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As a young man Roy Collins was a keen soccer player with enough ability to make it to the Birmingham City reserves team. His ambitions as a footballer though were short-lived as he knew he was never going to make serious money as a player. Nevertheless, his interest in the game and in other sports, particularly golf, led him to financial success.
In 1986 Collins invented a new kind of golf spike which became the core product of a company called Trisport. Now run by his 32-year-old son, David, Trisport has come from nowhere to grab 60% of the world market in golf spikes. That market share could increase still further with the launch of Trisport's latest product: a titanium tungsten carbide spike which all the professional players now want under their feet.
From a modern factory in Tamworth, Trisport churns out up to two million spikes a week. They are driven into soles, shipped out to Taiwan for completion and sold in every country where golf is played. Some 97% of the company's L4 million sales are for export and it expects sales to grow this year by 35%.
Trisport has not stopped with golf shoes. It has developed a revolutionary new studs system for soccer boots using plastics technology that can be applied to other sports shoes. It has even developed a new lightweight alloy horseshoe which is half the weight of a conventional steel shoe. 'We give it a polyurethane coating and it becomes what we jokingly call the Reebok horseshoe,' says David Collins.
Football bootmakers Umbro have calculated that Trisport's new, all-plastic stud system saves the average footballer the strain of lifting the equivalent of 1.25 tons during any single game. 'It is the lightest, safest stud system in the world,' claims Collins, a bachelor known in some corners of Tamworth as Mr Stud.
By any standards Trisport is an exciting company and is just one of more than 30 businesses which make up Bromsgrove Industries--itself still a modest specialist engineering conglomerate. Bromsgrove has been carefully stitched together with a stream of acquisitions over the past half a dozen years by 39-year-old Iranian-born solicitor Bijan Sedghi.
Inevitably, with one third of the group supplying the depressed aerospace and motor industry, not...