Blogs

There’s a dinner tomorrow night for the Sea Ray Owners Club at a restaurant on a lake near Austin, Texas. No RSVP is necessary. Members just need to show up and a seat will be waiting for them, courtesy of Sail & Ski Center – a dealership based in Austin – and each table of Sea Ray owners will receive ...

Of all the talk about this recession, there’s one question, of course, that no one can really answer: When will it end? But the most important question to our businesses right now may be: Has it already ended? The answer to that, according to a news report I read last night, might surprise you. Some experts believe that our economy ...

In my last blog, I wrote about why it is particularly important that our industry’s small businesses develop strong and effective succession plans. But the industry as a whole has its own succession problems, which become more urgent as the recession continues. As the boating business shrinks, the need for a new generation of leaders to point the way to ...

My husband and I finally buckled down and had a legal will drawn up last January. That’s not something I’m proud of. I’m well into my thirties, I’ve been married for almost 10 years, and I have a four-year-old son. You could argue that waiting so long was downright irresponsible. Unfortunately, I’m like a lot of people. You say “will,” ...

At the Marine Dealer Conference & Expo last November, Brunswick CEO Dusty McCoy said [and I’m paraphrasing here] that while many of the recessions the U.S. economy has endured in the past are V-shaped (the economy drops quickly, bottoms out, then rebounds steeply as well) he expects our current recession will be more U-shaped – meaning we won’t experience that ...

My four-year-old son broke his arm playing in the yard last week. While he was incredibly brave in the hours and days that followed, it has changed him. As the pain has receded, he’s begun thinking out loud about how he’ll avoid breaking something else, as have his father and I. We want him to go back to having fun ...

A month and a half ago, when I spoke at the Marine Trades Association of New Jersey annual conference, I touched on the growing number of marine businesses participating in social networking, as did the person who followed me, Sam Natello of Dot Com Design Studio. This is a subject that holds particular interest for me as our team has ...

I offended a dealer in one of my last magazine columns. This dealer, or former dealer as it may be, recounted the unprecedented conditions of the economy and, more specifically, the marine industry when he outlined how his business has succumbed to external pressures. He noted the drought boaters and businesses face in his home state of Georgia; $4-a-gallon gas; ...

I was fortunate enough to get to the television before my kids the other day. It’s almost a contest to see who can get up, dressed and in front of the television first. Breakfast in hand, of course. As I flipped from the Disney channel to CNN, I was greeted with some updated facts regarding an old topic with relevance ...