Boats for Sale Sitting Around Depreciating, Deteriorating, and What I Decided to Do About It

I was a super busy corporate mum of three kids, we’d become ex-pats and moved to Asia twelve years before and I was trying to keep up in my job, keep up with all the bills and payments and be a great spouse as well as trying to build a new style yacht brokerage business in my “spare” time.

My hubby had become jaded and worn down by his traditional boat broker job he’d quit 8 months beforehand. The industry, the wheeler-dealers, back-handers, and opportunistic sales practices, as well as income volatility, had taken its toll.

I wanted to provide a more effective service to boat owners to help them sell their boats faster, by marketing and selling their boats online; easier and faster and at lower commission rates, and make our new business a success, so I wouldn’t have worry about what my hubby was going to do for work, and also as a backup for me, in case the unthinkable happened, and I would be made redundant then my corporate gig would be over.

I wanted to be able to create a new, better system of marketing and selling boats online, a service that had better outcomes for boat owners.

The traditional model worked for the 10% of boats that sell quickly, but that didn’t help 90% of boat owners whose boats didn’t sell fast; you can see many boats sitting around for months and years for sale in marinas and I wanted to provide a better service for these owners, as well as giving me peace of mind that I was going to be OK financially since my hubby had quit his job 8 months beforehand, totally jaded and worn down by the traditional boat broker model.

The thing is I was hardly making any money, and many days I lost money, as the business was still in the start-up phase.

That meant I wasn’t able to create a new, better system of marketing and selling boats online that had better outcomes for more boat owners. The traditional model worked for the 10% of boats that sell quickly, but didn’t help that 90 % of boat owners whose boats didn’t sell fast — I wanted to provide a better service for these owners, let alone have peace of mind that I was going to be OK financially since my hubby had finished his job.

To make things worse, I felt terrible because we were continuing to invest more and more money in the business, in marketing and lead generation but we weren’t yet profitable.

I felt even worse about the situation because I had been working, quite obsessively, 7-days a week on this start-up business for nearly two years and it still wasn’t at breakeven and I was still investing in it. I felt like a scared “slow-learner” — wanting to give up and run away.

I felt like it was the day my education had totally failed me, working so hard and fast yet still not fast enough to get to a sustainable profit.

The problem was that many boat owners wanted an easy boat sale, and fair enough too. “Just sell the boat” they would say.

“Find me a buyer and I’ll pay a handsome commission.”

They would go from broker to broker with the same approach and granted, that’s what we all want — fast, easy, and everyone makes a lot of money. How hard can it be one might ask? Indeed, and often, very hard.

But, this meant I couldn’t do what the boat owners wanted — “just sell the boat” as 90% of the time, boats are hard to sell, unless I pulled my checkbook out and bought the boats myself!

All boat owners want to be in the 10% group — where once or twice a year there is the ‘easy’ sale for a boat broker and the owner is happy to pay the handsome and easy commission. For the 90% of boat sellers, that’s just not how it works. I couldn’t do anything to help these boat owner clients sell their boats yet I’m sure they expected or at least hoped that I’d do something.

It meant that we couldn’t work together to create the sales results that they were looking for.

I lost client after client, boat owners that I could have helped to sell their boats faster. It meant that potential clients who had just walked into my new digital business ended up walking straight back out again, without buying anything, but they were looking for a solution to sell their boats as fast as possible, looking for someone or something to do that for them.

Then, as if by chance, something amazing happened…

That’s when I had a brainwave and decided I could give them some help; something of huge value essentially, for free.

Something that didn’t cost me an arm or leg in time or resources to provide that value, because I had set it all up before, which meant it could be given away to many boat owners, which then reduces the individual cost to a minimum.

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Something that gets boat sellers on their way with their goal to sell their boat, and if, in the future, they get stuck or need a hand, they’ll be more likely to reach back out to me as they’ll remember the value already received earlier. We’d be memorable and top of mind as the go-to person, the problem solver and the solution provider next time.

The idea was all about creating an Online Toolkit for Do-It-Yourself (DIY) for Boat Sellers, specially designed for owners with boats less than USD150k. A Toolkit that would appeal to those owners who may feel the desire to try to sell their boat themselves or save on the commission.

A program and step by step guides, documents, and templates for boat owners, giving them exactly what they were looking for in one easy to find place!

It was now crystal clear to me how to provide boat owners with value, training, and tools right up front, about how to sell their boats in the fastest possible time at the highest price with the least amount of effort, because I now saw the boat owner would be well on his way to boat selling success with this information and Toolkit.

He could now find that buyer faster without paying the outrageous 10% commission to a broker.

I also learned that if you help solve problems for boat owners who inherently like the idea of trying to do it yourself (DIY) or to save on the commission, that when they eventually need your help (in 90% of the cases of boats that don’t sell quickly, easily, cheaply or effortlessly), they will come back and become paying clients for that valuable service.

It can be really difficult to sell your boat a lot of the time; you need to identify and plan the correct pricing and selling strategy for your boat sale first up.

As a result, I created The Complete DIY Toolkit to Selling Your Boat and Online Boat Shows for boat owners and started to get a copy of this System in front of every boat owner who wanted to sell their boat.

After I did that, I started connecting with boat owners and educating them on what was involved in pricing, marketing and making a sale of a boat and started getting all the leads I could handle.

Suddenly, I was helping more clients sell their boats faster, cheaper, easier and with less effort. And being able to attract owners and boats to work with and letting go of clients who didn’t appreciate what we did for them (instead of sitting around begging for anyone to list their boats for free, just adding more work to my day for no revenue).

That’s when I realised that the secret to build a new style yacht brokerage business — my hubby had become totally jaded and worn down by his traditional broker job he had quit 8 months beforehand — was to provide a System of all the things a boat owner needs to do to sell their boats — either a do-it-yourself (DIY) Toolkit, or through an Online Boat Show, in the fastest possible time.

A “How-To” of marketing and selling your boat, where to do it, and what to do to get three times the sales enquiries in 90-days compared to traditional methods, so you can sell your boat faster and move on with your life (or boat upgrade), without worry of how long it will take to get an offer.

I planned to start reaching all boat owners with boats under USD150k who wanted to sell their boats.

So, I started publishing a blog about selling your boat and letting people know about the Online Boat Shows and the DIY Toolkit and System I’d created. But we didn’t stop there.

We then started to offer the System to every enquiry we received from a boat owner about helping them sell their boat.

After that, we emailed our database of boat owners to share the good news of the Toolkit with them.

But there was still a problem…

The number of boat owners that we were reaching was still quite limited. Even though we had several hundred boat owners with boats for sale, it was still difficult to engage with them, plus with the holiday season approaching it was only going to slow down even further.

We ended up getting so frustrated that we decided to go all out and create an Online Boat Show and a Toolkit sales funnel. To start advertising on Facebook and to start blogging about this innovative System, as well as sending emails to our database inviting people to share the Boat Selling System with others.

We chose to call it “The BASCO Combination Boat Selling System”.

We thought if we could create something that would make it possible to educate and inform boat owners on how to market boats for sale in the digital and social media world, so they can sell their boats faster, easier and cheaper, something that produced results, that the clients LOVED and we got paid for, even if they sold their boats themselves, we’d be really happy.

After months of testing, tweaking and hours of testing every single aspect of what it takes to generate 3 times the sales enquiries in 90-days, meticulously follow up every lead, giving owners live links with real-time access to their enquiry dashboard, build sales pipelines for every boat owner and then, make the sale.

We also gave them access to The BASCO Online Boat Show platform and The Complete DIY Toolkit to Selling Your Boat, a huge value that once set up can essentially be provided for free. 

I can now work with thousands of boat owner clients helping them to sell their boats themselves (DIY) yet work with hundreds of others on a more done-with-you (DWY) marketing and sales program using our Online Boat Show platform and work with a few clients in our Done-For-You (DFY) premium program, generating 3 times the sales enquiries in 90-days compared to traditional methods, and reducing the time to sale by 33%.

We then started to let other boat owners use the System and The Complete DIY Toolkit to Sell Your Boat.

As a result of all this we were able to achieve the following:

In just the last 12 months we’ve successfully reached hundreds of boat owners to let them know about the Online Boat Show System for boat sales and we’ve marketed over 50 boats in the last 12 months.

We’ve generated hundreds of enquiries for each Online Boat Show and each boat owner had 3 times the boat sale enquiries in 90-days as compared to traditional methods and price feedback so they can make their move.

After creating The BASCO Combination Boat Selling System, I was not only able to connect with boat owners to educate and inform them about the easiest and quickest way to market and sell their boats. I’ve been signing them up as clients for our Online Boat Shows.

I’ve also been able to stop worrying about potential boat owners dropping by our digital business, walking in and walking out without engaging us to help them sell their boats faster and at the highest possible price because we can now give value at every stage of our interaction with our potential clients and then we are top of mind when they do need help to sell!

And in the end, all of this means I’m now able to spend time relaxing knowing that our boat owners have all the tools, training and knowledge at their fingertips and I can spend more time doing other things I enjoy, like spending time with my hubby and my children and living life on the water.