This is the second guest post from Richard Pierce and contains
a lot of thought-provoking stuff.
Sell
what we’ve got….not what we’ve not got! I was stopped in my
tracks when I heard this clear order from the production manager to the
marketing department of the competent manufacturing company I worked for in my
early 20′s. And the absolute wisdom of those words has rung in my ears ever
since a project I embarked on in the early 1990′s.
The mantra works in a number of ways, but fundamentally it says deal
with certainties, not possibilities.
In the early days of my own boatbuilding business we had few orders,
but it was immediately clear to me I should use my time to produce boats, solid
products that had a value that could, sooner or later be realized. If a day
passed with no product a day was lost that could never be regained. We duly
started to turn a profit.
Without a sample available, winning a customer is much more
difficult, so a substantial part of each day was spent creating new boats. For
the first few months these were capitalized by a bank loan of £500, sufficient
to cover the material costs of 4 small dinghies in those days. Within 6
months the loan was repaid, and we never used credit again, preferring to
re-invest the proceeds of sales in more tools and materials.
After 10 years trading this model was providing a steady if
unremarkable income for a few faithful helpers and me. A flow of orders flowed
from the distinguished house-style of our product, which was clearly
different from anything anyone within hundreds of miles of our sales
pitch was offering. We were building beautiful race-winning yachts.
Then
the catastrophe happened. I was lured into a contract to build two racing
yachts, just a little larger than those we had been turning out regularly
for a few years. Armed with hundreds of photographs and drawings of
typical and contemporary 5-5metre class (34ftLOA) racing yachts I gave a
fixed price, and set to work.
CAD machine printing was a new innovation at that time, and in
lieu of a bulky envelope of sweet smelling
dye-line construction drawings, the first package from the designer
was a roll of drawing plastic showing the sections, neatly and accurately
printed full size, followed by many feet of fax. Precise in some ways, but not
a firm base for a contract I later realized….
Time being of the
essence (the yachts were to be delivered six months hence to Norway for
the World Championships) we set to with little other than a small scale profile
drawing showing the station locations and the luxurious, full
size, planking-reduced sections to work from. To save time and money the
designer’s proposal was that we would remove the decks and cockpit soles from 2
old 5.5′s and install them ready fitted out to the new hulls and
keels. Retaining the old sailnumbers would also avoid the
substantial payment of a building fee to the IYRU, an organization to
which one of my customers was a past chairman!
The new hull building proceeded apace, with
slight delays occuring with the delivery of the designer-specified non
woven tri’axial glass cloth, a material I had no previous experience
with. (In the event this material needed so much epoxy to
fill its interstices its doubtful it was, in practice, any better than a
conventional flat weave low-crimp cloth).
At this point line drawings for a bulb
keel arrived… at the last possible moment, with some further details later
by fax. A pattern had to be built and delivered to the lead keel foundry, Henry
Irons in Cornwall some 388 miles distant. The shape was significantly more
complex than anything seen in the 5.5 class before, and so the pattern took twice
as long to make. Apart from superior hydrodynamics the designer was
aiming to place the CG lower than conventional, which meant that a hollow stub
keel had to be built into the hull.
The
fabrication and installation of these elements took way longer than the usual
5.5 arrangement (which was simply to bolt a fin onto a flat on the bottom of
the canoe body using big washers and ten or a dozen bolts ready cast into
the keel). Apart from the enhanced difficulty of ensuring perfect alignment,
many hours of extra manufacturing were involved in this ‘new’ layout
Did
I mention a call from the foundry? The lead castings turned
out significantly heavier than designed, and so had to have the top 4″
removed, to be replaced by deadwood. Another small job in itself
that multiplied the time needed to fit the keel. At this point I had to
move the yacht hulls to other premises with the benefit of an overhead crane…
the finished & painted hulls could not be simply lifted onto their
completed fins standing on a trailer. This also complicated the painting
process… each boat took 8 hours of almost continuous paint
spraying. I climbed on and off 2ft high benches to reach from deck edge
to keel sole, round the boat 6 times. Painting just a hull or keel is very
easy by comparison.
Fitting the keels did not bring the job to completion…
another first for these yachts was the inclusion of a trim tab. As all
yachtbuilders know, fitting, fairing, flapping and pivoting a tab or
rudder to the trailing edge of a keel is a highly skilled job. The final sting
in the tail was a call for existing rudders to be modified. These would be
extended in depth to almost the full draft of the yachts, with a modified foil
section. Sometimes its easier to start from new!
Further
delays were encountered when special chainplates had to be manufactured… the
fabricators did a great and prompt job, but I was frustrated that the drawings
were not available at the outset of the contract. Off-the-shelf parts also
caused frustration… specified stock rudder bearings from an American
manufacturer with a UK agent arrived only after much chasing on the telephone.
What a waste of time. At a late stage new masts from an untested alloy
were specified, and when the tubes were drawn they proved almost
impossible to drill to mount fittings! Fortunately this was outside
the scope of my contract.
In the last month before delivery another insideous, unforeseen
factor grew out of control. With time slipping away one owner started to
call on their newly invented mobile phones, not just once but many times a
day, each time with another good idea. I estimate I took over 150 calls, 75
hours, during that last month, with no positive benefit to the yachts.
Even
loading a yacht on a trailer into a container sounds simple… in the event it
would have been easier to tow the yachts to Norway behind the trusty Scimitar!
I learned very painfully that I should always keep a diary of
additions and variations to contract, however insignificant they might appear
at the time. In this instance each variation from the conventional seemed
almost trivial, but collectively they would have been my downfall had it
not been for other trade. From that time onwards, customers were welcome
at the yard after 4 on Friday afternoon to inspect progress, meet or phone to
agree variations to the contract. All other time was ringfenced for
construction.
The ability to build a beautiful boat is not sufficient to
ensure a fruitful future in boatbuilding. Skills in sales,
estimating, accounting, purchasing, man management, planning, contracting
and transport are equally important elements; ignore any one at your
peril.
Sell
what you’ve got…. this does not necessarily have to be something you
have completed, it could be a skill or experience you have already
acquired, but whatever, it should be something of which you are in
complete control of every last detail, from drawing to finished
specification. Something you have in stock. The most reliable
sub-contractors will sometimes be unable to deliver, but then its your head on
the block, not theirs.
Happily 20 years on, the yachts have new owners,
are re-named and sailing in the Netherlands, see the picture at the top of this post.
Comment by Ewan
There are at least two lessons here. Not only should you
only sell what you can deliver, but when you have no client in view you must
keep the yard busy by creating something you can sell later.
A good example of the latter is the beautiful Rosemary IV
built by William Fife III when the Fairlie yard was temporarily out of orders. The
result was not only a lovely work of art, still sailing today, but one of the
few examples of what the designer really wanted to produce, unconstrained by the
troublesome requirements of a customer. I've written about this before, here:
The designer unconstrained
A similar episode happened when I was building Sonas to a
design of the late David Ryder-Turner (David was indirectly responsible for
Richard and I meeting up, but that is a story for another day!). By the late
1980s orders for wooden yachts were few and far between and the McGruer yard
had been suffering like many others. Under a scheme funded by public money the
yard was persuaded to build a little yacht on spec and to engage some trainees
in the process. David readily agreed to do the design work, I suspect gratuitously,
and four young people were duly signed on for the duration of the build. The result,
the lovely Amber, was sold before she was completed. Sadly no lessons were
learned by management, who failed to cash in on the new talent that had been
acquired. Amber will remain for all time the last wooden yacht ever produced by
this once great yard.
