Harold and Tom each had young sons at the time, and 19-year-old Tom Johnson and 18-year-old Keith Shallcross were promptly put to work hauling boats, performing routine maintenance and learning the new family business. Both boys would eventually inherit their fathers’ ownership stakes, have families of their own and spend their entire professional lives operating Reed’s Marine on the shores of Delavan Lake.
“My advice to dealers is that they plan to get in, plan to stay and plan to enjoy every single minute in the boat business — but to also realize there will come a day when they will want to get out,” Tom said. “I feel lucky because it’s very difficult to get out of the boat business. It’s certainly easy to get in, but it’s tough to get out.”
“I remember asking how many boat dealers have seen a dealer get out at the time they wanted to and in anywhere close to the way they wanted to,” he said. “We came up with very few examples of that happening.”
That’s when planning became serious — and when Tom and Jason began exploring the succession process tools available through the Marine Industry Certified Dealership Program. All dealerships enrolled in the MICD Program are strongly urged to sketch a succession plan as part of their Certification journey, and Tom stressed the considerable efforts he, Keith and Jason invested in transitional planning were well worth the time.
Nuts & Bolts of Succession
“The succession planning process at Reed’s Marine was one of the most enjoyable I’ve ever been a part of — it was a pleasure to watch Jason and Tom work together and arrive at a juncture they can both feel comfortable with,” Lead MICD Consultant Bob McCann said. “Some elements of the Certification process, succession planning in particular, can be challenging and at times uncomfortable to successfully navigate. That’s why planning and communication are so vital.”
“(Certification) forces you to do uncomfortable things, but it’s only to make you better as a person, as a dealership, as a GM or any position you can name throughout the dealership,” Jason said. “For me, it helped at least get closer to what Tom has attained through the many years he’s led this dealership.”
“When you sit down and go through the Certification process and fill in those procedures and steps there is much more appreciation for what each operation has to go through,” Jason said. “You gain an appreciation for what the employees are doing and how difficult their job can be. “
Ask Jason and Tom how they architect the dealership’s CSI, and both will tell you that it’s all about the cookies at Reed’s Marine.
Calling customers also plays an important role in the way Reed’s Marine gathers customer satisfaction feedback, and the dealership periodically outsources a call campaign to cast a wide survey of past customers.
The cookies, feedback cards, personal phone calls and third-party surveying are of course in addition to the more informal customer feedback gathered by the team from foot traffic, emails and conversations in the frozen food aisle of the local grocery store.
“I was at the first meeting, and we were one of the first five dealers to sign up for the program way back at the beginning — I think we were third,” Tom said. “We saw the potential benefits right away and felt it was a great idea.”
“We saw benefits right away, certainly with our interaction with other dealers, but primarily by having the outside training and program brought to us,” he said.
Letter of Recommendation
“I think not only do the initial benefits of doing it and subscribing to all the processes and maps you go through help your dealership, but here we are talking about it and I just realized it’s helped me see aspects of what Tom does that I maybe never would have seen,” Jason said. “It does branch off into many different areas that you never would have guessed and makes you sit back and say, ‘oh yeah, it’s helped me through that and I never would have guessed it would have.’”
“What Certification does is force ownership to look at the overall job they’re doing, the job everyone else is doing, and realize that you as the owner don’t always know the best way or most profitable way to operate,” Tom said. “Yet because you’re under this constant pressure to be profitable it can be tough to say what should change — it can be tough to ask ‘where am I lacking?’ and ‘where could we be doing better?’ Certification forces you to look at your dealership overall instead of just putting out the fires of today.”