‘It’s just boats or guitars’: Rock ‘n’ roll lessons for yacht recruitment
Simon Foulkes is head of yachting at Shoreside Maritime Recruitment.
The German police patrol lined up the band’s crew outside the tour bus and began searching with sniffer dogs. Sensing there could be a problem, tour manager Simon Foulkes stepped out for a private word with the chief.
The world-famous rock band were playing in Munich that night but the sold-out gig was now in jeopardy. Foulkes wondered whether the officers might like some tickets in exchange for calling off the search and letting the crew get on their way. It worked and the show went ahead with some new fans.
“There was a moment when that could have really blown up,” Foulkes tells us. “The lesson was being ahead of the problem. And that is true in yachting. You’ve got to tackle problems in our industry head-on. Clients of mine don’t particularly enjoy bad news, but they would rather hear it than radio silence.”
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Foulkes is now head of yachting at Shoreside Maritime Recruitment, the specialist firm set up by CEO Ed Ewer in 2021.
His switch, sparked by days on the road “starting to hurt”, proves that to work in yachting you don’t have to have worked in yachting. There might be some harumphing from traditional quarters but Foulkes reckons his background in the music industry as a tour manager for some “really huge names” qualifies him perfectly, even if he hasn’t spent years as yacht crew.
“I’ve spent three months living in a tour bus eating Pot Noodles,” he says. “Trying to keep the show on the road, living and working with the same people in very confined spaces, in stressful, pressurised environments.
“How it really helped me was understanding the importance of relationships, and how to maintain them. It taught me how to deal with complicated people. And how to function in organised chaos.”
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Foulkes, Ewer and the lean team at SYR focus on senior-level roles ashore, originally in yachting but also now in commercial shipping, technical and defence.
His role is about constantly meeting new people and then evaluating whether their CVs stand up to scrutiny. Then he can work out what their value is, both in terms of skills and experience, but also relationships and networks.
“We’ve been behind the appointments of some fairly senior people,” says Foulkes. “We’ve carved out a reputation that’s been hard won. You’ve got to go out and earn it.”
They have recently appointed Paul Cook, former chief operations officer at Hill Robinson, as an ambassador, providing insight and advocacy.
“Our value is that we have a very mature network of passive candidates,” says Foulkes. “We’re accessing the bit of the iceberg that’s below the waterline, that you can’t see.”
‘How you can win’
For companies looking to recruit, Foulkes says his “broad finger on the pulse” of the industry gives him extensive insight – much of it confidential – into a range of businesses, from design and technology to shipyards, management, brokerage, commercial and operations.
“I spend all my time having conversations with heads of departments or senior execs around the industry, understanding where the pain is, what the plans are, where the skills gaps are,” he says. “That is often completely overlooked. When you say recruitment, people think you’re just sending CVs.
“So a conversation with me is not really a conversation about recruitment. It’s about how you can win, how I think you can do better, who I know might be available to help you achieve those goals or solve a problem.”
Foulkes’ impression of the recruitment landscape in yachting is that the “herd is thinning” in terms of suitable candidates for senior positions.
“It’s getting harder and harder to find people who are hireable,” he says.
‘Bright lights of Instagram’
The south of France and Monaco in particular “exists in its own vacuum”, he says. There is a “merry-go-round” of candidates moving around the big companies, but Foulkes sees that as “challenged” at the moment.
“It used to be backfilled by crew coming ashore,” he says. “I’m seeing a decline in that, statistically. I think people are staying on board slightly longer for cost-of-living reasons.”
He also cites the affordability of living in and around Monaco, “middling” salaries for shore roles and the sense that “anecdotally”, the major management-brokerage houses are “starting to lose their appeal” as potential employers, perhaps because of recent acquisitions creating a feeling of instability.
“All of those things are just making people think about the decision to come ashore,” he says. “This year, I’ve done more hiring in the boutique space than I’ve done in the established top 10.”
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Unsurprisingly, certain roles remain in demand. “I’m inundated with people telling me they’re brokers or want to be a broker,” Foulkes adds. “Often what they’re seeing is the bright lights of Instagram and the champagne lifestyle.
“But if you talk to any of the heads of charter around the Med, they’ll all tell you the same thing: there is a noticeable lack of business development. We’ve ended up in a space now where charter broking has become largely reliant on inbound leads and its marketing efforts.”
‘Rests on its laurels’
Outside the Monaco bubble, Foulkes says recruiting is a “completely different story”. In 2025, his biggest territory was the US, closely followed by the UK. Europe lagged “quite a long way behind”.
“The US culture is geared up towards networking,” says Foulkes. “I find it much easier to get a conversation going with somebody I don’t know in the US versus somebody I don’t know in Europe. They’re much more responsive and engaged.
“If I’ve researched that someone is, say, a New York Giants fan, we can have five minutes chatting about the NFL or fishing or whatever before we even get to yachting, by which time we’re buddies. Most of the time.”
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To dig deeper into industry practices, Foulkes recently audited the top 10 luxury car makers.
Of those, seven talked openly about their culture on their website careers page, he says. They described their mission and set out their values. They had videos of employees talking about the culture. By comparison, he says, only two of the top 10 yachting companies talked about their culture on their careers page.
“We don’t help ourselves,” he says. “The industry rests on its laurels quite a bit in terms of candidate attraction.”
‘Boats or guitars’
The mechanics of recruitment also need to be improved, he suggests. Companies often string out the interview process over several months which leads to good candidates losing enthusiasm or getting snapped up by a rival business moving more quickly. It can also deter talented candidates from outside the industry, he adds.
“Most clients view recruitment as a chore,” he says. “It’s an admin overhead. It’s time consuming. And at the end of it, the outcome is unknown. So recruitment gets picked up and put down. It doesn’t make for a smooth process and it doesn’t make for a good candidate experience.
“I spend far too much of my time fielding calls from candidates saying, ‘What the hell is going on? The company said they were going to call me last week. They haven’t.’”
Although he grew up messing around in boats, this is where not being steeped in the yacht industry is a distinct advantage, Foulkes suggests.
“I enjoy yachting but I’m not drinking the Kool-Aid,” he says. “I find that gap very useful because that allows me to be firm when I need to be firm. I’m not starry-eyed about yachting, which makes it easier to be objective.”
Foulkes knew his time on the road with bands was coming to an end when the “days were feeling longer” and “everything was louder”. Marriage and the shutdowns of Covid gave him the final nudge. But ultimately, he says, the two industries are “two sides of the same coin”.
“There are so many parallels with yachting: the glitz, the rock stars, the champagne, the parties. It’s all the same thing, it’s just boats or guitars,” he adds.
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