Meet Ben Taylor of Beachman
Building Cafe Racer E-Bikes out of Toronto, Ontario
The Come Up highlights successful business owners’ & operators ‘come-up’ stories in an easy-to-read, written interview format. All content is transcribed from live interviews.
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For this issue: Ben Taylor, CEO & Cofounder of Beachman — a Toronto based company that manufactures Cafe Racer E-Bikes.
Beachman Quick Stats:
📅 Time in Business: 3 Years
👥 Headcount: 8
💰 Top-Line Revenue: $2M
🚀 Amount Raised: $1M
🏍️ Bikes Sold: 500
🎯 Future Goal: Selling 1000 bikes/year
⛔ Times He Almost Quit: None
Founding Beachman…
It's a weird story — not like a normal company, because I created the brand, like ten years ago when I was 18...
I started an Instagram called Beachman Life, and it's just like a page that’s all vibes — screenshots of The Great Escape and vintage Ferraris and swimming on the coast in Spain. That kind of stuff…
And I still run it now, it’s got 95,000 followers, I think.
But eventually I launched a product and started as a watch company, believe it or not. I worked on a kind of a wooden and bronze watch design for a while, but I was never really happy with the product quality that I was getting. The design was great, but I didn't want it to stain the reputation of the brand that didn't even exist yet.
So I waited for years with just this vibey Instagram brand, and then I met my business partner Steve. He’s the engineer, designer — and genius, frankly — that is the other half of the business.
Steve’s a brilliant guy…he built an electric car in his garage in his backyard. Like, four years before Tesla was even a word, and he just did it for fun.
The dude built an electric Volkswagen Beetle, rode around for a year with his wife, and then converted it back to gas so that he could sell it. That level of incredible ingenuity, from a dude who grew up in Newfoundland in a small town with no formal education in this stuff, it’s truly breathtaking.
Hands down he has been the reason that we are so successful.
I always wanted to do a motorbike thing, but I didn't know how…Steve brought that expertise.
So, I just kind of pitched him the idea in a coffee shop. And then he said yes — it all happened in like five minutes.
But yeah — I didn't have any money, because after film school, I went into advertising as a video editor. I was making nothing, and I spent all my free money on the watches. Then, when I moved back to Toronto, I was a sales guy in the weed industry, and I was making a better living, but it was still a pretty normal salary, and I was paying rent to live with my dad because I was helping him with the mortgage.
All that to say: I didn't have any savings, but thankfully in the beginning Beachman wasn't capital intensive because Steve had about five motorcycles that were already half built in his garage.
We agreed that I’d just pay him to convert one of the bikes he already had lying around, which ended up being around $2,000. And that was the first Beachman ever.
He started working on the bike in the fall of 2019, so not long after, Covid happened, and we stopped for a little while. At that point, I was basically a telemarketer, because I just started a sales job in weed, but then everything went into lockdown.
Finally, in the summer of 2020, I rode his prototype for the first time.
I'll never forget that day, man. It was fucking amazing.
I just remember driving it down Bloor street across the Old Mill bridge, screaming at the top of my lungs! It was so cool. This dude on the sidewalk could hear me yelling, and just started laughing at me. He had no idea what was actually going on.
That was the first day, and then I gave it back to Steve. He worked on some upgrades and changes, and then gave the bike back to me in November 2020. From there, he started working on a plan for building the bikes in his garage, ordering the parts one by one, and assembling them in Toronto.
We realized pretty quickly though that when you're ordering individual parts, the minimum order quantities are HUGE. No one's going to sell you 20 left signal brackets — so we had to find a manufacturer who would do the whole bike.
Eventually, Steve found this supplier — on Alibaba of all places— that made this very ugly, classic, style moped. The kind that you would rent in Thailand.
Steve spent, like, nine months getting them to change part after part until it looked like the cafe racer that he had envisioned. Then it got to a point where the supplier wouldn’t let us make any more changes until we bought a prototype. So, Steve called me, and he's like, this is what I'm thinking: If we just get 5 of them, even if they're not that great, we're only paying factory cost, so we can at least make our money back by just selling them on Facebook marketplace.
I agreed, so he put in an order for 5 bikes.
Then a couple days later, he texts me, and he's like, you think we could sell 15 on marketplace?
I definitely thought we could, but it was a lot of money up front, and remember: we hadn’t even seen one of these bikes in person yet. But the numbers made sense, so I said, sure.
Next thing you know, he calls me, and he's like, yeah, so I was talking to them, and with 15 bikes, at that point, we're already using a shipping container. They said they can fit 30 in a shipping container. So I just ordered 30.
It was like $60,000 — and it was on his home equity line of credit.
He was supremely confident. Even though he hadn’t actually seen one in person, he said that he could read from the list of parts that the bikes were great quality. And I trusted him.
Then, about five months later, the first bikes came, in the spring of 2021, and they were better than we had hoped for.
I took one home, did a photo shoot down by the Humber River, and put it up on Facebook Marketplace. And then immediately, I woke up the next day, and I had 400 people asking to buy it.
So I called Steve, and told him we sold the bikes. And he's like, oh, great, you sold a bike. That's awesome.
No, Steve, we've sold ALL of them. I have 400 people asking for it.
From there, we started booking test rides with people down at Polson Pier.
People would come on Saturday, they’d ride up and down Cherry Beach and if they liked it, they would e-transfer me. That night, Steve would put their bike together, then on Sunday, I would deliver it to their house on the back of my car. And on Monday, I'd go back to work.
We just did that cycle for weeks, and at the end of two months of doing that, we had $90,000 in the bank.
That, plus some more money from Steve's line of credit, was basically what we needed to buy a batch of 100 bikes. Then we did an Indiegogo campaign — which was incredible.
I drove to Vancouver to meet all my buddies from film school and we shot the lowest budget possible commercial that you could imagine. I went back home, got the commercial together after work, and then put it up on Indiegogo, we went live, and we did $100k on the first day, and we did $300k in total.
From there, I quit my job, and we started rolling.
Cultivating The Aesthetic Of The Brand…
When I was a kid, I didn't really care about fashion or stuff like that. I was a huge video gamer, and didn’t get out much.
I wasn't exposed to aesthetics and design language until I got older. And part of it was through my parents. They’re really into mid century design, but it took them 20 years to collect all the stuff that they have in their house.
Growing up, our house looked like a normal North American house. But now, with all the stuff they’ve collected over the years, my parents live in this really cool space. I was at their house when I made the Beachman Instagram account, and I remember thinking the aesthetic was so cool.
Another huge thing was that when I turned 17, my dad gave me these two watches for my birthday. One of them really inspired Beachman (the watch brand).
I had never seen anything like it. It was rectangular, landscape oriented, and had wood and bronze in it. It was just so classy and different. I wanted to make something similar.
I also found a bunch of these Instagram pages that were all sixties-themed, but they were all gentleman’s pages, you know?
They had a lot of women in lingerie, Ferraris, Patek Philippe watches. It was all ‘excess and ego’, which I really don’t like. None of that appeals to me at all.
I wanted to make one without that. Something that was just an appreciation for design and the joy of living.
Over time, I just kept honing that skill and getting sharper and sharper.
All good branding is a process of elimination, right? It’s like that Michelangelo quote: ‘I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.'
That's what Beachman is: it's just cutting away the fat until you get this beautiful thing at the end.
Raising Money…
So in 2021, we raised the money, quit our jobs, got a retail store, got a warehouse, and ordered 100 more bikes.
At that point, we had the 100 we ordered off the initial sales, and we ordered 100 more from Indiegogo — so we had 200 bikes coming in.
All of them were supposed to arrive in March, but they came in October, so we pretty much lost all our money on just cash flow burn.
It sucked — they were in a shipping crate in a harbor for like six and a half months, and then they got held in customs because they were so backlogged because of the Suez Canal thing.
Every day we were billed by CN Rail and by the shipping container company for holding the shipping container. So I think it was $500 USD a day that we were paying to have our bikes on a customs inspection that we couldn't opt out of.
That ended up costing us an additional $20k.
That whole time, we were paying rent on a retail store in a really high end neighborhood and a freaking warehouse that was like 4000 sqft storage — all for 200 bikes that we didn’t have.
We blew through the entire $400,000 lead.
Eventually the bikes came, but half of them were already paid for because it was fundraised through Indiegogo.
We would’ve been screwed, but what ended up saving us is that in that period of waiting, British Columbia outlawed e-bikes with throttles — so we couldn't give our Indiegogo backers in BC their bikes, so we basically got to sell those 30 bikes twice, and that money saved us from going bankrupt.
Every curse is a blessing, every blessing is a curse, you know what I mean?
So, yeah, that was a really hard year and we barely made it through.
People waited like a year and a half to get their bikes. They paid for them the summer of the previous year, and they weren’t getting delivered until the end of 2021.
I remember delivering a bike to this guy on Christmas Eve in Barrie in the middle of a fucking blizzard. He came out of his house, out of the fog of the snow and he's like, are you Beachman?
It was like a movie. He took his bike and rode it away into the white. And I'm like, okay, this is a weird experience.
But that was kind of how it was — fulfilling everything last minute. And then in winter, you’re in hibernation mode. People aren’t buying bikes anymore.
Thankfully, in like January or February, we got $100k loan from the BDC and that allowed us to purchase more inventory to keep operations going.
We made it through 2023, but at that point were so in debt on Steve's line of credit and all the stuff we did to keep the business running that we needed to raise money. We had a great business going and lots of sales, but the cash flow was on pace with everything, we needed a lot extra to get us out of the hole.
So we raised a million bucks last year. Private, no, institutional money. All individual retail investors. Pretty much all of them are former entrepreneurs who exited and understand Steve and I building this business the traditional way. We're not an angel-investor-seed-money, A,B,C IPO, type company. Ours is the opposite.
Navigating Safety Regulations And Compliance…
Historically, we haven’t really needed to.
Our core product is a bicycle, legally, so there's no regulation of any kind. It was all on us to make sure the product was safe. So we learned a lot on our end.
But we are starting to get that in that territory now because we're making this moped. It's a process that was delayed for two years, because when we tried to start doing it, our insurance policy stipulated that we couldn’t do motorcycles.
We had to get a whole new policy, but it took six months just to find it before we could even start trying to do tests again. And then when it came around, the price tag was $110k — all for a business that had only done $500k in revenue. This was in 2023, coming out of that horrible year where we lost all our money. So we needed to raise money just to afford this insurance policy.
We just accepted the insurance policy with not much money left, assuming I'd be able to raise the million dollars before we ran out of money.
And we did it, man!
Now we're starting testing, but we're going overseas.
The factory we’re using produces road motorcycles, but they don't usually export to North America — so that’s been its own adventure.
We didn’t realize until six months in that they'd never worked with Canadian regulations Canada, and Canada is way more strict than the US. So in May, we had to start again from scratch on the certification, because they had just hit a knowledge barrier, and gave up.
Now, in the last couple of weeks, finally, we've been certifying these bikes the people have been waiting for since 2021.
Take that in — three years.
People have waited that long, no refunds. They're all just happy to wait.
Well, I'm sure they're not happy, but they're patient, and they're amazing. And we're finally getting to the end of it.
The certification, the package is all getting put together. That gets submitted to Transport Canada.
We get something called the National Safety Mark, which says that it’s a safe vehicle for someone to ride on the road. Then we get a world manufacturer —WMI, it's called. Basically says we're a factory and we're legit. We get that for the facility, and then we can start building the bikes here.
Then the bikes can go to customers, and then we have to get our car dealer license — me and Steve and everyone — because we're selling cars, right?
So we have to get that and we have to register our office as a car dealership, and then we have to get our dealers to register as dealerships in case they're only selling e-bikes if they want to sell the moped.
It just goes on and on…
And now we're selling into the US, and that's the vast majority of our business.
We're not selling the moped in the US until next year. But that's going to be my winter — becoming an expert on automotive sales policy in all 50 states, which is going to be fun.
Doubtful Moments…
There was this one day in the fall of 2022…I remember it so clearly.
We were at Drive Fest — this big automotive event. We had all these side projects that year because we had no bikes to sell. So we're at this big festival drumming up marketing, awareness, and making sales, and we're hanging out.
It's a beautiful sunny day, and a bunch of our customers had just come to help out for free and man the booth. So there's like ten of us doing test rides in the sun.
Then I get an email from my accountant about an HST payment.
It was for double what we had in the bank — and it was due in like eight days.
That was the first time that I had really felt close to going under, and thankfully it’s been the only time.
Somehow, by the grace of God, we made it through. But I remember that day being so tough.
Up until I got that email, it was one of the better days of my life: Our bikes are there. Our customers are happy. We’re cruising around in a freaking dune buggy. It was a fun time. But then it just went downhill.
It is interesting to look back on it. Some of my journal entries around then were pretty dark. I couldn’t see a way out. Then, somehow, somebody placed a big order, because they wanted to sponsor something, and we found the money.
And ionically, that huge financial risk that Steve took for us meant that there was no backing out…Like, the last thing I would do, I die before I just let him walk away in a position where he might lose his house.
So that kept us going — maybe if we didn't have the debt and were running low on money we would’ve just called it a day and say sorry to our existing customers…
But having skin in the game means you need to stay in the game.
Why the Brand Resonates…
I think that people identify with what we're doing because of the emotional reaction that they have when they first see Beachman — whether it be our bikes riding around the street or our Instagram page.
They look at it, and it feels familiar and nostalgic, but also obvious, too. Like, why weren’t there bikes that look like this before? It makes total sense.
A few times now in my career, I've had guys reach out to me and be like, dude, I had this same idea in 2016. They'll send me the PowerPoint that they had made to pitch it to some investors or something — but they couldn't quite make it work, or they couldn't find the right partner.
I think Steve and I got really lucky meeting each other. It's the combination of our two skills being perfectly aligned that it makes this whole magic sauce.
But I think that's the main thing: there's comfort, and it feels like people are coming home to something that they've always wanted.
Future Plans…
The 24 month plan is to dominate North America. Set up dealers in every state, every major city in the US and Canada. Move into Mexico, move into Central America, Costa Rica, stuff like that.
Continue producing here in Toronto, at least for Canada and the US. We might create satellite production facilities for Central America.
Then in 2026, the plan is to go to Europe. Open up another facility like the one in Toronto that assembles and distributes Beachman throughout the European Union.
We're also going to expand the product line.
As I mentioned, we’re making this moped bike. Then we're going to produce a bike that's smaller, like a 70s ten-speed bicycle, basically.
That one, you won’t even be able to tell it's an e-bike. It'll just look like what they ride in ET.
Eventually, we’re going to make a motorcycle, but that won’t be for a while. It's just not a viable product right now. It's amazing to me that companies like Zero and Livewire even exist with an electric motorcycle — like, who’s buying these $30,000 bikes that have the same performance specs as an $8,000 Honda?
It just doesn't make any sense to me.
That’s why we stay in this category, because the low speed allows the battery economics to make sense.
After all that — I mean, obviously global domination, right? *laughs*
Australia, China…
The Chinese domestic market is the largest in the world, and they have nothing like this. So the plan is to start setting it up, start getting ready for Asia, and these other territories, and then sell the business so that there's a very clear path toward doubling the revenue for the purchaser.
Honestly, I never wanted to sell this company. When we started it, my dream was to have Beachman save up enough of a war chest to buy me and Steve out internally, and then basically turn the control of the company over to the board and the employees and have a 100% profit share between all the actual employees.
But when we had that year of burning all our money out, there was no other option but to raise money. And so now I have to sell the company. I have a fiduciary duty to do that, and that's kind of the long term plan for the business.
Expanding the product offering, moving into other things, like merchandise and clothing, and then moving it toward an eventual buyout of the business.
On Competition…
I don't want to become a giant, and the nice thing is, I'm in a market where we don't need to worry about competition very much.
I did the math on what an exit looks like. If one in a thousand motorcycles and e-bikes (in the world) is a Beachman, we’d be doing 300 million a year in revenue. Given that kind of math, there's lots of room left for others.
I think that's what I want to pursue — finding our niche.
Some brands that I admire the most are the ones that aren’t huge, but are still globally renowned, and loved by people — like Lotus…
They are a fraction of the car industry, but they’re all over the world, and people love them. They make some of the coolest cars in the world, and they're a real business.
I don't want to be the Porsche of e-bikes. Someone is going to have to raise $100 million to do that, and it won’t be me. I want to be Lotus, making a really meaningful place for ourselves in the world.
Future Challenges…
I think our next challenge is going to be dealing with the growing pains of sending massive, complex machines across one of the largest countries in the world.
It's not going to be easy to manage every repair and customer service issue.
You know what they say: software is soft and hardware is hard, and it's just a reality.
Our team is getting better and better at dealing with issues remotely, though. We have a facility where we can get any bike part overnight from anywhere in North America. We're feeling more comfortable with understanding the logistical challenges associated with doing such a physically demanding thing.
It's not like selling t-shirts, you know, it's selling motorcycle stuff.
And then, of course, with expensive products like this bike, where your COGS are so high, if we suddenly get a huge review in Wired magazine and 500 orders come in, we’d need $500,000 just to purchase the basic materials to accommodate those orders, out of nowhere.
So that becomes the next challenge. But I feel confident in our ability to do that. I think that we have great connections through our existing investments and board, and there's people willing to put money into this business.
It's so rare to be assembling and manufacturing stuff in Canada, too. We haven't got much government support in terms of grants or anything, but I was recently invited to talk to the Ministry of Transport of Ontario. They're aware of us, and people are kind of keeping an eye out, so if we do have this kind of radical growth, I think we'd have the support we’d need.
Mentors…
First and foremost, my parents.
I didn't mention this, but my mom and dad are the founders of the Steam Whistle brewing company. They've had a really similar journey.
My parents did not have money when they started. My dad started as a truck driver at a brewery, worked his way up to sales. My mom worked her way up to head of marketing.
When that business was sold, the CEO — who had all this money from the exit — funded Steam Whistle for them. So my parents had an interesting experience, running a business that they started but didn’t own, because they had no money to bring to the table in the beginning.
Growing up and watching my parents go through the struggle of running a business for the first time, and one that had massive growth because the timing was right, and they got that incredible brewery right across from the CN Tower — it was very telling.
And, you know, I didn't see my dad a lot when I was a kid. He was always at work, but we'd talk about business, the hard times and the good times at the dinner table.
Now, it’s so interesting, as an adult, I’m able to have this new kind of friendship with my parents. We can relate to each other on such a deep level.
I’m able to be like, we're gonna run out of money on Thursday. And my dad will be like, been there.
It’s really such a unique experience — having someone be able to say that and know that they came out on the other end.
I think the biggest piece of advice they gave us, though, was to grow as slowly as we can.
I think that alone saved the company: telling us not to take so many risks. My dad always tells me to creep, walk, and then run. And I'd say we're walking right now.
But yeah, they’re by far my biggest mentors. Them and my accountant.
We got real lucky with him, because he’s also the former CFO of Steam Whistle. He's been helping us out this entire time and giving me and Steve an understanding of truly everything. His name is Adrian Joseph. Shout-out to him. He's kept us together.
Neither Steve nor I have any kind of business degree or anything, so it’s been huge.
Finding The Right Partner…
I think the reason that Steve and I work so well is because we have no skills in common at all.
There's no overlap.
We have the same taste, so we agree on what the product should be fundamentally and how it should look, but I have no idea how the bike is built, and Steve doesn’t know the password to the Instagram accounts…
There's a very clear delineation in what we do, and it means that every guy is busy all the time, and we're getting everything done in congruence.
His desk is next to mine so we're talking all the time, and we know what's going on, but he has his lane, I have mine.
And honestly, it's not very elegant, but I say the main reason we can work so well together is we're both just good, humble people. You know, there's no ego in our relationship.
We just have a foundation of deep respect that goes right to the bottom.
That’s it for issue this issue!
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Interview by: Alex Tribe
Edited by: Angus Merry