Business View Magazine - March 2016

82 Business View Magazine - April 2016 Business View Magazine - April 2016 83 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