Anyone who missed it should also look at Thom Damrich’s speach to the National Marine Bankers Association in the trade press. It looks like the nucleus of manufacturer-dealer agreement is being spawned.

Best regards and see you at the MRAA convention.
John Underwood

Any dealer naïve enough to think that somehow this near death experience on the part of manufacturers caused by this financial meltdown is going to suddenly teach them to respect the dealer and to treat him as an equal partner is delusional and deserves what he gets. Each new factory management team that shows up in the coming decades can only jack up their pay and bonuses by shipping more boats. Either the dealer takes them or they open up a new guy down the street who has some room on his floorplan (pretend for a moment somebody does!)

If you really want to make a difference in your lives consider creating your own brands and opening your own small manufacturing plants with a half dozen other dealers spread out around the country. This is not rocket science folks. You go get a top designer like Michael Peters and have him design some hot new models that cover only the 80% you need (80% of your sales come from 20% of your models) and then contract out the production in the short run while you wait for some nice factories to be offered by the bankruptcy courts in the next few years.

You and your six friendly dealers then own your own brand, own the factory, and finance the entire venture just with your existing orders. I call these kinds of companies POD Projects which is short for “Pissed Off Dealers” and there are a lot of them out there. This trend is becoming more common in the larger size range (60’ and larger) where a new yacht brand is created ever 90 days and it works amazingly well because the project creator already has the retail relationship with his buyers. This industry was built on the backs of dealers since the early 1950’s and in all that time you can’t even count the number of times manufactures have pulled the franchise after the dealer gave 25 to 40 years of his life to the company.

While to be sure there are some family run manufacturing companies who have a long history of supporting their dealers through the good and bad times there are plenty of giants who do not and cannot by their very nature. Regardless of how many zeros are on the financial statements, this is still a mom and pop business and maybe it’s time for mom and pop to look at some new options going forward. There are some amazingly talented production people standing in the unemployment line who would love to help you.