The Leadership Edge
"The Leadership Edge" podcast, by Kevin Gaskell, offers a curated collection of interviews featuring insights from one of the industry's most transformative figures.
Designed for busy CEOs and leaders aiming to propel their companies forward, each episode packs actionable wisdom into digestible segments that fit perfectly into your morning commute, gym session, or workday background listening.
Dive into conversations that have spotlighted Kevin's celebrated leadership style, as he and other top professionals decode the strategies that build successful teams and dominate markets. Tune in to transform your leadership approach and inspire peak performance, all on your schedule.
The Leadership Edge
Transforming Failure into Success: Fairline Boats
How can daring to dream big transform a failing business into a thriving enterprise? On this episode of Leadership Edge, Kevin Gaskell, who took Fairline Boats from the abyss of bankruptcy to dazzling profitability in just 14 months. Kevin challenges the notion that growth is limited to incremental steps and shares how he inspired his team to think beyond traditional boundaries, driving a 300% growth goal. You’ll hear firsthand how Kevin’s audacious mindset and strategic ingenuity reduced spare part supply times from 12 months to just 24 hours and led to the creation of a new boat without a designated budget.
Kevin’s journey with Fairline Boats is a masterclass in visionary leadership and overcoming self-imposed limitations. He explains how focusing on the right priorities and encouraging creative problem-solving led to swift and significant improvements. His compelling anecdotes and actionable insights will leave you questioning what you believe to be impossible in your own ventures. Tune in to discover how you too can break free from conventional constraints and propel your business to extraordinary heights.
Welcome to the Leadership Edge. In today's episode, kevin Gaskell shares the thrilling journey of transforming fair line boats from near bankruptcy to profitability. I go into businesses today and I say to people where do you want to take this thing? Where are we going to go? We're going to grow at 3%. I say, great, 3%, that's the market. Let me give you a little challenge. If I asked you to grow this business at 30%, what would you do? And they go oof, let's make it easy, forget 30%. How do you grow this business at 300%? And they say it's impossible. I say no, it's not.
Speaker 1:Most limitations in this world are self-imposed. People put them on themselves. So if you're going to grow your business at 300%, how are you going to do it? I get people talking, talking, talking and we kick. You know what? If we're going to do that, we'd have to go into this market, we'd have to have this kind of product, we'd have to deliver. I say yeah, and let's write it down. And we start laughing. Come up with crazy ideas when we look at them and I say which of these ideas are not in your control? Usually it's very, very few. We went through it for two days and at the end we came up with a plan. They wrote to me a short while ago and said Kev, you don't believe it. Our sales have just kicked up like this. All they did was recognize that their limitations were self-imposed. They're putting them on themselves, blaming everything else. Deal with the right priorities.
Speaker 1:About four years ago I was asked to run this business. Fairline Boats had made a loss for 10 years. It was just about to slip under the waves forever and it was owned by the banks. And I happened to know one of the directors of the bank big bank and he called me and he said we've got this business called Fairline Boats. It's just about to fail. We own it. We're a bank. We're not good at running companies. We think the brand has got huge brand capital. We think it could be turned around. Would you do it for us? So I went to have a look at this business Fantastic brand. I thought, wow, I can see the potential. But where'd you start? The people who are building these boats they just wanted to be successful again. And when I said to them, what does success look like? They said we build the best motor yachts in the world. That's success. When I took the job on my desk it was a pile of paper like this.
Speaker 1:The biggest complaint was about parts supply, spare parts. Now, these boats, that's about $6 million worth. If a part broke and you needed a spare part, what do you think was the average time it would take us to supply you with a spare part? 12 months was the average time it would take us to supply you with a spare part. 12 months was the average 12 months. And I said guys, you're crazy. And they said I don't understand. It's the marine industry. I said no, you don't understand who your competitors are. Your competitors are not necessarily other boats.
Speaker 1:Somebody who's spending $5 million, $6 million on this could be buying a house in Barbados. And they said what do you expect? Million on this could be buying a house in Barbados. And they said what do you expect? I said 24 hours. I said you're crazy. I said no, dare to dream. How could we do it in 24 hours? They said it's impossible. I said right, let's have that conversation again. How can we do in 24 hours? Six months later, we were doing 80% of it in 24 hours. It was just about daring to dream. It's just about saying we could do this stuff In 14 months. We got this business back in profit. 10 years of loss.
Speaker 1:This is the Fairline team. We had no money to build a new boat for the boat show because we had no money. I said to them design me a new boat. And they said what's the budget? I said budget's nothing. Design engineer said what's the brief? I said oh, andy, the brief's ever so simple whiteboard. I wrote on it S-E-X. I said that's the brief. Give me some sex, give me something that the press say wow, wow, that's exciting. One guy said I know how we can do that. I said go on, tom, how do we do it? He said we do it in CGI. What's CGI? Computer graphics, idiot. I said sorry. He said it is computer-generated imagery.
Speaker 1:We created this dream of a boat that we were never going to build. But because we were never going to build it, we could dream. We had people queued up around National Boat Show to come and see the future of Fairline. We outsold our competitors two to one with old boats. This was the team that changed the customer experience. We made it world-class. We made the experience world-class. At the end of the show, my biggest competitor, princess Boats, came and tried to recruit my whole team. How cheeky is that? It is about daring to dream. It's about creating leaders at every level in the organization.