Kevin Roggenbuck is the President and CEO of Lake Union Sea Ray. After working for a boat dealership in high school and college, he knew that the marine industry was where he saw a future. Many years later he and his family moved to Seattle and opened his first dealership. Today, Kevin oversees three locations in Northwest Washington. We had a chance to ask a Kevin a few questions in order to learn more about him and what keeps him motivated.

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Q: Tell us how you got your start in the boating industry?
Roggenbuck: I grew up boating and spent the summers on Hayden Lake in northern Idaho. When I was in high school and college, I had the opportunity to work for a boat dealership in Spokane. I loved the atmosphere and the boating community. Some years later, I moved my family to Seattle to open a Sea Ray dealership.

Q: What’s the most interesting decision you’ve had to make since you’ve been in the industry?
Roggenbuck: Just before the “downturn”, one of my biggest competitors, who was celebrating 50 years in the marine retail business, was not doing so well and became available. Never did I think I’d end up buying the company and all of the assets. Since then, Lake Union Sea Ray has accelerated quickly, running on all cylinders. Eight years later, Lake Union Sea Ray employs 80 men and women, sells seven brands of boats with three dealerships and three parts and service facilities. As a team we continue to receive industry accolades that highlight our hard work and continued customer care.

Q: You’re in a region and even on a lake with a lot of great dealers. How do you find your niche and differentiate your dealership?
Roggenbuck: From the very beginning, it was important to me that Lake Union Sea Ray built a reputation for integrity, professionalism and great customer care. Every employee knew what was expected of them. Additionally, we have been blessed by offering some of the best brands in the business, who supported both the dealer and the buyer of their boats.

Q: In 2016, your company was named one of Washington State’s Top 50 family owned businesses. What’s your secret formula for success?
Roggenbuck:  Integrity, professionalism, and great customer care.

Q: In addition to being an award-winning boat dealer, you also won a Formula 1000 national championship. Tell us about that.
Roggenbuck: I’ve been racing for over five years. When I was younger, I was involved in racing, but it took me decades to get back into it. I started competing in Open-Wheel Formula racing at the national level two years ago. In my rookie year, I qualified second in the national race. Unfortunately, I didn’t even make it around the second lap due to my car catching on fire. No one was hurt, thankfully. That just gave my team and me the motivation to come back stronger the year after, which is the year we took first in the national race. My team consists of six people—technicians, engineers, and a team manager. We travel from Seattle up and down the west coast—all the way to Daytona.

Q: How does your drive to be successful racing cars carry over to your drive to run a successful business?
Roggenbuck: Like in racing, I always strive to be in the front. Any successful business or racecar driver has a passion for what they do and strive to be the best, go the fastest, and outperform everyone. It takes a tremendous amount of planning to get to the top. When racing, you must be active in every part of the planning process and the race itself. If you make sudden changes while going 175 MPH on a racetrack, you are going to hit the wall or have trouble staying on course. The same goes for business. If we make sudden changes in what we do, we won’t be able to perform at our best and we might spin out of control. Only with careful planning and execution can big chances be made successfully.

Q: What are you doing differently today versus this time last year that has helped you stay competitive?
Roggenbuck: We have made a concentrated effort to expand our training of all Lake Union Sea Ray employees in their art (sales, service, parts, and administration) and their skill. We’ve recently brought in a full-time Executive Performance Coach who is available to all employees. This coach will be able to help employees achieve their goals and get where they want to be in their professional lives here at Lake Union Sea Ray.

Q: What’s the greatest piece of advice you’ve received during your career?
Roggenbuck: This may not be considered advice, but it proved to be a great motivator. When I first moved to Seattle, a competitor told me that I would never make it in Seattle. It became my mission to prove them wrong. Another piece of advice I live by is “take care of your customers and they will take care of you.”

Q: What are 5 things that people may not know about you?
Roggenbuck: I’m pretty much an open book, so I doubt there’s much to disclose here other than maybe a few minor things:

• I almost never have a desire for pizza or fast food; but, maybe a really good chocolate chip cookie once in a while.
• I sometimes feel a little embarrassed when a customer writes a big check for a new boat and says, “thank you” before I have the opportunity to thank them first.
• One of my goals is to leave the largest carbon footprint of anyone I know.
• With no desire to ever retire, I want to continue being a part of the boating community for a long, long time.

If you have a nomination for the Member Spotlight section of our newsletter, please send an email to mickaela@mraa.com.

Hi, I’m Bob and I’m a chocolate milkshake-aholic!

Because of this addiction, I frequent places that serve such divine pleasure. One place that got my attention this week promotes a Happier Hour and offers milkshakes at half price. They are hand-dipped, old-fashioned shakes topped with whipped cream and a cherry, all for $1.61 including tax! What’s not to like? I’ll tell ya: The aggravation of getting one!

The only thing consistent at this shake establishment is a poor customer experience that starts with, “Is anyone helping you?” This after a several-minute wait with no other customers in the place, delivered by a checked-out employee. Yes, I do go into the restaurant with décor that gets me in the mood for this classic, smooth beverage. The reason I go into the restaurant is to confirm that they are open and there are people working. You can’t tell from the silence coming through the speaker in the drive-thru! Every time I manage to achieve one of these shakes, I’m thinking it will be my last because a place like this isn’t going to stay open long.

Serving vs. selling
Compare this experience with a place down the street that doesn’t have Shake in their name, a chicken sandwich place. How can a place that sells chicken compare with a place that serves Steak and Shakes?  The difference is that the chicken place SERVES their customers and the steak place SELLS their customers. Truth is, the shakes at Chick-fil-A are machine made and the flavor is spun in, but they don’t forget the whipped cream and cherry! It’s the pleasure of being served by such enthused employees that makes the shake taste better.

I’ve been a raving fan of Chick-fil-A for years, and they find ways to further delight me on every visit. I have always parked my car and gone into the restaurant because the line that wraps around the building for the drive-thru deters me. I went out today to do some errands and brought along our new puppy, Lilly. I had the urge to fulfill my addiction and pulled into Chick-fil-A knowing I couldn’t walk in for my shake because I couldn’t bring Lilly inside. Leaving a dog in a car in the Florida heat is not an option. There it was, the line wrapped around the building, and I had to wait for vehicles to leave the window so I could get in line!

As I was thinking, “Is this worth it?” a young lady walked up to my window and asked my name. “Do you know what you would like?” I gave her my order, and she asked if I was paying cash or card. Meanwhile, the line ahead of me is already rounding the first corner of the building, so she asked me to move forward and walked along with me. She told me that she could take my card, swiped it across her belt, and returned my card. Again, the traffic ahead had already turned the next corner, and I followed, encountering another young lady who was holding my receipt and said, “Here you go, Bob!”

I still hadn’t come to a full stop, and I saw a young man directing the car ahead of me forward to clear the window for me with their bag of food in hand. I finally could make a full stop and put my credit card away while another lady at the window asked, “How’s it going today, Bob?” as she bagged my sandwich and handed me my chocolate fix!

Wow! It took less time to get served from a line that wrapped around a building than it took for the other restaurant to say, “Is anyone helping you?” I don’t think I need to see the books for each of these businesses to determine which is more profitable or review employee satisfaction surveys to know which has happier, more engaged employees.

How they do what they do
How does Chick-fil-A do it? I’m certain it didn’t happen overnight. I’ve eaten Chick-fil-A sandwiches for too long, well before they started serving my version of crack. They were never this good. They went from good to great! They haven’t shared their secrets with me, and I’m not sure they will. But I’m certain it starts with a proper culture and training. Then lots of observing and talking with customers to find the less-than-desirable parts of the experience and make them a pleasure.

Can we do the same in the service department at a boat dealership? I think we can by creating a great place to work, always looking for ways to exceed the customer’s expectation that will naturally drive profits, thus having a viable company that will keep customers for life. Adopting the processes required to become a Marine Industry Certified Dealership is a good start to creating the right culture and making sure your dealership’s operations are in line with customer expectations. However, the process to stay Certified is the special sauce that keeps you looking for ways to further delight your customers on every visit.

I hope you enjoy your food and milkshake on your next visit to Chick-fil-A, and more importantly, enjoy how they serve their customers!

Steve Arnold is the owner of Yarmouth Boat Yard and Moose Landing Marina located in Maine. Steve has been involved in the marine industry for a great while. He grew up in Fort Lauderdale, and started his time in the marine industry as a yard hand. Arnold worked his way up through management roles before heading off to college at Florida State University. After earning his MBA, Steve embarked a career in finance. In search a richer quality of life, Steve moved to Maine in 2003. He purchased Yarmouth Boat Yard in January 2004, happily shifting from his career as the Vice President of Trading at Goldman Sachs to focus on his passion for boats. We had the chance to ask Steve some questions in order to get to know him better and discuss the industry that he couldn’t stay away from.

Q: How long have you been in the marine industry and what is your fondest memory of your time, so far?

Arnold: I grew up working in marinas in Fort Lauderdale. I started out as a yard laborer, sanding bottoms, and worked my way up to travel lift foreman. 

My fondest memories are when customers take delivery of their new or used boat for the first time. It’s a very happy day. For some, owning a boat and being on the water has been a lifelong dream. It’s very gratifying to be able to help them fulfill that dream. 

Q: You acquired the business in 2004, What made you decide to get into the industry?

Arnold: Marinas have always fascinated me. I really enjoyed early years working in boatyards and it was a time in my life where I could make a transition and hopefully succeed at it!

Q: What is the most interesting decision you’ve made while in the boating business? 

Arnold: There are too many to list, but one important one is when we decided to carry the Pursuit line of boats. That decision really put little old Yarmouth Boat Yard on the map and it has been a great partnership over the years.

Q: What are you doing differently today versus this time last year that has helped you stay competitive?

Arnold: For us it is always about the customer experience. I challenge all our employees with the question of “how do we make the customer experience better”? Knowing your competition and market share is good, but delivering a A+ experience for the customer is even better!

Q: What are your hopes for our industry?

Arnold: More consolidation for one voice to be heard at the national level as well as at the state level. As an owner of two marinas in Maine, I have to manage a lot of the agencies who oversee our industry. That is a full time job itself.

Q: You have been an MRAA certified dealer since 2008. What value has the certification brought to your dealership?

Arnold: Becoming Dealer Certified was one of the best decisions I have made. It taught me and my employees how important it is to maximize the customer experience. It provided a handbook of best practices to help us achieve our goals and drive up our CSI scores. It made us consider everything from the appearance of our facilities to boat deliveries. The process of becoming dealer certified helped us to clarify our objectives and fine tune our strategies.

Q: What’s your “dream boat” to own?

Arnold: A 38’ Holland lobster boat. One of my customers owns one and I love that boat.

Q: What are 5 things that people may not know about you?

Arnold:

1. I haven’t flown in a while but I have my pilot’s license.
2. At one time in my life, I wanted to be a CPA and sat for the exam.
3. I worked on Wall Street for several years.
4. I have lived in London and San Francisco at different points in my life.
5. I have never had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich (my daughter finds that fascinating.)

 

If you have a nomination for the Member Spotlight section of our newsletter, please send an email to mickaela@mraa.com.

What’s most valuable to your dealership? Is it your customer database, physical assets, your boat brands? These are all important for sure, but none of them are more important to your business than the knowledge and know how of the people that do the work, which is captured in your dealership’s processes.

Such valuable assets need to be saved and protected. How? Through process documentation, the collection of mapped out visuals that anyone in your organization can easily navigate. The dealers who conceived the requirements for the Marine Industry Certified Dealership program knew of this thinking years ago and brilliantly decided to make process mapping a standard for a Certified Dealership.

Some dealers look at the prospect of creating process maps for everything they do a daunting task. It doesn’t have to be. Dealers have found ways to make quick work of this requirement, and I have some tips that can help too. But first, let’s look at the many payoffs.

1. You can become certified, which offers a ton of marketing, sales and dealership operations benefits. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

2. You can easily use customer and employee feedback to improve dealership productivity and provide a higher quality and more consistent customer experience. All you do is use what you learn to continually update your process maps.

3. As an educator, process maps allow me to deliver highly effective training that takes a fraction of the time to understand. The same will be true for you when you have new team members to train. With complete roadmaps to study, the newbie will become a useful part of the team in a fraction of the time it would take relying on the old guy’s memory!

Those are just a few of the benefits of dealership process mapping. Now, let’s look at how to do it fast and easy. Many dealers have found that they can make quick work of this requirement by getting their employees involved. Together, they can use a whiteboard to jot down everything that happens in their department. Once in place across all departments, these processes become the tool to visualize how everything in the dealership is done, which is critical for effective management.

So, once you’re ready to document your processes, the whiteboard exercise is the key to making the project easy and an effective use of time. Dealers say: “We don’t have whiteboards large enough to capture everything.” No worries. That’s why the MRAA invented smartphones with cameras! Just take a picture of the whiteboard, erase, and continue with your sub processes until the desired level of detail is captured.

The long pole in the tent to process mapping has always been publishing a good visual representation of the process. With the software and apps available today, this has become the easy part. I’ve become so comfortable with using PowerPoint (PPT), I lean on it to create most everything for desktop publishing, including my maps. But not all dealers are experienced with PPT. To find a simpler way, I Googled “Process Map Software.” It returned pages of solutions, and I tried out a few.  All were so much easier and intuitive than using PPT for creating maps. I settled on Lucidchart because it was simple and cheaper than the others!

So, don’t go another day without protecting your dealership’s most valuable asset. We’ve heard of dealers spending large amounts of money for consulting firms to interview their employees and create the documentation. Save the money and bring the benefits of process mapping to your dealership though Marine Dealer Certification. You can save thousands by using the experience gained by MRAA consultants who work with marine dealers every day. Learn more at MRAA.com/certification.

When I first entered the marine industry in 1999 after a long and rewarding career in the auto business, we were designing and building websites for dealers at a company called BoatVentures, which later became Channel Blade. During that time, we worked closely with a great number of boatbuilders that had Vice President- or Director-level executives leading Dealer Development staffs.

These departments were very concerned about the effectiveness of dealers’ websites and their response to leads generated from these websites. We became one of many companies that would work with a Director of Dealer Development and the associated dealer network to improve dealers’ results with prospects and customers. I recall arriving to more than one of these Dealer Development meetings aboard a manufacturer’s corporate aircraft. They were hosted at posh locations such as the Ritz Carlton in Chicago during IMTEC, where hotel clubs were closed for the night to entertain their dealers and guests.

It’s amazing what a great recession will do to make the jets and 5-star hotels a thing of the past! The frills may no longer be a priority, but the real need for Dealer Development remains. Most boat manufacturers see themselves building boats that boaters want and creating high brand awareness that sets them apart in the sea of fiberglass or aluminum. They see the dealer managing the purchasing and ownership experiences. Too many times, a lack of alignment between the two results in a poor customer experience, and the efforts of both the OEM and the dealer are out the window.

I don’t see Dealer Development VPs coming back anytime soon, but after over a year of working with dealers going through the Marine Industry Certified Dealership Program, I can’t think of a better avenue to bring dealers and manufacturers together. Dealer Certification is entirely focused on the customer experience — before, during and after the sale — and in a sense, it allows the MRAA to execute what was once the OEM’s Dealer Development efforts. The results are not only a better customer experience, but also a more efficient, effective and profitable dealership with staying power. Case in point? If you were the average dealer heading into the Great Recession, you had about a 65-percent chance of survival. But if you were a Certified Dealer, you had greater than a 91-percent chance to make it through. Certification makes that much of a difference.

From the moment that MRAA became involved in the Certification program, dealers have told us that manufacturer support is critical to its and their long-term success. When the industry comes together to make the customer experience a priority, it moves the needle for all involved.

If you are an OEM interested in learning more about the industry’s Certification program or a dealer who would like to see your manufacturer(s) get involved, please contact allison@mraa.com or (763) 333-2419. 

There’s no doubt that there are aspects of the marine industry and the individual companies that make it up that are unique compared to other industries and businesses.

But exactly how different the factors that drive success in a given marine business vary from a similarly sized business in another industry … well, that’s debatable. Are they 60 percent the same? 90 percent the same?

Today, I’m leaning more toward 90 percent. In a book I’m reading called, “Setting the Table: The Transforming Power of Hospitality in Business,” the author – one of the most respected entrepreneurs of the restaurant industry – writes about his formula for success, which involves providing “enlightened hospitality” to his customers.

One of his core strategies is putting employees first, a concept that can apply to just about any organization. Easy to say, harder to do. Especially in an industry like the restaurant business with all the turnover it experiences. But that’s precisely why he does it.

“There are five primary stakeholders to whom we express our most caring hospitality and in whom we take the greatest interest,” writes Danny Meyer. “Prioritizing those people in the following order is the guiding principle for practically every decision we make, and it has made the single greatest contribution to the ongoing success of our company.”

1. Our employees
2. Our guests
3. Our community
4. Our suppliers
5. Our investors

When he says “ongoing success,” what he really means is sustainable profits, which he argues is near impossible to achieve without a team of dedicated employees providing the best possible service to your customers.

If you put investors first – and let’s be clear: when he writes “investors” he’s talking primarily about delivering a return on investment for himself, his friends and family – “there will inevitably be a revolving door of staff members who, finding themselves in a business culture that does not place their own or the customers’ interests ahead of the other key stakeholders, will quickly cease to feel particularly proud, motivated or enthusiastic about coming to work,” he writes.

But what does it mean

It’s easy to get behind an idea like putting employees first. But what truly interests me is how it’s practiced in the business.

So many companies will tell you about their “values” or “mission” or “culture,” but even when management has the best of intentions, it rarely seems to be reflected in the day-to-day experience of the employee or the customer.

Here’s a few ways that Danny practices what he preaches in his restaurants:

• Staff roundtable discussions where employees provide feedback on how they feel the business is performing;
• Monthly dining voucher program through which staff can dine at the restaurant in exchange for completing a detailed questionnaire about their experience;
• Walk the Talk” survey where employees rate the company’s leadership and management.

The best dealers in the industry have found similar ways to improve and grow their business.

• Marine Industry Certified Dealerships adopt an Employee Satisfaction Process that includes conducting an annual survey, sharing the results with their team and using their insight to improve the way they do business.
• Other dealers ask employees to rate their managers as part of the company’s performance review process.
• And still others use more informal strategies, like employee suggestion boxes (They’re not just for customers!) and asking for feedback during company and one-on-one meetings.
• We want to know: Do you believe in putting employees first? Why or why not? And if so, how do you do it? Respond to this blog or email me at liz@mraa.com.

As I learn more about other industries, I’m beginning to suspect that regardless of the size or target customer of a business – or even the product, the foundation on which success is built is much the same.

As Danny writes, “You may think, as I once did, that I’m primarily in the business of serving good food. Actually, though, food is secondary to something that matters even more. In the end, what’s most meaningful is creating positive, uplifting outcomes for human experiences and human relationships. Business, like life, is all about how you make people feel. It’s that simple, and it’s that hard.”