Fraser’s Busacca on leadership, trends & insight from 40 years
Mike Busacca is CCO and COO of Fraser Yachts.
Football fandom experts are keen to point out that star players these days are often more treasured than their particular clubs.
Think devoted Lionel Messi fans rather than big supporters of Inter Miami; or Cristiano Ronaldo lovers rather than Al-Nassr ultras.
The same could be said in yacht broking where clients often turn to their trusted guy or girl first rather than their brokerage house.
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That’s one of the conundrums facing Mike Busacca, executive vice president, chief operating officer and chief commercial officer of Fraser Yachts.
With 21 offices worldwide and a host of cosmopolitan, independent brokers, Busacca has to balance the pulling power of his people with a drive for the greater good of Fraser.
“Everybody here is experienced. Everybody here has been here a long time. Obviously, we have a lot of different personalities, but they have to understand, even though they’re independent, they are working for Fraser and Fraser’s name is what matters,” he tells us.
“I need to keep everybody working together as a team and a family, basically, to make a successful company.”
On the other side of the deck, however, Busacca has to fight hard to preserve the company’s individuality in the face of creeping corporatisation.
“I’m not a drill sergeant. I don’t micromanage,” he says. “Everybody knows what they need to do. They’re on their own, but when it comes to getting ready to close the deal, it’s full on, all of us.”
Occasionally, the individuality and the whole come into conflict. Busacca says there are times when a client might call a broker with a listing in Fort Lauderdale and another broker with a listing in Monaco. The two brokers are now claiming the same client as their own. Or an established client of a particular broker contacts another Fraser representative about a boat. The client is unaware that there could be internal politics at play.
“I’m the referee,” he says. “I come in and make an executive decision on how it needs to be handled. The client knows nothing behind the scenes, nor does he need to know that. At the end of the day, that’s an internal problem.”
The 82m Oceanco Alfa Nero is asking €88.5m with Fraser.
When Fraser’s now parent company MarineMax came calling, Busacca offered his advice.
“I’ve been through many acquisitions, and I told them the only thing I ask is that you don’t integrate 100% corporate into our business, because we’re a specific niche for the ultra-wealthy,” he says.
“Basically, what I said is, ‘Leave us, let me run the business the way we need to run it. You’ll make your money no matter what.’ And it’s been like that ever since. They’ve been very trusting for the most part.”
With private equity circling around yachting, and MarineMax itself the subject of takeover speculation, Busacca insists investors are “great, as long as they understand the superyacht business”.
“It’s not a dealer business, it’s not an inventory business. It’s completely a different model,” he says.
“My main focus in this company is to make sure everybody understands that the clients, the relationships are everything. We have one client which has bought and sold 10 boats with us. There are some clients I’ve known very well for many years. And some people aren’t even clients of ours, but they call me to get my advice.”
Busacca works very closely with CEO Anders Kurtén across Fraser’s six pillars of charter, sales and purchase, new builds, management and crew.
And while brokerages with varying business models might have their own perspective, Busacca’s view is that Fraser’s all-service offering is the way to long-term success.
He offers an example from his time at Allied Marine, selling Benetti Classics and other boats up to about 40m.
“All we did was sell boats. We had no other services,” he says. “Every one of those clients who wanted to go to a bigger boat or wanted management or to charter, we lost to big brokerage houses with services.
“Companies that are going to survive the big yacht sector are companies like us that have that history, reputation and experience. And combining a lot of services is key to the superyacht business.”
Fraser is selling the 72m Dunya Yachts Axioma with an asking price of €55m.
Busacca entered the yachting industry more than 40 years ago, starting as a tradesman building yacht interiors at Broward Marine. He rose through the management ranks and joined Fraser in 2011 as US commercial director, quickly upgrading to chief operating officer in the US. Earlier this year he was promoted to his current role.
“I’ve seen the industry grow, slow down, crash, come up. In many different ways,” says Busacca, who co-chairs the Boys & Girls Clubs Yacht Rendezvous charity event, which has raised more than $30m for at-risk youth across Broward County, Florida.
On the current market, he says Fraser’s sales are up 40% on last year with the US dominant and Europe “very, very strong” over the last three months, particularly in the 24-70m range.
He acknowledges charter was slow to ignite because of “hesitancy” over global goings-on. However, he says charters are now “back strong” with a notable trend for longer time frames.
“Usually, it’s one or two weeks. Now we’re seeing one-month, two-month charters on big yachts. That’s big numbers,” he says.
READ: ‘Experience is a trap’ – Fraser’s Minnema on 25 years as a yacht broker
Fraser’s new-build sales are also up by nearly 40%, with the size of yachts being built trending up, according to Busacca.
Much of the buoyancy stems from the increasing wealth of the younger generation, particularly in the US, Busacca explains. He has also seen a host of clients who have gone from millionaires in the 1980s to multibillionaires.
But despite the rising costs and lengthy build times, the psychological tug of building your own yacht is stronger than ever, he reckons.
“When you have a 50m and you’re in Europe anchored next to a 60-70m, all of a sudden, your 50m doesn’t look big anymore. So there’s a little bit of ego involved,” he says.
“Some have a bigger family and want to be more comfortable, and some want a more long-range vessel that can go much further in comfort. After what we went through in Covid, you can have all the money in the world, but if you can’t use, it means nothing.”
‘He doesn’t realise how wealthy he is’
It’s a far cry from the first significant deal Busacca oversaw at Allied Marine. It was for a 115ft Benetti Classic which he had helped spec out with the shipyard in Italy.
“It was for about $10m and we signed there and then at the boat show,” he says. “I was nervous because it was my first deal. I was in my late 20s and I had never seen that many zeros on a cheque. I can’t lie, I was wondering whether I had just signed away my career blessing this deal.”
Since those formative days, Busacca is involved with every deal, negotiation, or new-build signing.
He has seen the industry change significantly. One aspect he couldn’t have envisioned was the increasing size of yachts. “In the 1980s, 100ft was huge,” he says. “Now people own 100m yachts and they’re building ones 130m. It is incredible. I never thought I’d see that much wealth in such high quantity.”
With that growth comes pressure on berths, he notes. “Something I never thought would happen is more yachts than marina space,” he says. He also suggests the number of sales brokers in the world has “quadrupled”. And he admits he never thought the charter retail business would be so big.
“These states like Oklahoma and Texas, we never realised there was so much wealth out there,” he says. “And in the past 10-15 years they found out about this so-called ‘chartering yachts’, which many knew nothing about. We’re seeing a lot of these multimillionaire oil field clients chartering big mega-yachts and buying yachts. So that’s been a big revolving door.”
What hasn’t changed is the importance of relationships. Busacca illustrates this with a story about a “long-term, old-school client” who “doesn’t realise how wealthy he is”.
The client had owned a 45m in the past and had an “itch” to get back into boating. He was adamant he wanted something around the 30m mark.
“We looked at 13 yachts together and I got him on a 60m-plus that was practically new,” he says. “It was beyond his stated price range and yacht size but he’s got a big family and I convinced him to buy it. And he’s been cruising in the Med for the past six months. He trusted me, ran with it and signed for it. He’s never been happier.”
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