Tag Archives: Columns

By Matt Sellhorst Your sales are through the roof. Margins are up due to insane demand and stunted supply. Your service department is busier than ever, even if some parts and materials are harder to come by. The question is, are you doing an outstanding job taking care of your clients across the entire dealership to ensure they continue as ...

By David Gee As I write this, I am staring at a bunch of boats bobbing in the sunshine at King Harbor Marina in Redondo Beach, California. Big deal, you might say. Well, it is kind of a big deal. For me anyway! Because I don’t live in L.A., or California, or on the west coast, and I traveled on ...

By Matt Sellhorst Here’s a conversation a serious boat buyer shared with me the other day: He was searching for a 22- to 24-foot tri-toon with 150hp in a few of the mid-price range brands in the Midwest. As you can imagine, his search was coming up empty in an effort to get on the water this summer. A particular ...

By David Gee I recently caught up over Zoom with a friend I last got together with a year-and-a-half ago. It was good to “see” him, but at one point he just sounded kind of sad and said, “I feel so disconnected. I don’t go into the office, I don’t have beers with my buddies, my dad died last fall ...

By Adam Quandt While surfing my LinkedIn feed recently, I came across a post from Leadership First titled “7 C’s to build a winning team,” that struck a chord with me. The post broke building a great team into coaching, character, communication, commitment, contagious energy, caring and consistency. After reading these characteristics, I immediately thought of the Boating Industry Top ...

By Matt Sellhorst The data is coming out and the 2020 season has been an enormous success so far, especially considering the state of the world, upcoming presidential election and overall uncertainty. It’s great to celebrate, then, ask what’s next? Virtually every dealer has added new clients and generated a ton of new leads. So, in addition to the huge ...

David Gee I love summer. I love to travel. I love vacations. Normally that’s a pretty good combination. And though there are lots of ways to describe this summer so far, normal is not one of them. We usually go somewhere that involves a boat and a lake. And sometimes a cabin. Or we also often go to the mountains ...

By David Gee “The world is full of magic things, patiently waiting for our senses to grow sharper.” -W.B. Yeats Nobel Prize-winning Irish poet William Butler Yeats, one of the foremost figures of 20th-century literature, wrote those prescient words over 100 years ago. If that sentiment rang true during Victorian times, we surely find even more meaning in the words ...

By Adam Quandt Well, we’re just about halfway through the year, and what a year it’s been so far. Have you checked in with yourself? Your family? Your colleague? Your team? Anyone else you can think of. If not, take a moment to catch up with everyone, including yourself. Look back at the first six months of the year. Look ...

By David Gee I like the word community. I use it a lot. In fact, I likely overuse it, and I’m not the only one. It seems these days especially, more and more advertising, marketing and social media messaging contains, and in some cases co-opts, the word community. So, I am attempting to reframe in my own mind what it ...