Changing lanes to a corporate career
Mark Beaumont talks to Emma Newlands about recordbreaking expeditions and swapping cyclewear for suits as his corporate career picks up speed
For 15 years, I was a full-time athlete and a broadcaster – and for all professional sportspeople, there’s always that question of what you do next.
In your mid to late 30s, you don’t really want to start in a graduate job, so how do you transition comfortably and pivot in a career? It’s a switch that has in fact been expedited for so many people by Covid-19 over the past 12 months.
I used to joke that I spent half of my life in Lycra and half my life in suits, but that's just not the truth any more. Now I spend most of my time working with early-stage, fastgrowth businesses.
And I would see my transition from being Mark Beaumont, the athlete and broadcaster, to Mark Beaumont, involved in early-stage investing and finance, as a five-year process.
I had started to sow the seeds for that back in 2018 and 2019 – and I feel lucky now, with hindsight, that I started to make those plans before the world stopped spinning a year ago, because it allowed me to turn that five-year plan into a six-month plan.
The transition I've made is not a typical move from sport into business, because I've managed to jump straight into a partner role in an investment firm – St Andrews-based Eos Advisory, which provides seed funding to innovative ventures in science, technology and engineering that are trying to address some of the world's biggest problems.
The reason I’ve secured a senior role is that I managed throughout my athletic career to keep pretty close ties with equity investing, and one of the partnerships I had, for 15 years, was with Lloyds Banking Group’s private equity arm LDC.
I got to know the business in my early 20s as a sponsored athlete, progressing to looking after a lot of their ‘eco-sys
tem’ – their advisory networks and hosting events, and later working with their originations team, opening doors, creating deal flow, and some of the due diligence that happens around such investments.
I’d done an economics and politics degree, but I didn’t have hands-on experience of equity investing or how to scale SMES.
Before lockdown, I was spending my life on the road as a public speaker – in 2019, I did 130 events and keynote speeches, and I probably got to see more businesses than most advisors would. You therefore get this real understanding of different sectors, different ages and stages of business.
I thought ‘well, this is exciting’. What I don't want to do is spend the next chapter of my career just singing for my supper – going to conferences and talking about cycling around the world.
I want the next 15 years to be equally impactful, albeit in a different way. I've got no ambitions just to hang on the coattails of my former career.
I was seeing quite a lot of opportunities for me to invest in a couple of early-stage companies at the seed round. My plan was just to build a small portfolio of businesses I could help nurture.
When I met Eos managing partner Andrew Mcneill during that research process, he said convinced me I could make the transition successfully.
At that point, it was growing from being a private members’ club, based out of St Andrews, to something that was actually scaling quite quickly.
I later decided to invest in some of the syndicate companies as a private individual, but also to invest in Eos at the core. And I felt there was an opportunity to take it from a private syndicate membership, which it still is, to something that scales from three to five early-stage investments a year to something much more significant in terms of deal flow. Through my athletic career, I'm not just entering and trying to win races, I've always been trying to go out there and really shift the dial in terms of what's possible.
All the records that my teams have taken on, they've always been very high-profile events where we've not tried to repeat history, we've tried to do something significantly different – so it’s not about sort of me as an individual any more. People always assume that with the major expeditions it's just about being an athlete, but it's a business.
To go the distance in every sense you've got to have a plan for how you create significant impact for yourself, your sponsors, your shareholders. So that start-up mindset is incredibly useful when you're then raising a fund, when you're then investing in earlystage businesseshaving that sort of entrepreneurial drive to do things differently, and to inspire people around you to work hard, on your own purpose and plan, is the same if you're investing in an earlystage cancer research company or trying to peddle around the planet.
Most businesses don't fail because their core product isn't viable – it’s because of the human dynamic. If mentally you give up, then you give up.
If you've had hard miles in your life, be it in sport, or the military or something entirely unrelated, you can clearly see how that gives people a level of grit when it comes to businesses, and we face hard decisions all the time in Eos – for example, turning down money if it doesn’t feel right.
Something else that’s true of both the sport and business worlds is that having a good support network is crucial – and I’m a big advocate of being connected to and having a positive impact on your community.
I was lucky, because my athletic career started quite young – a 12-year-old who peddled across Scotland with the help of my mum, and that was helping local causes.i’m not saying I've got it all figured out, but I try and make sure every period of my life is meaningful.