‘Mediator, translator, educator’ – the value-add of owners’ reps
Richie Blake of Dohle Yachts makes his point at Superyacht Investor London.
It’s far easier to move a line on paper than it is to move a bulkhead in steel. It sounds obvious on a computer screen, but it encapsulates one of the key battlegrounds of owners’ reps in the new-build process.
The role is both the figurehead of the owner’s build team and the interface with the shipyard, conveying checks, wishes and possibilities in both directions.
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Another way of putting it is the owner’s rep is a saver of time and money and the conduit to a happy client.
“I’ve always taken it that an owner’s rep is someone that knows the owner’s wishes and can represent them to the rest of the team,” said Richie Blake, MD, Dohle Yachts on a panel at Superyacht Investor London.
WATCH: ‘Standing up for owners’ reps’
According to Blake, though, ‘owner’s rep’ is a “strange term”.
“The team you put together to build a 110m, one-off, bespoke piece of kit is very different to the team you would assemble to put together a 30m, 15th in the series boat,” he said.
“It’s also not to be confused with the project manager, although one person could fill both roles on a small build.”
For panel moderator Donna Green, head of new builds for Y.CO, it is a role that calls for aspects of “mediator, translator, educator” to name a few. “We wear many hats,” she said.
‘Finessing specifications’
The key, said Blake, is understanding how the client will use the yacht. “Every owner has a different motivation,” he noted.
“Some people want to go heli-skiing, some people are taking granny with them. Others want to go along the south coast of France on a wedding cake and let everyone see them coming in and out of Monaco. You need to assemble the right team for the right boat for the right owner.”
Derek Munro, director of Divergent Yachting said he is a “big believer” in being involved very early in a project to work with the client and shipyard to nip problems in the bud. Despite pressure from brokers keen to sign the contract, he suggested it can be worth passing over the first available slot in the shipyard to ensure more time to fine-tune the design.
“The time you’ve spent with the shipyard finessing the specification … and removing as many little hurdles as possible, in the end, will save you time and save the client money,” he said.
From a shipyard’s perspective, a good owner’s rep who understands the owner and can progress difficult conversations more quickly can be “invaluable”, according to Tim Kershaw, sales and marketing director for Turkey’s Dunya Yachts.
“We love that we have good owners’ reps making those decisions early, putting that advice in front of the owner because it benefits us as well in the long run as a shipyard,” he said.
The panel debate the topic ‘Standing up for owners’ reps’ at Superyacht Investor London.
A recent phenomenon which has been taxing owners’ reps is the rise of renowned commercial designers coming into yachting, possibly because they’ve worked on other projects with the clients, added Munro.
He explained how on one 100m-plus project it took him four months to convince the designer that his layout would not work operationally because the distance from the galley on the lower deck to the dining area he was planning on the top deck meant coffee or food would be cold by the time it arrived. “He just couldn’t get his head around it,” said Munro.
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Julian Smith, principal surveyor for the Cayman Islands Shipping Registry said owners’ reps can add huge value in convincing owners to go beyond the minimum required of regulations.
“It’s not just about compliance with a minimum safe manning document, which is all that is required to drive the thing and tie it up,” he said.
“It is also about the ability to comply with hours of work and rest. If we don’t get that sufficient amount of real estate handed over for crew accommodation right from the very outset, as pretty as the thing looks on paper, it’s going to cause a problem once the vessel goes into service, because that service level will have to give at some point or another.”
Munro added: “It’s about educating the client and saying that this little bit of space seems like a lot to you now, but it will save you a great deal of money later on when you’re not changing crew every two months because they’re really upset with the space they’ve got, they’re not mentally in the right place and they want to go home.”
Living the dream…or not
Smith highlighted another trending feature in yacht arrangements which has proved problematic.
“We have these huge shell doors in the sides of yachts nowadays, very close to the waterline and when the whole thing is opened up and it’s sat there on a mill pond it looks absolutely fabulous,” he said.
“You’re living the dream. You’ve got a G&T and everything is wonderful until the little local tender comes past and all of a sudden everything around you is floating. So you get this immediate sense of disappointment in terms of what exactly is it that I have bought here?”
Munro added: “Class gives you the minimum requirements for safety, Flag will give you the minimum requirements for running the boat. So it is about how you as an experienced owner’s rep or an operator can explain to the client, well that is the minimum, but if we raise that by 500 millimetres and we move that bit over there, then you’ll be able to use it in 90% of sea states instead of in 40%.”
Blake told the story, when he was a surveyor for the Cayman Islands Shipping Registry, of an American client whose captain asked for a pause in his trip for the crew to have a day off to recuperate because of the demands being put on them. The owner, “a lovely chap”, agreed and spent a night ashore. At the end of the trip, the owner asked the captain to look into additional crew accommodation to avoid having to stop again in the future.
“For whatever reason the owner’s representative on that project hadn’t discussed in detail with the owner how they wanted to operate the boat, and they came across this exact problem − there weren’t enough people on board to fulfil all of the family’s desires,” said Blake.
“It was lovely that he had the foresight to say he needed more people if they were going to run the boat like they wanted to, having spent that amount of money.”
Mr. Shouty
While owners’ reps are working for the owner − “the clue’s in the title”, said Blake − there are occasions when an owner is “not being well served” by that individual. The panel admitted they knew of people not welcomed in some yards.
“What you had was perhaps Mr. Shouty in there, who liked to swear and not be reasonable and not listen and not do his own work. And then the yard gets fed up with that, because they’re producing dozens and dozens of variations of contracts and losing money and taking engineering hours dealing with this,” he said.
“It comes back to time spent pre-contract, time spent with the specification, time spent with the construction agreement, proper legal representation to make sure things make sense and are understood by all parties and everyone reads a sentence and understands the same thing from it, the pre-engineering work − that’s what pays dividends.”
Blake summed it up: “If the buyer comes out of the build process super excited and super happy, they’re going to tell their friends, and it comes back around.”
And those steel bulkheads can remain exactly where they were drawn.
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