Last week, I stayed at the Rosen Plaza in Orlando. It’s a potential home for the 2010 Marine Dealer Conference & Expo, and we were scouting the site to determine its capability of housing this growing event. We were on a tour with two of the facility’s sales managers when I happened to notice a vacationing middle schooler wearing a ...

About 10 years ago, I learned a great lesson about finding a service shop you can trust.

The debate over the value and the use of customer satisfaction index surveys rages on, and in the heat of the economic downturn, perhaps even more fuel has been poured on this fire. Some of the best dealers in North America have, for the most part, abandoned the practice; some boat builders have stopped using the measurement in favor of ...

Editor’s note: This is the second in a series of customer-service-related blogs I’ll write to wrap up 2009. Through a series of recent consumer experiences, I feel I’ve learned a number of things worth sharing about satisfying customers. Last week, I shared the incredible experience I had with a Disney employee who went above and beyond to exceed my expectations ...

It’s the holiday season, and it’s all about the consumer. And as a consumer, I’ve been fortunate (or unfortunate, as it may be) to have had a series of experiences — both incredibly good and horribly wrong — that I believe contain worthwhile lessons on customer service and are therefore worth sharing. So with that as a backdrop, I’m going ...

Welcome to the photo showcase for the 2009 Boating Industry Top 100 Dealers Club 100 Gala, brought to you by the Leadership Alliance and Boating Industry magazine. This gallery showcases the entire event, held on Nov. 18, 2009, from the cocktail reception through the awards and the after Top 100 networking event. You can view all of the photos and ...

Three years ago, our team here at Boating Industry had an identity crisis. We had assembled a collection of editors, sales people, a publisher and a production team that sought to revitalize a brand that had, for the most part, lost its way. The easy decision at the time would have been for our team to continue what it had ...

matt_new-mug2If you're not paying close attention, there is some news in our line-up today that could sneak by you without giving it much of a second thought. But I want to call your attention to it because of the potential that it represents: The Marine Retailers Association of America has created the Young Leaders Advisory Council.

While dealer net profits through July are off 60 percent, the rate of decline appears to be slowing. Through June, net profits, year over year, were off almost 86 percent.

It’s no secret that consumers are spending less these days and that savings rates are rising. Hidden behind this obvious fact is the lesser-known reality that our industry’s top customers, the 79 million baby boomers who have been buying, trading in and upgrading their boats for years and years, may be saving themselves right out of the boat market. According ...