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Business View Magazine
erships are not going to invest themselves so deeply
in one niche. If you want a pontoon or a runabout or
a fishing boat or a ski boat –they’re not going to spe-
cialize in one area. We wholeheartedly only support
the inboard, ski boat and wakeboard market. We don’t
work on outboards, we don’t sell outboards,” he adds
adamantly.
Outside of doing boat shows to gather leads and pros-
pects, deAndrade reveals that the company does ab-
solutely no radio, TV, or print advertising, whatsoever,
because, as he explains, with such a limited number
of potential buyers out there, “we don’t think we’d get
our dollars’ worth. How many inboard ski and wake-
board boats are sold in the entire world? That number
is probably less than 15,000 units; where the IO (In-
board/Outboard) market is a quarter million; pontoon:
the same or more. So, we’ve always seen traditional
advertising as risky. Where’s the payoff?”
Luckily, White Lake Marine is a business that has al-
ways thrived on word-of-mouth. “My parents and I
have always tried to view our customers as long-term
investments and relationships,” deAndrade says. “So
we have customers that come in – new customers -
that we’ve never seen before, and normally the conver-
sation starts out with: ‘My friend bought a boat from
you,’ or ‘my parent bought a boat years ago.’ Some-
body they know referred them. After 60 years, we’ve
been very blessed to have built up a name and a brand
recognition in our area.”
Even so, the Great Recession took a huge bite out of
White Lake’s business. “Before 2008, when we had
that economic downturn, we had two full-blown dealer-
ships,” deAndrade recounts, “one here at White Lake
and one just west of Raleigh, in a town called Graham.
And we were selling one brand of boat, just the Nau-
tiques, and we were pushing about 60 units a year.
