Power of Cooperation

It’s time for our annual Buyer’s Guide issue, which can help you all year-round find the companies and services you need to help your marina or boatyard business. You can search 846 companies in 63 different categories.

We’ve just passed our deadline for this year’s annual Marina of the Year award. Thank you to everyone that applied. We’re always overwhelmed by the response and care and thought that goes into developing the applications.

Because it’s so hard to choose every year, and so many great marinas go unrecognized, we’re trying to expand our awards this year. In addition to honoring our annual small and large Marina of the Year winners, we’ll give other annual awards, recognizing facilities that have excelled in the different categories of the application–environmental responsibility, renovations, industry involvement, marketing and more. Facilities will be eligible to win these category awards year after year, and former Marina of the Year winners can win more too.

We’ll be honoring all these marinas at The Docks Expo in Nashville on December 5. Joining our Marina of the Year winners will be our Young Leader award winners, a new award to honor industry leaders under 40. Part awards ceremony and part education session, we have the best-of-the-best and our future leaders together to celebrate their accomplishments and learn from one another. Don’t miss it!

In this issue we also have our first product survey on power pedestals. Thank you to the manufacturers who helped us develop the questions, and thank you to all the facilities that answered the survey. We’re working hard to boost our survey response numbers. If you’re not answering the surveys, please do. If you are answering the surveys, please encourage your colleagues and neighboring marinas to do the same. We all benefit from more diverse responses. We’ve grown this survey a lot in 10 years, but we’d like to keep it growing. We need your help to do that! Our surveys are conducted online and promoted via email. Visit our website to sign up for our emails, if you’re not receiving them already.

Hopefully, you read this magazine to stay in touch with the industry and what’s going on outside your facility – to learn, to grow or to teach others. There is power in cooperation, even perhaps with your competitors. Likewise, the more we grow the survey for the industry together, the more those numbers can go to work for us.