RefStuff Journey and Evolution…

Let me tell you a story of my journey and evolution with my company; RefStuff – where I personally design, create, invent and then manufacture sports products for Referees, Teachers and Sports Coaches…

It all started around 2008. I was 31 and running my children’s football coaching company Teamtheme in schools around South Ribble (Leyland, Penwortham etc). Paul and I franchised this company all over the UK and were pioneers for children’s schools football coaching and also started the fast growth of girls football too, over 10 years before how you know it as today.

Teamtheme quickly became the largest and most popular school sports coaching company in the UK, still running to this day and safe in the very capable and talented hands of Ian Latham and Danny Clarkson, plus one or two others.

But this is a story for another day.

Back to 2008 and it was a very wet and windy day in Longton and I was refereeing a Sunday league junior football match in the early stages of my refereeing career with my high goals and aspirations to become a pro referee and referee on the biggest stages possible. I didn’t quite make it the way I had planned, but again this is another story for another day.

The rain was belting down sideways. We were all drenched. It was windy as well. I couldn’t feel my fingers and my referee wallet, pen and paper were wet through and unable to write.

I thought “There’s got to be a better way to record the information in the match than this and what we’re used to”.

When I got home, and warmed up, thawing out in the bath, the ideas came to me…

Let’s invent a scoring device that is built into or on our whistle.

Now, I’m a rubbish artist. My sister and my mum were the arty ones. I inherited sport and developed a very strong business brain partly due to working with and becoming a protégé of Paul’s.

But what I lack in artistic skills on paper, my creative mind flows freely and I’m able to do the crappiest of sketches but then describe very vividly to my artist or designer who then nails it in their interpretation (often after several revisions from myself though!)

So I set about contacting the worlds biggest whistle manufacturers; Fox based in Canada and our homegrown ACME based in West Bromwich in the Midlands.

I never heard back from Fox (until later years, and now we have a good relationship and common goal), but Simon Topman the CEO of ACME responded and we set up a meeting.

ACME are such an old homegrown UK business and they even manufactured the whistles that were used by the staff on the Titantic.

By the time of the meeting, I had a few prototypes constructed of the whistle scorer idea, soon to be named the RefScorer Whistle, with the help and contacts of Steve Ward from Ad-Options, a business partner of many years who helped me source and create 1000’s of promotional products to giveaway to the children on the Teamtheme sports courses.

At the meeting Simon boldly proclaimed to me that “In all my years working in this industry, I thought I had seen it all and everything and then you come along with this new invention, and I really like it”.

Well this was music to mine and Paul’s ears. We left Simon with the designs and our original rough prototype and he pledged to have his factory make a better quality version of my invention.

A couple of weeks passed and then in the mail arrived our NEW RefScorer Whistle prototype made by ACME (which I still have to this day and used without fail for many years when I was refereeing myself).

It was basic but I liked it, but… there was always a but.

Instead of building the scoring device within the whistle, ACME had only been able to build an extension to attach TO the whistle.

Simon explained that whatever the factory did to build the scoring device within the whistle, it compromised their shrill sound and affected the chambers inside the whistle.

He went on to explain to me that the ACME patent was their sound and not the design, and if their sound was compromised then it couldn’t and wouldn’t be an ACME product.

And with that, my dream of partnering my fledgling company up with the worlds biggest whistle manufacturer ended. But my dream in itself didn’t.

You see, I always have a Plan B, for everything, and sometimes Plans that go all the way to Z!

I had already designed the artwork for a handheld version of the RefScorer that fitted neatly into the palm of your hand, and the score of the match is recorded by turning the cogs on the side of the device.

But it wasn’t until 2014/2015 that I restarted working on RefStuff, after I had finished up and exited from the Teamtheme family.

Teamtheme was a massive nationwide success and succeeded beyond all expectations, but I had fallen out of love with it and I was failing myself by continuing.

Jim Carrey, of all people, did a speech at the Maharishi University in the USA.

When I saw the speech on YouTube, it hit me so hard in the heart and in the head, I had to make a change.

What he said was so very poignant and has resonated and stayed with me forever. It was; “instead of failing at what you don’t love doing, take a chance and do what you love”

You can see this motivational quote at 1.00 at the link below: