Q: What do you think of the relatively recent emergence of the peer-to-peer model in boating, and how do you see its role?Ī: I’ve been talking to a couple of those groups over the last four or five months, really trying to do some research on them. If we don’t find some way to engage the younger demographic to not only get them on the water, but also get their children on the water, that’s a huge missed opportunity. I want to say 70 percent of people that boat today boated as children. I forget the statistics, but it’s extremely high. The second part of that, and I forget the statistics for this, but we do a lot of work with Discover Boating’s Take the Helm program and we donate a lot of boats for the boat shows that they have hands-on training classes on. We have one day a week where we can really spend quality family time together and we love getting out on the water. They come home and do homework, and then we’ve got soccer games on Saturday morning. They go to school, and then they do something after school. I think that’s been lost, and I don’t necessarily think it’s been lost because they’ve lost their interest or passion for the water it’s been lost because they don’t think they have the time to do it. That’s what people used to do with their recreational time. They weren’t involved in three or four extracurricular activities a week. Like you mentioned, they had the time to do it. Not only the aging baby boomers, but the younger people, they may have grown up boating, but it was a huge time-consuming event for them.
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I don’t want to knock the industry, but at the same time demographics have changed dramatically. Do you think the industry fully grasps the magnitude of this hurdle?Ī: I don’t know that they do. That means constant and frenzied activity on weekdays and weekends. Kids today who are born into a middle- upper-middle class family that can afford to buy a boat are often in four or six activities for each kid. Q: When our generation was growing up, we might’ve had one or two activities. Then on the back end, once those people have cycled through the boating life cycle, as I like to call it, we’re going to get them again as they exit the pitfalls of boat ownership.
Freedom boat club how to#
The way I look at it overall, we are a tremendous resource for attracting new people into the market, teaching them how to safely operate a boat and giving them the tools to be able to decide what kind of boat they want. Clubs are a great option for them, as well. As the industry struggles with how to keep those people in boating, we’re an unbelievable resource for them, too - you know, those people who don’t want to give up boating, but can’t handle the physical demands anymore. We offer hands-on training to make sure our members are safe and comfortable out there.Ī secondary standpoint, we’re fortunate on the west coast of Florida to have a large retired population here. They can get the training that virtually nobody else offers. People who may not know if they like boating can join a club and try a whole bunch of different boats. So when you compare an $80,000 boat to the types of boats we’re running, which is probably more of a $30,000 or $40,000 boat, we are such an effective avenue to get people engaged in boating, people who don’t necessarily want to go out and plunk down $50,000 to $80,000.
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When Bob Daily and I purchased the company, it was really just lucky timing, I guess. While consumers were looking at ways to get on the water, we kind of fell right into that niche. We had this neat little recurring revenue model we’d never had before. As the economy went down, our business got better.
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The business had gone through a transition three years earlier and it started to really take off. So I was doing sales and operations from 2007 to about 2010 or 2011, when the president of the company and I had the opportunity to buy it. Once we dialed in on the sales process, I then went back and started running operations again. We started charging less on the front end and little bit higher monthly payments, which made the sales process a lot easier. People would pay a whole bunch of money up front, and then a very small amount on a monthly basis.īack in 2007, as the economy started to turn, we flipped that upside-down. So the pricing through the first 16 or 17 years was really predicated on the time-share model. Q: Tell me how Freedom Boat Club has evolved since you came aboard.Ī: When the club was founded in 1989, it was built on the premise of time share.