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34 | Boating Industry | May 2014 [ Time to grow? ] www.BoatingIndustry.com www.BoatingIndustry.com how do I get out of it?" With 25 years of ad- vising clients in the farm, marine, RV, powersports and construction indus- tries, Spader has been a part of many strategy sessions helping business owners decide why, when and how to take that next step. He's also been called in to play the role of the ambulance pick- ing up the pieces after a misguided addition. He recommends owners answer a fundamen- tal question about their desire before moving for- ward: "Do you want stability or growth?" Kevin Code, CEO of The Boat House, has locations in Wisconsin and Florida and just opened his sixth store in Naples, Fla. After a long career in manufacturing, he purchased his first marine dealership in Cape Coral, Fla., in 2009 as the world economy approached its nadir. While growing his group, he has employed a strategy of establishing store clusters at opposite ends of the country — north and south — while adhering to the idea that dealerships should only grow for a good reason. In his case, that means betting on historically stable boat brands and building or buying stores in locations he deeply understood to minimize risk. "If you're doing it to grow, to me that's prob- ably not the right idea," Code said. "If there's syn- ergy and strategic reasons for doing it, then by all means move forward. When you add a second store you have two sets of costs, you have two sets of management tasks, you have two infra- structures and two cultures, so it isn't as easy as adding $5 million and $5 million together … and [thinking] it's just going to be easy." Honing your processes Beyond desire, Strong's Marine President Jeff Strong urges dealers that are sizing up to focus strongly on evaluating their people and pro- cesses. The goal isn't just to succeed in adding a location, but to also ensure that it's "done in an enjoyable, profitable way." After his most recent acquisition last spring, the pros and cons of growing are fresh on his mind. Strong has steadily expanded his family business from one location up to a four-store group with more than 50 full-time employees. Creating process maps for all key positions, completed as part of achieving Marine Five Star Dealer Certification, has been a big step toward refining Strong Marine's best practices, as well as creating job templates that could be transferred to new locations. Rather than creating cookie-cutter locations that all look and feel the same, Strong said the payoff of building finely tuned process maps is ensuring a consistent employee and client expe- rience at all of his family's stores. "If we have good processes in place, the likeli- hood is that the client experience is going to be consistent," he said. "More likely than not, when we fall short and have an upset employee or cli- ent, it's because either our process wasn't clear or it wasn't trained well." Spader says the diversity of changes that ac- company growth can surprise employees and owners alike, and can occasionally bring un- wanted changes in day-to-day duties. "The bigger you get, the tighter your pro- cesses will need to get and the more narrow the job functions, so the more important it is to get the right person in the right now," he said. He added that there's often a big shift in daily operations that happens as organizations add their third or fourth store. This shift means that, instead of handling a few duties with aplomb, all employees need to become more specialized and narrow their daily duties to match the in- creased volume. "You've hit a point where you've got to sig- nificantly change the way that everything gets managed and done, from the president or gen- eral manager … all the way to the front-line people," he said. "You hit a critical mass where there's just a whole other way you've got to start doing things or it becomes chaos." Culture without borders While being a newcomer in a mature industry isn't easy, Code says his most critical challenge has been establishing a uniform corporate culture "If we have good processes in place, the likelihood is that the client experience is going to be consistent." – Jeff Strong, President, Strong Marine Ryan, Re, Jay and Jeff Strong at the company's original location at Mattituck Bay, N.Y. The family has expanded the business from one location to four with 50 full-time employees. JOHN SPADER P32x36-BI14MAY-TimetoGrow.indd 34 4/17/14 10:47 AM