An industry coming together
I can be a bit of an idealist sometimes. And one of my ideals is a united recreational marine industry, all of us working together to deliver a boating experience that exceeds customers’ expectations every time and to create a business environment that everyone wants to work in. When I see evidence of that, it makes my day. That’s why I had to share a recent press release I received.
Mercury Marine and BRP/Evinrude employees came together this past weekend for a benefit hockey match in Oshkosh that raised close to $2,000 for the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. But the companies didn’t compete against each other. They joined together on the same team to play against the Oshkosh Ice Devils, and they won, 7-3!
“What a great time and a great cause,” said BRP/Evinrude Vice President Roch Lambert, who skated with the Evinrude/Mercury team. “The Evinrude team had a great time playing with the Mercury guys, and it was well worth the travel to skate against a strong opponent.”
The event was organized by John Davids of Oshkosh. Sponsors of the event included Evinrude Outboards, American Marina of Shawano, Crownline Boats, Mercury Marine, Cranky Pat’s Pizza, Oshkosh YMCA, Northwestern Mutual Financial Network New Flag, and Flair Flexible Packaging Corp.
Now, I know the two engine companies weren’t coming together explicitly to create a better industry. But they certainly represented our industry well in their local community, supported a great cause and built a bridge that can only lead to more goodwill down the road. As the Greek philosopher and orator Demosthenes said, “Small opportunities are often the beginning of great enterprises.”
If you have examples of other marine industry executives, companies, associations or sectors coming together despite all odds, please share them by commenting below.
Great story! Thanks for writing that. I think we all want to be our best, which is for most of us, far better than we have been before. It’s just that we’re all trying so hard to just survive, right now. If we can sort it all out, and come together as friends and associates, we have a huge new opportunity coming.
It’s one of the reasons I created http://www.marineindustry.org... one man on a mission to unite the industry so we all can work together to achieve more. There is so much talent in this industry and my site makes it easy to connect to others for the greater good.
Hello.
Great story Liz and BIG thank you to Jim Sabia for creating a place that everyone can come together to share commments and idea’s. If only more people would start to contribute to marineindustry.org. Jim maybe you can give a free toaster oven to people that contributed, Ha,Ha. Jim has created something for everyone to use and it seems that people are just reading and not contributing. Let’s start working together.
Gotta love it! Once upon a time I was an aircraft mechanic at Merrill Field in Anchorage, Alaska. If our work load was too heavy or we knew that another shop had more expertise in an area than our shop had, we would send the customer to that competitor, and it worked the other way also. We lost few customers by this practice and never lost a regular customer as long as I was there.
When I came East, I was shocked to find the anamosity between shops and the resulting “trashing” that went with it were overwhelming. It appears that the predominent attitude is to try to appear better by making the competition look worse. I got out of aviation because of that attitude and went into the marine industry only to find that it is as bad as it was in aviation.
In my opinion this attitude is a cancer in any industry and the entire industry is damaged severely by it.
My thanks and appreciation to those who stand against it.