Ben Navarro and the art of showing up

One of Ben Navarro’s students went grocery shopping dressed as an inflatable shark. It was homework. The College of Charleston course he teaches with Andrea Kindorf asks students to attempt things that make them uncomfortable, and student Lexi Drumm chose an errand with fins. Among the many ways a financier can spend his time after making a fortune, devising a class that produces this scene deserves a little attention.

Navarro’s subject is intentionality: choosing values, developing habits and building relationships before deciding what success ought to look like. He began teaching the course in 2023. Students read, keep journals and interview guests. The syllabus makes room for difficult assignments whose usefulness may become apparent only after the embarrassment subsides. There are easier ways to spend a semester. There are certainly less conspicuous ways to buy groceries.

The class offers a useful entry into a life otherwise described through acquisitions. Navarro, co-founder and CEO of Beemok Capital, has interests in hotels, professional tennis and the future of Charleston’s waterfront. With his wife, Kelly, he also founded an education network. Across those activities runs a recurring question: what happens when you give people a place to turn up, and a reason to try?

A coach’s son, with a different game plan

Navarro was one of eight children of college football coach Frank Navarro. His childhood included the ordinary backstage work of sport: filling water bottles and pumping up footballs. During family summers at the beach, the children were expected to work. Painting houses, mowing lawns and retrieving golf balls to resell featured among the possibilities. The vacation came with a small labor market attached.

He played football and wrestled himself. Tennis arrived later, in his early twenties, when the sport was making room for Andre Agassi, Pete Sampras and Steffi Graf. The timing matters. His involvement grew from watching a game, learning its pleasures and eventually seeing what it could offer his own family and city. Ownership followed an enthusiasm that had already had years to settle in.

A finance degree from the University of Rhode Island, earned in 1984, took him toward a different kind of competition. His early career included Chemical Bank, Goldman Sachs and Citicorp, where he became co-head of mortgage sales and trading. In 1997 he founded Sherman Financial Group. Its business in consumer debt supplied the financial foundation for the projects that would later make his name visible around Charleston.

There is a charming domestic footnote to that corporate history: Sherman was named after his childhood yellow Labrador. Financial firms often reach for names suggesting permanence or classical wisdom. Navarro’s choice commemorated a dog. It is a useful detail to keep beside the balance sheets, if only to restore the proper scale of human attachment.

The money came from the less picturesque business

Before the hotels and courts came consumer finance, a business whose customers and economics warrant attention of their own. Sherman built operations around acquiring and servicing consumer debt. Credit One Bank became another important part of Navarro’s financial interests. Beemok describes its present holding in the bank as a significant minority interest. That distinction matters when describing an enterprise frequently reduced to a single owner’s name.

Credit One serves borrowers seeking to establish or rebuild credit. Its customers include people whom traditional lenders may find less attractive. That can create access to credit; it also makes price and customer experience consequential. In 2018 reporting around Navarro’s bid for the Carolina Panthers, the bank’s poor showing in a customer satisfaction survey received scrutiny. The origin of philanthropic capital belongs in the account alongside its destinations.

He did not buy the Panthers. David Tepper won that contest in 2018. Navarro’s subsequent public footprint would be easier to encounter on a tennis court, in a classroom or walking through downtown Charleston. Beemok, established in 2018, gave his investing and philanthropy an organizational home. The resulting collection is unusually tangible for someone who began by trading mortgages: seats, classrooms, restaurants and streets people can actually enter.

Thirty-three students in a church

In 2008, the Navarros’ school project began with 33 children in a downtown Charleston church. Meeting Street Schools now describes a network of four campuses serving about 1,700 students in Charleston and Spartanburg. That beginning gives the enterprise a scale the grander numbers can obscure. Thirty-three children are a classroom-sized responsibility. A network has to make the daily work repeatable.

Meeting Street includes independent and public schools. Its approach pairs expectations for student achievement with investment in teaching and additional learning opportunities. The Navarros later added college scholarships and performance awards for teachers through Beemok Education. Taken together, those efforts address different points in an educational life: the classroom, the educator doing the work and the bill that arrives when a student reaches college.

The scholarship initiative launched for Charleston County graduates in 2021. In August 2026, it announced an expansion from 14 counties to all 46 South Carolina counties for eligible students graduating in spring 2027, supported by an $18.7 million recurring state investment. Scholarships provide up to $10,000 annually. In the expansion counties, the announcement guarantees one year for that incoming class; the original 14 counties retain their philanthropic funding and renewal conditions.

That partnership introduces a different measure of influence from a building with a donor’s name. Other donors and the state become participants. A private initiative can travel beyond the founder’s immediate neighborhood, although its terms still matter student by student. The distance between an attractive announcement and a usable scholarship is filled with eligibility rules, applications and someone making sure families understand them.

A tennis match you can get home from

Navarro bought the Charleston tournament in 2018 and Cincinnati’s in 2022. His explanation of the Charleston purchase was refreshingly domestic. Residents could finish work, have dinner, watch evening tennis and still return in time to say goodnight to their children. A tournament is an international business. It is also a question of what a person can reasonably do on a Tuesday.

His daughter Emma became a professional tennis player. In an earlier family conversation he later recounted, she argued that a successful life involved choosing something you care about and working toward it, including the struggle. He carried that story into a meeting with the WTA before buying the Charleston event. A parent discussing a purchase found himself repeating something his teenager had taught him.

Cincinnati made the physical ambitions explicit. Its 2025 campus transformation represented a $260 million investment made with the City of Mason, Warren County and the State of Ohio. The changes included new practice courts, a clubhouse and shaded gathering areas. Some of that spending serves the competition. Some serves the hours between matches, when spectators discover how much their enjoyment depends on somewhere comfortable to sit.

In Charleston, the 2026 player compensation package reached $2.5 million, including $2.3 million in on-site prize money. The tournament moved ahead of the WTA’s 2033 target for equal prize money at this level. The increase extended through the draw rather than concentrating only on the champion. The commercial decision carries a clear consequence: players departing before the final also leave with a larger check.

Kelly’s eye, Charleston’s drawing board

Kelly Navarro is a co-founder of Beemok and its vice president of strategy and design. Her work with its business leaders includes Credit One Stadium, Sorelle, The Cooper and the Cincinnati tennis venue. Describing the enterprise solely through Ben would miss an operating partnership concerned with how places look, function and feel. A family office, in this case, includes a substantial discussion about the room itself.

Beemok Hospitality Collection began in 2021 with the acquisition of The Charleston Place. The hotel became independent and locally owned in 2022. That year also brought the reopening of the Riviera as a live performance venue; Sorelle followed in 2023. Hotels, theaters and restaurants create different kinds of invitations. They also require the daily discipline of people who answer phones, run kitchens and welcome guests long after acquisition day.

Union Pier puts that philosophy before a much larger audience. The 65-acre former port property sits on Charleston’s waterfront. Beemok’s stated ambition combines public access, gathering spaces and development connected to the city around it. A waterfront plan asks enduring questions about who gets access and how a neighborhood fits its surroundings. The finished place will have to supply answers a presentation cannot.

The College of Charleston is part of that picture, too. In October 2025, the college announced a Beemok gift enabling a future School of Business at the Carroll Building site near Union Pier’s entrance. Navarro’s connection had begun in a classroom. Here it reached the city plan, placing the institution where students could encounter the businesses and civic decisions they might someday help shape.

The teacher has more homework

There is a smaller building that may explain the larger ones. The College of Charleston’s Center for Intentionality opened in October 2025 through a gift from Navarro. Its student club grew out of the course. The center offers places to gather, study, read and hold conversations. His ambitions for the idea extend beyond Charleston: he hopes the campus approach can become a model elsewhere.

The classroom also leaves room for his own education. While climbing in Greece, he picked up a guide’s advice about slowing down to make progress. It became a lesson he brought back to students. Wealth has made it possible for him to commission a great many things. Teaching requires him to explain what he thinks those things are for, then face people young enough to ask awkward follow-up questions.

His interest in new businesses has taken another public form in Catalyst by Beemok. Its first live pitch competition in November 2025 drew more than 400 people to Union Pier Terminal and involved 13 startups. Funding came from Beemok, InvestSC and additional investors. The building awaiting its next civic purpose briefly became a room where founders could make their case, with actual money at stake.

A shark costume, a scholarship application and a shaded seat at a tennis match make unlikely companions. Each makes Navarro’s interests easier to understand at human scale. His money can change the setting. The next part belongs to the person who enters it: the student who tries something awkward, the teacher who returns to class, the founder who stands up and pitches. For all the acreage and capital involved, the work keeps coming back to people showing up.

“I have the humility to be willing to fail.”

Ben Navarro · Center for Intentionality opening, 2025