Business View Magazine
7
When the economy tanked, and the next year we sold
12 boats, we had to look at what we were going to do
to stay in business. The first thing we did was we closed
the younger location which had been there about ten
years and retracted back to home base.”
When times are tough, the business that is wise
enough and/or lucky enough to adapt is the one that
is going to survive - and maybe even come out stronger
than before. White Lake Marine is one business that
figured out how to adapt. deAndrade explains: “What
was our core competency? Nautiques – we’ve done
them forever. So we took that and said, ‘What can we
do?’ We had been dabbling, using our expertise and
our history to sell retail customers, and even some
dealers, parts for their Nautiques. We had a small web
store and we sold a few orders a day and had a couple
of people internationally who had found us, and we
said, ‘Okay. Boats sales – our hands are tied, the econ-
omy’s not that great, right now, we can’t do anything
there, but maybe we can expand the website.’ So, we
did. And we have gone from keeping maybe 20 or 30
thousand dollars worth of parts in inventory to having
approximately 300 to 350 thousand dollars in inven-
tory; selling close to two million dollars a year in parts;
having customers on almost every continent, except
Antarctica; and almost half of our staff is devoted to
keeping that side of the business going. We get tens of
thousands of orders a year, now.”
As the company began to focus more on its web busi-
ness, it began to realize that, for older boats espe-
cially, replacement parts were getting harder to come
by. “Factories don’t keep parts forever,” deAndrade
