CCM’s Tom Soar interview
Tom Soar, 43, was appointed CEO of CCM Motorcycles in August 2022, since when he’s worked closely with the manufacturer’s new owner, local businessman Anil Pitalia, in completely revamping the 52-year-old company, including the widening of both its distribution and product range. But as a visit to the company’s factory on the edge of the wild, unspoilt West Pennine Moors revealed, the increased investment Pitalia has brought to the company has it poised to capitalise on its potential.
Soar has form in this respect. After a five-year stint at British manufacturing giant GKN, half of it spent at one of its subsidiaries in Brazil, in 2010 he joined Ricardo UK’s Powertrain division, tasked with establishing a new brownfield factory in southern England to build twin turbo 3799cc and 3994cc engines for the McLaren 12C, 650S and P1 supercars, ranging in power from 540bhp to 1036bhp. Producing up to 4000 engines per year in a world-class lean manufacturing environment that’s widely considered to be superior to Ferrari’s, gave Soar sufficient kudos to have a broad choice of next steps up the career staircase. He chose CCM. Visiting him at the firm’s Bolton factory yielded the opportunity to find out why – and what that entails for the future of the boutique British brand.
AC: Tom, you have a successful background in high-end automotive manufacturing. so what brought you to motorcycles and, in particular, to CCM?
TS: For years I’d been looking for something vehicle-related on two or four wheels where I could create something really special, to show what we can do here in the UK. We’re very good at talking ourselves down here in Britain, but we make lots we can be proud of – we have very skilled engineers and vehicle designers; we have the ability to create outstanding products; and, of course, we’ve got great heritage, so why are we so apologetic about things we make? So that’s what I want to do here at CCM – and I’m really excited about the task in hand. I think we’ve got the opportunity here with this well-established brand to do something with it, and to create an exciting line of future products for global sale.
What’s interesting about CCM for me is that it’s not just a manufacturing operation – we also have a unique approach to product development, building bikes that nobody else does, which is a core pillar of what this business is about. It’s a very distinct brand, and it deserves to be developed much more than it has been so far. People may have heard of CCM, but I suspect they know very little beyond that it’s a bit of an extreme brand, without being really sure what exactly it is that we make. Till now, CCM has been one of Britain’s best-kept secrets on two wheels, so we need to get out there and build it as a global brand. So far, we’ve sold each of the 500 or so bikes we produce each year directly to customers ex-factory, but under our new owner and the new management he’s brought in, we first need to build a dealer network in the UK, and then start selling a decent volume of motorcycles around the world via distributors and dealers. We intend to produce and sell thousands of bikes a year, not hundreds, and we want to be present in all the key markets of the globe.
AC: So what’s the size of your factory here at present, and what are your plans to expand?
TS: At the moment we’ve got 31 employees working in 15,000ft² of covered space. However, it’s very disjointed and spread across several different units on two separate levels – the company’s grown organically, so none of it was conceived as a factory, or as a showroom, or as product development, etc., as such. At the moment we’ve got what we’ve
got, so pending our plans to construct a proper purpose-built factory which will allow us to expand, we’re presently reconfiguring what we have into something more resembling a series production factory, but without losing our handbuilt USP. So, we’re creating a cool showroom in our upper level building, but done in our own way, which Owen, one of our engineers, has termed as Shed Chic, so that’s what we’re calling it. Thanks, Owen!
We’re not trying to create something that’s super-polished, but more of a customer reception area that plays on our history and our heritage, and on the Factory Customs we’re increasingly focusing on. We’re then going to turn the lower section into a bona fide factory, so we can start to do what I know how to do, which is build and run a proper manufacturing plant, with the appropriate manufacturing flow running through it.
AC: To a visitor it seems you’re presently producing a series of individually built motorcycles with no real sense of series production.
TS: I guess we are using a production line system, but it doesn’t have all the things that I would expect a proper production line to have. So it doesn’t have single piece flow; no faults forward; no automation in our production process; work standards; error proofing; automated tooling; traceability of components on to the bikes; documentation of all the torques; and everything relating to its birth history, and so on. Essentially, we need to turn CCM’s manufacturing process into a smaller version of the same system that Aston Martin or Land Rover use to build a car. We have a strong order book, and we fully intend to entirely run out of space here, so the plan is to invest in a new facility somewhere close to Bolton.
AC: And will you finally establish a dealer network for CCM?
TS: Yes – it’s only taken 52 years to get round to that! We’ve taken on six dealers so far, all in England, including Completely Motorcycles, but with only two of their 11 sites while we evaluate how that’s going to work. We have others in the pipeline that will be announced in due course. The aim is to have a small number of 10 to 15 highquality CCM-branded showrooms around the UK. Previously, all bikes had been sold out of the showroom here in the factory, and that’s fine, but the problem is we can’t get close enough to our potential customers. So people want to test ride a bike, or they want to have their CCM serviced, or they want to have a look at all our products, and the only way they can do all that is by driving 300 miles from Kent, say, to Bolton! We know people just aren’t going to do that in sufficient numbers to underwrite our expansion, so we must have a range of premium dealers around the UK. So in scaling the business to make it sustainable and to support our expansion, we think we can add more sales in the UK market by being closer to customers. So the big focus here at CCM right now is getting ourselves on a safe footing with our current products, while developing a range of models that we can homologate and sell abroad.
AC: How many CCMs do you presently manufacture and sell each year, and how many of those are sold outside the UK?
TS: We deliver around 40 bikes a month on average, so of those 500 or so last year about 20 were sold into Europe – but none any further afield, and we intend that to change in the near future. Homologation is obviously an issue for entry into those global markets, but there are some dispensations available for ultra-light volume products into each European country, which will give us a nice boost. Equally we’re looking at entering the Australian, New Zealand and North American markets, including Canada, with an expanded product range.
AC: At present, all CCM models are based on the same single-cylinder platform, powered by the ex-BMW/Husqvarna 600cc motor sourced from SWM in Italy, with each bike individually homologated for UK registration under the SVA system. Will that change?
TS: There are benefits to what we’re doing at the moment, because we’ve got a cool
looking product, and the fact that it’s not homologated means we can use an engine that has no airbox, with a straight through exhaust which sounds amazing and has no cats, so we can keep the weight of the bike to circa 140-145kg. Those are all attributes of the bikes that our customers love and which make a CCM what it is. It’s really difficult for us to scale that, because ultimately you need to be homologated. So the future challenge is going to be about retaining all the cool stuff about CCM, and making a great bike that we can sell globally. So that engine is a good unit for us at the moment, really nice and torquey, powerful enough, light enough, lively, good fun, so we’ll keep our existing single cylinder platform, but we’re also looking closely at doing a twin. We have several engines under consideration, and are presently trying to work out which would be the best long-term option for us to use.
AC: At present, a CCM is ultra-stripped-out, lightweight, aggressive in styling with an uncompromising demeanour, and with little practicality for commuting or anything like that – it’s a fun bike.
TS: People do commute on them! One owner told me at a show: “I’ve got a Tracker, and I did 4000 miles on it in the past year commuting into London.” He said it was the best traffic tool he could ever hope for!
AC: But is CCM interested in marketing a less extreme form of product?
TS: I think we’re interested in retaining the brand’s premium quality while increasing production numbers. It’s already a premium product – if you look at our bikes on a show stand next to other brands, we’re never going to compete with the big companies in terms of the money they spend on R&D and product development, but our bike already looks premium compared to theirs, so I think we’re looking to ensure CCM remains a hand-built British premium product.
When you move to volume production, the risk of losing that goes up, so we’ve got to make sure that our product is going to be individually conceived, with beautiful machining, outstanding detailing, gorgeous to look at, fun to ride. Our market research tells us our customer wants an electronics-free motorcycle, so it’s not going to be the most technologically advanced, but riding it will be the purest motorcycle experience available from anyone.
AC: You displayed a prototype Cruiser two-seater model, which never actually went into production. Do you ever plan to do a two-seater?
TS: I think the CCM model range is a little bit confusing, with all the different variants on the original Spitfire. These were all really successful, and once we’d sold out of one version, we’d build another one. We’re kind of 17 iterations down that road, so there wasn’t any flow to what the CCM product range is. So we’ve now organised it into four families of models: Scramblers (which includes the Maverick), then Bobbers, Roadsters and Trackers. For each of those types of bikes, we’ve got a Base level, then a Premium level, which has got nine of the most common optional extras included, and then we do an Ultimate level which has got the twin disc front end, and a high power engine map. So you’re starting to sort of segment it into something that’s more digestible for the customer, because often before, you saw people glaze over when you tried to explain what was on offer. ‘I don’t understand what your product range is!’ was a frequent comment. So we’ve spent a lot of time getting those four families sorted, and then above that we have the limited-edition models like the RAF 100, and the Heritage 71, and the Factory Customs, where a customer can work with our designers in creating a one-off version of one of our models.
AC: How many of the Heritage 71 have you sold?
TS: We’ve sold 20 so far.
AC: Was this not an important bike for you, because it was the first time that you’d ever done something that was super high priced, but also with such a high level of technology, including a titanium frame?
TS: Yes, but in the end, we’re not doing the Ti-frame on that bike. This was before I joined, when we were looking for a high-end product and came up with the titanium frame, but then they had to find a supplier who could build it! Bending and welding titanium is super-difficult, and CCM aspires to extremely high-quality levels, both perceived quality and actual quality. Now try and find a supplier that can do that – it’s not a man in a shed job, this, you need to use an aerospace quality supplier, and then you’ve got aerospace prices. I would need to have charged a lot of money for the Ti-Heritage to get the quality right – well over £30,000 for a single cylinder motorcycle. I’m not going to put something into production which I don’t have confidence in as a series production model – they might be able to do one such frame okay, but they’d have had to make 71. So we decided that actually we don’t need to do that, and we’ve now switched to a steel frame in a really cool colour, but we’ve kept the rest of the high-end components. The Heritage 71 is now £21,000, and it’s a lot more popular at £21k than it was at £30k!
AC: Back to the Cruiser – do you plan to make a CCM that can carry a passenger?
TS: Well, we’ve got a two-seater at the moment in the Maverick, with an optional pillion kit that you can mount to turn it into a two-seater. The Cruiser was just getting too complicated, so I decided to stop and make sure we do those four product ranges really well before we try to expand our customer base.
AC: You’ve had some competition success in France, with your local importer Stephane Mezard twice winning the French Flat Track title for CCM. Do you plan to expand on that?
TS: Not now, but a Motorsport program may well return in the future. First and foremost we’re focusing on getting this site sorted out, focusing on the existing products and on new products, and on professionalising the business so that we’ve got a proper basis on which to grow. Expanding our dealer networks, improving our aftersales service offering, all of this takes precedence over racing. Which is not to say we don’t support what our local importers like Stephane are doing – but there will be no factory CCM competition involvement just yet.
AC: So what’s your road map for CCM in the coming years?
TS: By the end of the decade we have aspirations to be selling 7500 bikes annually, and to sell those in Western Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand. And if we can also get into some of the other expanding markets like India, we will. We know there are barriers to entry there, but we have products that are extremely well suited to an urban environment with high-density traffic. We want to be in a new, world-class factory in order to be able to service that volume, and we want that factory to be in or near Bolton, and to create 300 quality jobs around here.
AC: And with the possibility of multi-cylinder models being added to the range?
TS: Yes, indeed. As I said earlier, we’ve got various different options on the table at the moment, because we can’t keep doing what we’ve already done, so I think the big question is, what’s next for CCM? At some point we have to consider electrification as well, especially with our present bikes being so suitable for urban use. So the question is: when we do that? You’ve got to be in that race as well, otherwise you might get left behind. But the fact that the EU has now approved the use of synthetic fuel beyond 2035 is very interesting, so we’ll keep monitoring how it’s going to pan out. I think that now we’ve got the financial resources at our disposal that Anil’s involvement is giving us, we have the backing to do some really interesting things with the CCM brand.