Entrepreneurs to watch: Going Long

May 14, 2009

Bob Long, the chief executive officer of Marine Concepts in Cape Coral, built his business on the marine industry. But diversification in recent years has paid off.

Bob Long has had a storied career in the boating industry on the Gulf Coast. His Cape Coral-based company, Marine Concepts, has a hand in the designs of dozens of boats, but diversification that was started three years ago is paying off today.

Take a peek behind a massive plastic curtain inside a cavernous warehouse in Cape Coral and you’ll get a glimpse of the future of Marine Concepts.

And the future doesn’t float. It flies.

The fiberglass molds Marine Concepts used to make for boats are now being created for military fighter-jet and helicopter simulators. The heavy plastic, opaque curtain hides the work from spying eyes.

Military simulators are just a part of Bob Long’s efforts to diversify Marine Concepts’ revenues beyond boats. It started three years ago when Long, the company’s owner and chief executive officer, hired Matt Chambers as the company’s president.
Chambers’ marching orders were to find other industries that might need precision-made molds for fiberglass and plastic products.

Since then, the company has designed molds used to make products such as amusement park water slides and giant protective covers for wind-powered turbines. Initially, Long was concerned that diversification might cause his boat-manufacturing customers to worry he was losing focus on them. At the time, the boating industry made up 85% of Marine Concepts’ revenues.

But diversification turned out to be a good thing, because the economic downturn has crushed the boat-building industry. Boat-related business is down 70% this year and now accounts for half of Marine Concepts’ business. “It’s never been this severe,”
Long says. “Here, we’re having trouble seeing the end.”

Boat manufacturers aren’t so concerned about Long’s diversification efforts now. “They want to see us surviving as well so we’re here when they come back,” he says.

Long, 69, knows the crests and troughs of the boating industry as well as anyone. He rose to be president of Sarasota-based Wellcraft Marine for 18 years, growing that company to $350 million in annual revenues and 2,000 employees before leaving in 1993.

In 1994, Long bought Marine Concepts, then a tiny company best known for making the iconic Twistee Treat ice-cream-cone-shaped buildings. It was rough going at first and the company barely made payroll the first month under Long’s leadership. But the company grew as the industry recovered following the repeal of the disastrous luxury tax on boats.

As customers demanded larger boats in recent years, Marine Concepts invested in equipment that could cut wooden frames to make boat molds more quickly, accurately and efficiently than by hand. But Long knew that depending on a deeply cyclical industry such as boat manufacturing was risky. “We thought it was smart not to have all our eggs in one basket,” he says.

Of course, not every effort at diversification turned out to be golden. “We targeted RVs and that took us in the same direction as boats,” Long chuckles. The recreational vehicle industry has also been hit hard by the recession.

And Long won’t work directly with the military because the rules and regulations are so burdensome and complex. “You have a whole bureaucracy to deal with there,” he says. Instead, he performs work for companies that contract with the U.S. Department of Defense.

But Marine Concepts executives have found opportunities in water parks and the burgeoning wind-energy industry. The company makes molds used to make fiberglass water slides for the largest manufacturer of its kind, Canada-based ProSlide Technology Inc.

For the wind-energy industry, Marine Concepts makes molds used to create fiberglass covers for large turbines that convert wind energy from giant windmills into electricity. They found this business by asking themselves: “Who makes fiberglass parts?”

To get these new customers, Chambers and other Marine Concepts executives hit the road and attended trade shows. The alternative-energy trade show, for example, gave executives the contacts they needed to land new business. The company’s non-marine business is up 300% so far this year.

It helps that the company has invested thousands of dollars in new technology to digitize most of its molds. It can also use this technology to develop other products. For example, it can digitize the bottom of a boat so you can build a trailer specific to those dimensions.

But Long is quick to point out that the people running the equipment are his biggest asset. “I’ve been a big believer is hiring the best people, giving them objectives and let ’em go,” he says. “There’s a temptation to second-guess, but that doesn’t work.”