Boating Industry Intelligence You Can Profit From
We’ve told you from day 1 that the Boating Industry Top 100 Dealers program is not about volume and unit sales. The program was designed and continues to be a mostly qualitative review and ranking of the industry’s leading dealers, with no consideration given to overall revenue.
But no ranking of the best-of-the-best among marine dealerships would be complete without MarineMax, the industry behemoth, at the top. In fact, this $1.2 billion conglomerate dwarfs almost all of its boat builder partners, and it is now six times larger than any other dealer in this year’s ranking, having recently purchased our 2005 No. 3 dealer, among other businesses.
With that kind of revenue to fuel countless business initiatives not otherwise an option for smaller dealerships, MarineMax truly is in a league of its own, building a world-class company at its corporate headquarters and watching as the process improvements filter down to its 85 storefronts. The company has been guided by incredible leadership that has seemingly made all the right moves and investments at all the right times. Whether it’s the planned $500,000 investment in Lean Six Sigma this year or its extensive online MarineMax University, these are efforts afforded to very few.
Perhaps on a store-by-store basis, dealers could compete with a single MarineMax location, but as a corporation, its inclusion in the Top 100 creates an unbalanced contest that would most likely find MarineMax atop the list year in and year out. With that in mind, we have honored MarineMax by retiring it from the list of Top 100 Dealers, recognizing the company with a “Best In Class” award from here on out — in a class all its own.
MarineMax must reapply each year to earn the designation, but it will no longer be eligible for a spot on the list. In the founding spirit of the Top 100 and its mission to help all dealers improve through the sharing of best practices and benchmarking data, MarineMax has indicated it will continue to apply each year.
Congratulations, MarineMax.