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. Read more >>
Tags: Economy, Marine Dealers
I was driving in the car yesterday when a story came on National Public Radio about Columbia, Ky.-based houseboat builder Majestic Yachts. It’s no surprise in this economy that it was a sad story, at least at first. The article began by profiling Faye Womack, a former employee. She was part of a 27-person boat production team until orders stopped coming in last summer and CEO Jim Hadley was forced to lay off every single employee. He and the two other owners spent the winter trying to find odd jobs to pay the factory’s bills, according to NPR. Read more >>
By Terry Grapentine, Principal at Grapentine Company LLC — In a recent Sunday New York Times’ column (“The Inflection Is Near?” March 8), Pulitzer prize winning author and journalist Thomas L. Friedman suggests that the U.S. economy has finally reached an inflection point in its ability to sustain growth. We have reached a point where we can no longer support the growth that our economy has experienced over the past 50 years at the expense of increased environmental waste, insufficient financial market oversight, and indiscriminate credit lending. “We simply can’t do it anymore,” Friedman says. Read more >>
Tags: Economy, Guest Blog, Marine Dealers
By Peter Granata, President, Granata Design and the Marine Design Resource Alliance — There’s a new bandwagon pulling into town, and if you’re too busy ducking bullets you may not notice it. If you hang around the boating industry long enough, you’re bound to experience a cyclical downturn. This most recent version has to be the worst since 1980, and many agree that this one is the worst, period. Nonetheless, the point is that it is cyclical. The industry will come back, although it’s probably going to look different than it was. Read more >>
After the alarm went off this morning, my husband and I were talking about how fast the summer is going this year. This is an annual conversation, and as usual, I’m reluctant to acknowledge that it’s almost over. The difference this year is that I’m much more satisfied with our summer. Last September, we decided we would devote this summer to family time with our son, Nathan, now four years old. What we couldn’t have anticipated then was that our family’s cabin in the Thousand Islands region of upstate New York would be available for so much of the summer. Because the cabin is shared by my mother, her three siblings and their children, we typically make it up there for one week of vacation and two or three other weekends. This year, as of the end of Labor Day weekend, we will have spent 24 days up there. Read more >>
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. Read more >>
Joe Cavarretta has sat through enough budget meetings to know that it can be tough to live up to numbers that were put to paper months prior. In today’s economy, “tough” can be an understatement of magnificent proportions. But Cavarretta has devised a method, along with fellow managers at Riva Motorsports, a seven-brand powersports dealer in Pompano Beach, Fla., that helps him and Riva’s three-location company unearth valuable information that aids the dealership in improving its business. Read more >>
Tags: Economy, P&L, Powersports, Solutions
You should know, as you begin reading this, that I am an optimist at heart. Problems phase me for only a moment. I look for (and usually find) opportunity in every situation. And I believe that good things will happen to people and companies that make decisions that reflect the best interests of the people, industries and communities they serve. Those general philosophies on life and business make it difficult for me to believe the many catastrophic economic predictions that author Harry S. Dent, Jr. suggests lie in our immediate future. Read more >>
Tags: Baby Boomers, Economy
As you may have guessed, trade magazines like ours are adjusting to the downturn right along with the industries we serve. As our company has tightened its belt, the Boating Industry staff has been asked to work much more closely with Affinity Group’s sibling publications. In fact, I just returned from a trip to Pittsburgh last night, where I was interviewing a Honda motorcycle, ATV and PWC dealer for Powersports Business magazine. Read more >>
Tags: Economy, Marine Dealers
It’s no secret that matters affecting inventory are highly sensitive subjects these days. Just this morning, as an example, we’ve had three e-mails cross our screens related to inventory issues. The first was a boating business service provider who said our recently released inventory management e-white paper didn’t drill down deeply enough. The second was an industry-leading dealer who suggested that the same publication was a great balance between the 50,000-foot and street-level views. And, finally, a powersports dealer who shouted: “Lord knows we can’t take any more hits at this time,” as he shared his trials and tribulations with an auction house that had scammed him out of some money. Read more >>
Tags: Economy, Inventory, Marine Dealers
