OEM Manager

My job is to gain access to new boat builders and manage existing OEM accounts with the attempt to grow the accounts, adding Seakeeper into additional boat models.  I also work closely with our Distributors in Canada and Asia/Australia/New Zealand.

I was the Procurement and Category Manager at Boater’s World Marine Centers corporate. We had ~200 retail stores at our peak, I believe, as well as a catalog and website business.

July 2009

How much time do you have?

My favorite change has been seeing how our marketing and hard work has made us THE NAME in gyro stabilization. I like hearing customers refer to “competitive models” as Seakeepers.

I’d say early on, it was challenging to convince boat builders that they are going to soon be adding a 35” x 39”, 1,200+ pound piece of equipment to their boats that already were fully loaded with equipment. We got laughed at a lot, but we left our business cards. Then we received phone calls from those same builders as we created demand from the ground up.

There were many builders that took years of visits before we received our first orders. Grady-White, for example, took very long to break into but now they are one of our biggest accounts in the Mid Atlantic.

The people involved from every department all working together to turn the initial visions into realities.

There are still some late adopters of our products. It’s frustrating to show them all of the interest and demand we receive directly, yet they still are slow to integrate.

Hold on tight. Soak in as much as you can as quickly as you can.

I was lucky enough to work with both founders early on as we did not have very many employees. I learned a ton from John Adams about hull forms and boat roll principles as well as effective ways to work with third parties to keep our systems up and running in the field.

My first “office” at Seakeeper was the kitchen of a small rental house in Solomons Island.  That was the original corporate office.