even before we started I was 26 when we started so I would have been 25 when we were going to go in to meet these factories and refining the idea so Phil would have been 23 young kids I guess really and we were just making it up as we went along and yeah so Jay Carter Sporting Club was the initial idea, thankfully we came to our senses and realised that that maybe wasn't the snappiest name and then Castor came, we were kind of grappling around Jay Carter doesn't work, let's think we've got to have somebody that's going to resonate and one day, because we were starting to think at this point about teams and athletes we hadn't refined it but we were starting to think about it we need something that's going to look good if it's on television um where people can see the name and then go on your website and somehow we got into greek mythology and started thinking about greek mythology nike a fairly well-known u.s based sportswear brand is the greek goddess of victory so i guess greek mythology works in this sector so we started to look into various stories and castor is one of two brothers castor and Pollux who in Greek mythology challenged the Greek god Zeus which we thought was quite a nice analogy for us as two brothers challenging the big guys of the sportswear world and being the highly perceptive individuals that we are we thought Castor is a better name than Pollux we're going to go with that one we've made a lot of stupid decisions in the last seven years but I think we got that one right I want to ask you about your parents because you said you said earlier about how about feeling like you let your dad down how did you feel at this stage when you moved back in with them and then they remortgaged the house to help finance the business how did you feel then um putting forward to them what you were planning to do and then the support that they gave you so thinking back to that time honestly it's almost it's almost like a black hole like it's It's almost like I blocked out that period in my life because it was so hard.

26:45It was so difficult. At the time, of course, you don't know if you're going to come through it. So there's no guarantees. Kind of finally look back now and it's worked out relatively well. Never take it for granted, of course, but it's worked out pretty well. But at the time, you don't know that. And it was just incredibly difficult. I almost find it difficult to look back at that time because as you say, I'd come, firstly, it should be said, we're a very close family. kind of I guess traditional family values we've always been very close as a family very supportive of each other my mum and dad had a big belief in education work hard do your best at all times be a good person but dream big like there's there's kind of no ego no arrogance always have humility but don't think that anyone else can achieve something that you can't achieve like you back yourself to go and do it so I guess those values were instilled in us at an early age when I moved back it was really difficult because I guess I was yeah 26 all of my friends were starting to get with their partners or move out and think about the next stage of their life and I was taking what I guess optically looked like a massive backwards step and when you try to tell people that yeah I've quit my job I'm moving back in with my mum and dad I don't earn a salary but I'm going to create a sportswear brand that competes with Nike and Adidas not surprisingly people thought you were completely crazy.

28:10So it was a really difficult period, but my mum and dad were just massively supportive. And like I say, as had been instilled in us for a young age was believe in yourself. There's no reason why whatever you believe you can't make happen. So we were thinking about starting a business. I'd save some money from my job. My brother had done the same. So we had some money to, I think, buy some of the early stock, start to think about a website where we didn't have enough. We're like, shit, we've got this idea. We're putting it all on the line. And we've been off, like I said, had this mindset, I'm going to speak to 100 people.

28:46And a lot of those conversations were, oh, do you want to put some seed investment in? And everyone said no because we didn't have any proof of concept at that time. And it is demoralizing. Again, it doesn't matter how optimistic you are, how driven you are as a person, to be told no constantly starts to mess with your head. And if you're not careful, you can get into a negative kind of downward spiral. And it was during that period that, because my dad's quite old school, like my dad's not a talker, so he never would have done this. It was my mom who came up to me and was like, look, we know you and Phil want to start this business.

29:18I know people don't want to invest, but we believe in you. We'll back you. Or we'll give you some money who wasn't back you because there was no conversation about, oh, what is the valuation? Like, what are we going to, it was just, we'll give you some money to start. And yeah, like I say, I find that quite difficult looking back because it was like, fuck, we've got to make this a success now. Like, yeah, I just went into a very insular, almost dark place where it is, back to that football analogy, but tunnel vision. I don't know what success looks like. I don't know if this business is going to get to£100 ,000 revenue, a million.

29:55I've got no idea what success looks like, but I'm not going to fail. I'm not stopping until I make enough back to pay them back. And in a way that's quite hard to articulate, that instills something in you that is a real competitive advantage. I've got nothing against people that go to Oxford or Harvard. I'm probably jealous that I didn't because I left school at 16. But I do think that it's a competitive advantage to have that ferocity, that relentless, deep, deep drive and desire to be successful. versus someone that's had a really good idea that they wrote in a business plan in their dorm in in harvard i mean facebook and other quite good businesses have come out of that idea as well so clearly that works but it is looking back it didn't feel like it at the time but it was and is a competitive advantage just that ferocity that relentless desire to be successful what what then happened when you had the money because my understanding is you then you got a bit more you managed to get a startup loan i think it was with virgin put together some other funding then what did you do yeah so the virgin piece came so we did we got about i think it was 50 000 something like that as a loan not an investment but again you had to have started by that point they wouldn't fund understandably wouldn't fund an idea so you had to have started so it was at that point once our mum and dad had given us that initial money and an investment that bought the stock allowed us to finish the website there was no marketing budget left over you have to have somewhere to like hold the stock which to begin with was was kind of in the bedroom you had to pay to deliver the product all these things that as you get bigger just become a line on the p &l at the beginning like they're literally life and death every time a customer returned you were like oh my god that's 85 pounds that we thought we had that we no longer have like it It was really stressful and you're watching every penny.

31:50So we were talking, I think before we came, we started recording about the train down from kind of the north down to London. And because we didn't have any marketing budget, we couldn't kind of buy billboards or pay influencers. I would come down to London from Merseyside, stand outside Equinox in Kensington and basically give product or get one, get to know, build relationships with it and give product to the personal trainers at Equinox and say, well, can you wear it with your clients? If they go online and buy it, I'll give you a kickback on the sale. So we didn't realize it at the time, but it was kind of like pre-Instagram or non-Instagram influencer marketing, and it worked really well.

32:33So people would buy it. The customer that we hoped existed, which was a more discerning, affluent guy, we kind of jokingly called it the Goldman Sachs man, someone that was in the office five days a week at 7am, but with a personal trainer four days a week at 6am and then kind of running a marathon or doing a triathlon at the weekend, that customer who would spend a bit more on a higher quality product and a more premium brand, we hope they existed. We believe they existed and they did and they would start buying. And then we, again, we didn't have any budget, marketing budget, so to speak of.

33:05So it was all via word of mouth, all organic so we started to grow quite naturally but then you're faced with another kind of real challenge which is working capital like oh god i bought 20 000 worth of product i've sold that now i need to go buy 40 000 pounds and i don't have 40 000 pounds where the hell do i get that money from so that's where the virgin loan came in and we just started to go from there when was it that you first started you touched on a little bit there about traction when was it you really started to to gain momentum i'd say within the first year but it's it's it's it's a bit of a paradox that question because certainly the way i felt and maybe it was because it the way it all happened for us where until i repaid my mom and dad that money that was the only thing that mattered in life when did you repay them it was after like because we constantly needed money it was like two and a half years so we'd made enough money but you constantly needed it for the next thing so i'm i I think it was about two years, give or take.

34:04But in the, so although we started to gain traction and customers would buy the product and they liked it, they'd say, oh yeah, this is different from Nike. Like I like the fabric. I like the designs. That's cool. There's a premium brand, British brand, nice. It kind of, again, everything that we hoped would happen slowly started to, but you never feel like, good, we've got traction. Or I didn't anyway. It's all just fear. and about shit, what if this doesn't go well? What if someone doesn't like it? So again, you're just so tunnel vision and focused on every day you check, right, how many orders have come in, how much revenue's come in?

34:40Is that more revenue than the cost that we've had for today? And you literally are, again, we were hand to mouth, like has more money come in than it's gone out, which is not a very nice feeling. And I would not want to go back there. Castor was now growing fast, But the brothers believed the business could get much bigger. So they started looking at how they could partner with athletes and sports teams to promote Castor. So it was always an idea. It was always a feeling that, again, go back to the initial vision. We want to create a British sportswear band that competes on the global stage. You then reverse engineer back from that.

35:21Well, you can't do that without having global visibility. How do you get global visibility? to buy it on billboards to go down the influencer route. You could do that, but we want to be a credible, authentic performance sportswear brand. There's no better way to get authenticity and authority than by having great athletes, world-class athletes, where your product competing at the highest level. So it was an idea right from the beginning, but one, we didn't have the money to do it at the start, and two, we didn't have any credibility. So we knew we'd have to build both of those things, and it took us probably two years.

35:56I can't remember what revenue it would have been, but let's say a couple of million, which sounds like a big number and it's not a small number, I guess, but you work for every penny of that. So every single customer you feel like you've personally earned. But we got to a point where we were big enough to think about doing something. We had this big vision that led decisions that we made and probably made us a lot more audacious, which again is a bit of a paradox. the background was that we had no money we took this money from our mom and dad everything was about survival but in contrast to that everything we did we fought big and the mindset was well i'm going to work however hard it takes to be successful i'm going to do whatever it takes legally to be successful but i'm not going to have that mindset to build a mediocre brand i'm not going to come this far to come this far so we always fought big we always dreamed big which again a lot of people thought we were crazy at the time and was probably the reason why no one wanted to give us any money at the start or invest in us but that mindset led us to think well if we're gonna if we want to be a global globally recognized brand you need to have global athletes and then we started to think we can't do teams because we went big enough like operationally it's hard work to service teams athletes are a lot easier there's one of them there's not a whole kind of squad so we started to think about athletes you look at the sports that individual athletes where brands and tennis and golf were the two and it was no more analytical than if you're watching golf there's multiple different places that the camera can be if you're watching tennis there's only two places that the camera can be on that player or that player so we're like are you going to get more bang for your buck in tennis than anything else so then we started to gift product to the people around the athletes so the coach the personal trainer the masseur When you say gift, you'd literally just send it to them.

37:49Just unsolicited, just send it to them. Unsolicited, find out who they were. It sounds creepy, right? But that is what we do. Or you'd send it to, yeah, wherever they trained for the attention of and all these various people. And often we'd put in a note, say, Castor, kind of two brothers that have started this brand, you've got this big vision. We'd love it if you wore the product. And there's a good lesson in this, actually, that putting yourself out there like that, often you'd be amazed at how much people respond to it. So in a slightly different way, so to go off-piste ever so slightly, we used to email every Sunday, I'd get the list of people that had ordered that week and I'd email them and I'd say, I just want to say thank you.

38:34My name's Tom, I'm co-founder of the business, really appreciate your order. Thanks very much. Let me know if there's anything I can do, et cetera. And I won't name any names because that would be breaching confidentiality, but some pretty high powered people who were customers at the start would come back and say, well done, start a business. Like, you should be proud of yourself, blah, blah, blah. And then if you're smart and have got your head screwed on, you could be like, oh, maybe that person can help me, help introduce people's willingness to help you. If you put yourself out there in the right way, you've got to do it in the right way.

39:04Again, we probably all get cold emails, don't we? And it's annoying. So you've got to do it in the right way. But if you're really genuine about it, It's amazing how often or how rewarding that can be and how much people will be willing to help you. And that's how it was with the athletes. We said, we're just going to put ourselves out there. I'm a massive believer in the old adage of the harder you work, the luckier you get. And we were really lucky that Andy was coming, Andy Murray was coming to the end of his previous partnership at the time that we were kind of getting big enough and had the capability to do a deal with someone like him.

39:39so we'd give the product to people around him they started to wear it Andy started to see it coming to the end of his agreement and someone said oh why didn't you come and meet Andy and I did and then we managed to make something happen What was your first team deal? I think it was Rangers correct me if I'm wrong and then how did that come about? Because obviously as you say different challenge to signing up an individual Yeah very different operationally completely different so Rangers were the first team up until that point maybe we'd done a little bit outside of Europe but almost all of the manufacturing was in Europe whereas a lot of team sports manufacturing is global so you'll have Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, China, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia because of the volumes like you're making big big volumes of product so Rangers came about again in a not dissimilar way we put ourselves out there there's a consistent theme here as I said we'd had the realization earlier that if we wanted to be a global brand, our brand and logo would have to get global visibility.

40:43We had to get credibility that would come through sports. And over time, we'd started to work out that this market for team sports is broken. There is a disconnect. There's a real supply-demand breakdown. You've got two massive brands, Nike and Adidas, and hundreds of teams, and the big brands dominate everyone else and they decide what they want to do. So the market works for them, but kind of didn't work for the teams. Nike and Adidas would focus almost all of their resources on a very small number of teams at the top of the market. Real Madrid, Barcelona, Bayern Munich, and in our view would ignore or certainly not do a very good job for everyone else.

41:25And the more people we spoke to, the more it became apparent that there was a strong level of dissatisfaction with the status quo. but not dissimilarly to how when we started Castor people thought we were crazy you're never going to be able to go in and kind of compete with those guys they're massive, they've got more financial firepower than anyone but we felt well if we can offer a club something that is genuinely different and superior to what the big guys are offering them more bespoke products, higher quality product range help them grow their revenues help them connect with their international or global fan bases, approach the market from a digital perspective, which no one had really done before.

42:09All of those things were very innovative and really interesting to the team. So although it was difficult to do the first deal with Rangers because we were an unproven entity at that point, again, I don't know this for a fact, but I suspect the fact that we were partnered with Andy Murray helped because we weren't just Tom and Phil, two guys from Merseyside that have started this brand. We were that, but Andy Murray trusts them enough to work with them. So I definitely wouldn't say it was easy, but we were pushing against an open door in team sports. The market was broken. The status quo didn't work for a lot of people.

42:44Did you consider this an evolutional strategy or a sort of natural extension of it in the sense of you've gone from doing like bespoke high quality products to something that is significantly more mass produced in terms of a football shirt? I guess the answer to that is yes, in that it was an evolution. Again, right at the beginning, and this hasn't changed, the fundamental founding vision was to create Castor as a British sportswear brand that is recognized and respected all over the world. We realized, and again, it's, I think, a massively overlooked skill of an entrepreneur is the ability to pivot, be opportunistic, recognize where the landscape has changed and that yes you might have this big well thought through vision and roadmap but everyone's got a great every boxer has a great strategy until they get punched in the face you have to adapt so going into team sports was one of those things where we felt it fit into the bigger picture vision but it was a bigger opportunity than we recognized and we only realized that when we started speaking to people in that market where they were not receiving a great product or service from Nike or Adidas.

44:01No one was thinking about the market through a digital perspective. The Premier League, just to take one example, you could apply this to Formula One, you could apply this to international cricket or rugby. The Premier League is watched, consumed in countries, markets all over the world. There are fans of teams in all of those markets, yet no one was thinking about, well, how do I build the infrastructure, the capability to connect those teams with those fans? It's hard for the teams to do it themselves because they've got a lot to focus on trying to win games every week. They needed a partner to help them do that and the incumbent brands were just not focused on it.

44:39Castor now has more than 500 staff and has shifted its headquarters from Merseyside to Manchester. The company has grown so much that it now has more than 50 deals to make kits for teams, including the Red Bull and McLaren Formula One teams, Newcastle United in the Premier League and a host of other football teams across Europe. But getting bigger has posed challenges. This includes the challenge for Tom Behan of managing a business that looks very different and much bigger than the one he founded in 2015. But there's also been setbacks with actual products. Aston Villa ended its contract with Castor after male and female football players criticised Castor's shirts for becoming too heavy with sweat and looking like they were wet.

45:30I think we alluded to it briefly earlier, you have to change. So as the founder, the co-founders, your role has to change. The skill set that gets you from zero to one, that drive, that determination, that passion you do everything you are customer service you are head of marketing you are head of product that isn't the same skill set that gets you from one to two so there's firstly a recognition a realization that you have to change sounds really simple is actually really hard because when you've had success doing something i think it's human nature to think brilliant i'm going to go and do more of that thing so to recognize proactively that no you do need to a pivot you do need to evolve you do need to change how you operate where you add value to the organization that that's difficult and i do think a lot of entrepreneurs struggle with that as they scale up i think we certainly had our challenges so i'm not not claiming to be kind of the font of all knowledge but but recognizing that you need to evolve is is one aspect of it and then secondly and at risk of stating the obvious people are the difference between either failing or being a good business or a great business if you get better people in and come and align them around a singular vision can lay out a roadmap for them where they understand what it is that collectively we need to do to achieve that vision and then create a culture that allows talented people to thrive and develop and push themselves you can grow faster than you ever and that has been our experience than you ever thought possible people are the hardest part of that but also the best part how have you dealt with setbacks along the way i wanted to ask you about let's take the aston villa example how have you dealt when there's been a challenge like someone's questioning the quality of what you've produced it's all part of the journey so we we work in an incredibly highly scrutinized high pressure environment and I love that we're a disruptive brand we're an innovative brand and we're disrupting some very very powerful people if the market worked perfectly before Castor came along we would not exist and not only do we exist we're growing really quickly which proves that the market was not perfect was not operating in the right way but when you are disruptive and innovative there are always bumps in the road you can't let them affect you you have to learn from them you have to have humility and say okay could we have done something better there often i mean most times in life the answer isn't black or white it's gray but there will always be learnings you take those learnings you implement them and you'll be better for the experience but i've met so many entrepreneurs in the last seven years who let the setbacks affect them more than they should you can't be pig-headed about it you can't have your head in the clouds and pretend that problems don't exist because they do but you can fix them far more than people often realize and i do think it comes back to i think it's a really interesting difference between american entrepreneurs and british americans expect themselves to be successful and i do think that's a big reason that psychology that mindset behind why they create the phenomenal businesses that they do in britain there's often this mindset that, oh, you've had a setback.

48:55Yeah, we told you it's going to be difficult to disrupt Nike and Adidas, you were never going to be able to do that, were you? And now here's the evidence. I just don't subscribe to that view. All of the setbacks are opportunities to learn, to get better, as long as you take them in the right way with humility. The setbacks are what you learn a lot more from them. They'll make you stronger in the long run. There's no doubt about that. What would you like the business to learn from this setback? well it's all about having the right processes and systems our revenue has grown beyond any business plan expectation because the gap in the market existed and the fact that we're an exciting brand and create good products there therefore teams want to work with us but because phil and i are very entrepreneurial we said well we're not we're not gonna do things because the five-year business plan five years ago said it we're going to do things that we feel are right in the moment.

49:46And because of that, we've grown incredibly quickly. You're then running really fast to build the infrastructure that supports that. The lesson for me is as you get bigger, the processes, the systems, the people are incredibly important, particularly in our market. So it's not a learning where you'd say, oh, I'd never do that again. It's just an evolution. It's part of the process. I think the Silicon Valley mindset of move fast and break things again is one that I massively believe in. Sometimes you have to go through these moments to learn from them, to change a process or a system and then get back to full steam ahead.

50:25So you basically answered my next question there. So it's very much carry on and learn from it rather than stop, take stock and then get going again once you know that it wouldn't happen again. It's an interesting question. And Phil Knight, the founder of Nike, written an amazing book, Shoe Dog. And there's an expression in that book. There's a lot of really interesting things. I'd definitely recommend it to anyone listening, where he says grow or die. And he's like, my mindset for the first 20 years of Nike was grow or die. You have to grow. You have to be on offense. You have to think about how you can make the market better, offer something positive and exciting and new and innovative to customers.

51:02If you're in a defensive mindset, you can't do those things. So there is always a balance to that for sure. That yes, you learn. Yes, you refine and improve. and you bring in people that are focused on supply chain and operations and systems. Absolutely. But those things are not mutually exclusive to we want to build a global brand. We're going to go where that opportunity takes us. It's not a case of one or the other. Castor has come a long way in a short period of time. It is no longer a promising startup, but an established brand. But Tom Behan is not finished. Far from it. It hasn't changed the ambition.

51:44We still haven't fulfilled anywhere near what I want and believe we can, which is, as I've said, to be a British sportswear brand competing on the global stage, to be recognised and respected all over the world. Like I said, brands like Aston Martin and McLaren in a different sector, Dyson, these are British brands that are known all over the world. That's what I want Castor to be. The fundraise, again, it's a catalyst. It's a moment where people come up and congratulate you and it's nice and all the rest of it. And you do have to enjoy the good moments because there's a lot of tough ones as well, which we never talk about.

52:20Of course, we all live in a social media world where people only ever post the positives. There's so many more setbacks than there are good moments. You do have to enjoy the good moments. Equally for me and Phil, it doesn't change anything. It just gives you a foundation. It gives you more resource to go and achieve the vision that has been the vision from the start. that doesn't and will not change. Is there any temptation to sell, enjoy success and enjoy the rest of your life? I'm 34 years old. I would be bored within a week if I sold Castor. We've all got bills to pay. We've all got families to feed.

52:58And I wouldn't dismiss or poo-poo for a second anyone who made a different decision because we've all got our own things going on in life. but Castor's already been more successful financially than looking back when I was living in my mum and dad's house, packing orders on a kitchen table beyond my wildest dreams. So I feel incredibly grateful for that. Equally, all of us were only going to get to play this little game called Life Once. I've got a chance to create something, build something, hopefully incredibly exciting. I value that a hell of a lot more than I do. time on a golf course. So it's not something that I've spent any time thinking about.

53:40I think that's within me, that desire to work, that desire to try and build something that doesn't change based on money, based on external validation, based on external challenges. That's just an innate drive that's within you. What does the next level of success look like? What does being a goal competitor to Adidas tonight look like? Is it being making Real Madrid or Barcelona shirts? Is it being in the FTSE 100? What is it to you? Internationalization is the very simple answer. So we have stores in the UK. We've got a really successful website in the UK. I think we've built a really strong brand reputation and recognition here that is now expanding across Europe.

54:24We've got an office in Rotterdam. We've got stores across Holland. We've got massive brand awareness in certain parts of Benelux. Max Verstappen, you might have heard of him. He's quite a popular guy in that part of the world. We're lucky that he wears our logo every day of the week. So we're slowly starting to expand across Europe. We opened our first store in Dubai earlier this year that's traded phenomenally well, but there's still so much more we can do across the Middle East, across the Far East, across Australasia. Of course, in team sports, you've got some of the most passionate fans in the world in South America.

55:00So I definitely think there's some interesting opportunities for Castor in that part of the world. And certainly if you have global ambitions in this sector, the US, North America will always be something that's worth considering. So there's so much opportunity still ahead. I think the really exciting, interesting thing for us is being disciplined, but also ambitious in how we go about that opportunity. Women's Wear, our Women's Wear collection is the fastest growing category in a business at the moment. Golf is growing incredibly quickly. So there's a lot of exciting things going on. The fundamental values around product quality, product excellence, commitment to marginal gains, they don't change no matter how big you are.

55:46It's just about how you apply them on a bigger scale. Do you have like a dream deal in mind that would be sort of symbolic of what you're talking about? I mean, yeah, look, think about the detail that you've thought about this business in, you must have like, whether it's getting Adidas off Real Madrid or Nike off the Brazil shirt for Bosch, some deal that really announced that you were alongside Nike and Adidas globally. Mate, I'm a Trummy Rovers fan, so that would be a pretty exciting deal for me to go and do one day. But no, I mean, like I say, we are ambitious. There's always opportunities out there, but I very much focus on the inputs and let the outputs look after themselves, which again is an easy thing to say and quite hard to do when innately or inherently we're in a very results-driven environment.

56:34But if I keep creating high-quality sportswear products, keep investing in our digital capabilities, our data analytics capabilities, our global distribution, if we remain laser focused on building our brand, offering the best possible service and proposition to teams, there's going to be exciting opportunities out there. I don't expend too much energy worrying about which ones they'll be. I know they'll be there. When you look back, what advice would you give to a business leader looking to scale their business? I think you've talked about entrepreneurs and founders, but what about a founder who's maybe struggling to grow their business?

57:12What would your one bit of advice be for them? I don't think it's one bit of advice, but I'd say don't be afraid to pivot. I do meet a lot of people who had an idea, had some success without that idea, have done really well. And then the world changes, the market dynamics change, but they find it hard to change. So that advice could be interpreted in many different ways, depending on the business and the sector, but not being afraid to pivot and go and do something different, I think is something that would benefit a lot of scale-ups. And you talked about marginal gains there, which people probably recognize in the world of sport as well.

57:49I mean, is that how you think about the business today, that where you can really make progress is just one small step at a time, 1 % here and there? Absolutely, yes. Which again, goes back to the beginning where you have this big dream and this big ambition. And I think it's so important to have that. And I do think it's not kind of a British specific comment, but I do think when I go to America, I was in Vegas recently for the Grand Prix. I kind of came back via New York. people just believe in themselves in a different way over there they expect themselves to create a billion dollar company a lot of people don't like that i love it i'm like you want to be around that kind of energy and that ambition so it's really important to have that equally anyone who runs a business has started their own company knows that it's incredibly difficult at times so having that big vision is really hard to connect to reality in those situations or that when when when no circumstances arise i am a massive believer in just the consistency of hard work the consistency of finding marginal gains don't worry about whether your revenue is x percent below budget because stuff always happens and often it's outside of your control if you work really hard consistently and focus on whatever the key value drivers that your business has and the marginal gains that you have, nine times out of 10, the results will look after themselves.

59:16You've been listening to Business Leader with me, Graham Ruddick. Our producer is Anushka Tate. For more business news and analysis, please check out businessleader.co.uk.

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