How do you convince the consumer that your boat or product is more like Häagen-Dazs than the store brand? How do you professionally and effectively differentiate your boat or service or piece of equipment from the rest of the field? (Read More…)

One commentator called it a “talk for the ages.” It’s the commencement address Steve Jobs gave at Stanford University in 2005, which you can access by clicking here or watch below. (Read More…)

I spoke Tuesday with yacht dealer Ben Wilde as he drove a Nordic Tug 54 into a stiff current on the C&D Canal en route to PassageMaker magazine’s Trawler Fest event in Baltimore. He grumbled about the foul tide that would put him into port after dark, but he didn’t complain a lot about the economic headwinds that he, like the rest of us, is also bucking. (Read More…)

If a picture is worth a thousand words, what about three videos? You’ll have to be the judge of that. (Read More…)

I had intended to write a piece today about how we’ve all grown more stress-hardy in the three years since Lehman Brothers collapsed — “we” being the industry and the boating public. But I changed course after watching an e-mailed video from boatbuilder Ken Fickett, who owns Mirage Manufacturing, the builder of Great Harbour trawlers. (Read More…)

An old saying you used to hear with some frequency was that all you needed to get into the boatbuilding business was a barrel of resin and a shed. It’s not that easy anymore, but you get the idea. (Read More…)

If there was ever a political rallying cry worth remembering, it is James Carville’s prescient mantra, “It’s the economy, stupid.” You could build a campaign around those four words, as Bill Clinton so aptly did in 1992 when he defeated President George H.W. Bush. (Read More…)

One of the enduring images I carry from Fort Lauderdale in the aftermath of Hurricane Wilma is of a reporter opening the trunk of his car outside the Bahia Mar Hotel and revealing a traditional 20th century office phone, just waiting for an energized outlet and an intact landline to do its thing. Talk about wishful thinking. (Read More…)

As consumers, and as an industry, we are living and doing business in an age of thrift. Consumers are continuing to deleverage to work off debt from their household balance sheets to increase their savings. (Read More…)

Sooner or later you’re going to get caught out — in more wind, in bigger seas, in more of everything than you hoped for. That’s just part of being on the water. When it happens, you don’t want to panic or overreact. Safer to let cooler heads prevail. (Read More…)