From the Helm | Special Edition: Interview with MarineMax Executive Chairman Bill McGill

Going great. Hello everyone. Excellent.

Wow. Well, I just got back last night from being up ringing the bell on New York Stock Exchange to celebrate our 20th. A very exciting time. I remembered that 20 years ago when we were up there for the first time ringing the bell. And what was really interesting, the New York Stock Exchange, they roll out the red carpet. They had pictures from the original 20 years ago. Guess what? The CEO looks a little older, and the CFO who doesn't look any older. We were both in the original picture. And a lot of our senior management, like Chuck Cashman, our Chief Revenue Officer, was celebrating 20 years ago and was helping us drive business. Brett McGill was there, who was with us over 20 years ago also. So we were up there with a couple of our board members. And what the New York Stock Exchange said, which was a compliment or it's time to get the heck out, they said very seldom do they see a 20-year celebration where the CEO and CFO are the same and a lot of the management. So that's really an accolade to our company that we enjoy what we're doing. It was touching for me and for the other team members that were there as well. We're one of the few companies that has rolled together close to 30 private dealerships and taken it public, and it's working and everybody's still having fun.

Well, I wake up every day excited to go to work. This morning I was here at 5:30. Why do you do that? I enjoy what we're doing. What gets me up is I know that we change people's lives through boating. If you go back to my early years, I was on a farm. My dad had a job in town, and my two brothers and two sisters, our job was to take care of the farm. Our reward on a Sunday afternoon was to go boating as a family. So I grew up with this boating gene and saw what it did for our families. After I graduated college, I worked for an aircraft company and for NASA for a while, then got into manufacturing. The company I was working for, Colgate Palmolive, wanted me to move to Boston or New York. I was competitive water skiing and boating, had two kids and another on the way, and I said it's not all year long in New York. So I had an in into the boat business, and that's where I got into my passion, which was boating. What is better than to come to work every day living your passion? I got into the boat business in 1973, so I'm 45 years into this and still enjoy it. We just celebrated the 45th anniversary of me being in the boating industry. It's an important part of my life. My three grown kids grew up boating. A few weeks ago, my son was doing an event with the Jesuit wrestling team, a local high school here in Tampa he graduated from, with all the wrestlers out on the lake. Boating is really... I've got nine grandkids today who are involved in boating and love it. When you grow up with this boating lifestyle, it pulls families together. It's one of the few recreations that brings the family together. One of the greatest rewards I get in my position is when I'm on a getaway event or seeing customers at a boat show, and the lady of the household comes up and says thank you, I've got something I can do with my husband. Then the kids come up and say I'm having fun with my parents, and we're bringing our friends. So it brings families together. We're changing people's lives. That's what I really believe, and that's what empowers a lot of our team members, knowing that they're making a difference. In a world where people take their cell phones and sanitize them and not watch TV, instead they're enjoying each other out on the water. That's what boating is about.

Well, if you go back to when I got in at 1973, it was a couple of dealerships here on the west coast of Florida, and we started developing the strategies which are now today MarineMax. Basically, the customer is part of the family. It needs to be understood that this is a discretionary purchase. It changes people's lives, but it's discretionary. People like to feel like they're part of a family when they're doing it. So we invite customers into our family. That's what we tell our team members all the time: it's not a customer, it's part of your family, that's how you want to treat them. We started developing the strategies of educating the people that are part of our family on how to use these products, but also helping them select the right product based on what they want to do. You want to go waterskiing, which is my passion, or cruising, wakeboarding, excursions, whatever these emotions are that they're looking forward to. We help them to be able to do that. Our team is more focused on what the boat does for you to change your life than on selling a boat, because we're selling a lifestyle. It's about this life-changing recreation. We were putting all this together, and we were friends with a bunch of other dealers across the country. We kept saying to each other, wouldn't it be nice if we could put our companies together and get some of these synergies? For example, how do we take care of a customer who buys a boat in Florida and they're up in Ohio for the summer? If our companies are together, we can take care of those customers when they're up north. In 1997, there was this thing called roll-ups and IPOs going on. They were doing it with funeral homes, you name it. We were approached as to how to do it, and we decided to move forward. There were five independent dealers, I think there were 28 locations across the country, and we were doing about $250 million in revenues total. So we went public. I knew as much about IPOs as I understood what the letters meant, that was about it. But we said we're going to make this work. The way we're going to make it work is this is not a New York Stock Exchange public company that's run short-term. We're going to do everything for the long term, and we're going to run it just the way we would as far as the customer and our team members are concerned, like we would if it was a private company that I owned and the other founders. So we don't chase quarterly earnings, we don't chase short-term thinking. When we make acquisitions, today we're 29 private companies together, we look at it and say does it make sense, is the culture right? It's all about culture. It's about helping the customers select the right boat, teach them how to use that boat, service it. We have 260 service trucks out on the road today to take care of our customers. And the important one is get involved with them and have fun. We've done over a thousand events this last year, where we'll take customers up to Nantucket, Newport, through the lakes in Minnesota, in Texas fishing out on the oil rigs, the Bahamas. These events give customers a chance to relate to other families who are also doing this wonderful recreation called boating. It's like magic. The kids interact, the parents interact, and they make some of their best friends. We even take customers to Italy, and they don't have their boat, they're there to enjoy each other because they're boating together in the summer and winter months in Florida or up in the Northeast. It's a family recreation, and it works. I've had the privilege of being on a lot of these events, seeing the coming together of the service team, the sales team, the customers. Everybody's always just a family. It doesn't matter who you are, it's always just coming together as one and having a good time boating. So we put it together, and today we're 62 locations, plus a location in the British Virgin Islands where we do charter, and we have 1,700 team members. We've got millions of customers. This year, I think we're on track to be in excess of $2 billion in revenues. It's exciting. The economy goes up and down, and what I've discovered over my 45 years in the business is people are going to boat no matter what's going on. The affinity for this thing called boating and this family connection is so strong. I've had customers come up to me and say, if I was to lose my car or my house, the boat would be the last to go.

Probably the British Virgin Islands and Newport are outstanding. It's hard to call it. The Bahamas, Lobsterfest, they're all wonderful events. But what really makes it special is not as much the destination as it is seeing the families interacting with each other and having fun. I remember this one trip, a customer was having a lot of problems with his boat. We were taking care of them, but at the end of the day on the getaway event, you didn't hear one word, just having fun. I remember another occasion where we were over in the Bahamas, and a customer went out on their own, not part of our group, and ran aground. One of the friends they had made on the trip said, you can't run your boat, join us. So they came back from the Bahamas, and of course we took care of making sure the boat got repaired. We even sent a captain to run it back from the Bahamas. That's teamwork. It's things that you don't see in the world a lot today. It's all about making money and selling stuff, but when you're selling a lifestyle, that's where it really makes the difference.

Well, we've always focused on if you're going to do something, do it right and the very best you can do it. I learned this from my dad, who's still back on the farm and will be 99 in August. So we've really focused on manufacturers that provide the premium product that supports this premium experience for our customers. It takes the product to do it. I've been a Sea Ray dealer for 45 years now. It's a prestigious brand that goes from 19 to 65 feet. I know it's for sale, and that's probably going to be one of the questions. We are involved in what's happening in that process as it unfolds. I can assure everyone it'll be the right buyer, and we will be involved to make sure that brand continues and does very well. We sell Boston Whaler, unsinkable legend, Scout, and it goes on. We sell Galeon out of Poland, super premium product, does very well. Ocean Alexander doesn't get much better in these larger yachts. Additionally, Azimut, Italian built, Atlantis, and Mozilla, incredible product, beautiful styling and innovation. We're actually contract manufacturing the Aquila brand, which we use in our charter fleet, and it's working very well retail here in the United States as well as all over the world. The key is it needs to be premium product that's supported by the manufacturer so we can give behind-support to our customers. And here's Nautique, probably on 50, and that's skiing and waterskiing.

Probably the biggest change that I've seen occur is that more and more retailers in our industry are starting to provide more services. I remember when I first got in, for the first 20 years of my 45, a lot of dealers sold and then didn't even service. Then they started servicing, and we're starting to see more that are getting involved with their customers, not to the extent that we do, but understanding that it is a lifestyle change and that you're selling not a product but this whole experience. So that's evolving. Of course, technology has evolved to the point where joystick docking and mixed navigation is a piece of cake. I remember Loran going out looking for dive and fish spots. Today, you can see the fish on the bottom with the finders we have, and you can get within five feet of that great dive spot and leave it there with Skyhook. The boat just sits there and won't roll if you have a gyro. There's a lot of things that have changed. But in our company, what really makes me the most proud is our team. They're all on the same train heading in the same direction, and that is service that customer second to none and make this an enjoyable lifestyle and make them part of our family. I hear it more and more almost every day. It's about culture. At the end of the day, we're in the people business. That's the business we're really in, because it's a relationship with a customer, it's having happy team members. You've got to have fun at what you're doing. Happy team members and happy customers.

I tell our team, if a customer has a problem on their boat, whether the manufacturer caused it, whether the customer caused it, or whether we caused it, it's our problem. You run to it, you don't walk to it. Then you communicate what we're doing to fix that problem and help the customer. Whether you have great news, bad news, or no difference, you still communicate. We measure our customer satisfaction through Net Promoter Score, we call it fans. According to the book The Ultimate Question, the average retailer or manufacturer in the United States has a score of less than 10%. You can have a minus 100 or plus 100 when you ask the question how would you recommend MarineMax. World-class companies are 40, 50, 60%. Our scores are in the 70s, and even after 5 or 10 years, we're still in the 60s. It's because we own the problem, and we're trying to make this as enjoyable an experience as it can be. You are going to have some problems, they're normal. Take your car, park it on the beach around the salt water, and you have problems.

I don't really look at it as I'm striving to be the leader. I look at it as do the very best you can do every single day, and what happens happens. If there's a problem, accept that you made a mistake and learn from it. If you're always doing what's right for the customer and the team member, and you do that every single day, then we are the world's largest retailer, we have unbelievable Net Promoter Score and customer satisfaction, we sell the very best products, and we do the most of all that. That happens as a result. We're trying to do the very best we can do every single day, a day at a time.

Making acquisition or growth can be a strategy for a public company, and it's not our strategy. Our strategy is if we find the right dealers or right marina location, whether that's a marina or a dealership, if it's really right and it has the people that have the culture, we'll do it. That's what we found with Island Marine, that's what we found with Hall Marine in the Carolinas, that's what we found with the Rousseau family up in the Boston area. That's probably worthy of a story. Here we are, Larry Senior and his wife B, who was working in the store. I tease him that he's older than me, but he's not. He's got two sons, Larry and Alex. We looked at it and said, what's going to happen is they become part of MarineMax. You could say maybe Senior would retire, he wasn't saying that, you could think it. How's this going to work? I can tell you, I was just with Larry, he was with us ringing the bell. Larry Senior had more fun than he said in his whole life. His wife B is still there driving the whole store, and his two sons are performing stellar. So when you find that, you got a win-win. It's a win for MarineMax, a win for our customers, and a win for them. Things like that really get me up every day, that's what I love.

We're going to keep doing what we've been doing and just try to do it better every single day. We're going to continue to look for opportunities, whether that's a marina property. We're going to continue to look at growing the manufacturing part of our business, whether it's contract manufacturing or who knows what the future holds. But primarily, it'll be a focus on making sure we have the right team members in the right place within our company, and then it gets easy. People have asked me, Bill, you've been in the boat business, and you weren't a teenager when you got in, so what's your key to success? What's the one thing you can say? I have always tried to surround myself with good people. If you surround yourself with good people, and this is what I tell our store managers and our regional presidents, surround yourself with good people and your life gets easy. Surround them with bad people and it is really hard.

That's a good question, Nathan. The primary driver, well we ask two questions, so I need to explain that. First question, on a scale of zero to ten, how would you recommend MarineMax to a friend or associate? That's pretty easy. If you give us a nine or ten, then you're a promoter, and if you don't, then you're hurting the company. But we ask the second question, and it's not why didn't you give us a nine or a ten. We ask, why did you give the score you gave? 99% of the time, it's lack of proper communication. So it's news, no matter what it is, whether it's not good, bad, or excellent. Don't tell me when I was coming to pick up my boat tomorrow, don't tell me two hours before they're just not ready. Give me a notice if that's the case. That's the primary reason. I'll tell you another story. This goes back a few years. We had a customer with a 45-foot Sea Ray on Lake Minnetonka up in Minnesota. A score came in, and he gave us a low score. He just got the boat like 30 or 45 days before, no reason why he gave the low score. The manager at the time called the customer and said, how's everything going? The customer said, let me tell you. I bought this boat to watch the Minnesota Vikings game on Lake Minnetonka, and the TV broke, and I had all my family and friends there to watch it. The manager said, I'm sorry, I can't do anything about that right now, but I'll get somebody out, we'll fix the TV. The manager took it on his own, got a couple of minutes of the Vikings box seats, and delivered it to the customer's door. That was the right thing to do. World-class. They're part of the family. That's what you do for your family.

Thank you. And thank our team for the 20 years and all their hard work, some of them 45, 50 years. Also thank you to our customers for your belief in us and all that you do for us.

Thank you very much, Bill. And if anybody else has any questions or comments, be sure to...