This business wasn’t planned — it just “grew and grew”
Issue 45 : Nov/Dec 2005
Contrary to what the MBAs will tell you, it is possible to start a business without a business plan. Ask Gordon Torresen. When he started his marine business 40 years ago, it was based solely on relationships between Gordon and other sailors, primarily friends, who needed to have work done on their boats. These days, Torresen Marine still does business the old-fashioned way. Gordon is passionate about sailboats and offers services that help people. The number of relationships, however, has grown significantly.
Torresen Marine, which has grown to cover a large part of the Muskegon, Michigan, waterfront, started in Gordon’s garage as a part-time business in 1965. Now the company occupies 15 acres and four buildings. It provides winter storage services for approximately 600 boats each year, has about 30 employees on the payroll, and has annual revenues in the $5 million range. What was once Gordon’s little boat shop has become a real presence on the east side of Lake Michigan.
One thing more: these days Torresen Marine has a huge Internet presence, an accomplishment that is probably priceless. In 1965, Gordon could not have planned any of this and put it in a business plan. But sailing and boats were in his blood, and one thing led to another. “There are six generations of seafaring people on my father’s side,” Gordon says, something that clearly makes him a son of a son of a son of a sailor.
Gordon built his first boat as a young man of 23 in 1954 with his brother, John. It was the first fiberglass Comet. The brothers grew up in New York, and Gordon says he pretty much assumed that New York City was the center of the universe. He spent three years in the maritime services, but decided it was not his lot to spend his life aboard a ship as his father had done. Not long after he left the merchant marine, he was drafted into the U.S. Army and spent two years in Europe.
Transferred to Michigan
Eventually Gordon landed a job with Brunswick Corporation as an engineer in the pin setters test area. When the company transferred him to Michigan, he spent part of his time working on schemes for getting transferred back to New York. “But then I got involved in the Muskegon Yacht Club and sailing,” he recalls. “And I realized that everything in Muskegon is no more than 10 minutes away. I liked that. I haven’t been back to New York in more than 30 years.”
At the Muskegon Yacht Club, a fellow who had a natural affinity for sailboats and an understanding of all things mechanical wound up being a real asset. At first, he offered his services for free. Then, in 1965, Gordon set up a part-time business, while keeping the job with Brunswick. “By 1973 I got involved with the local Albacore fleet and got involved in selling boats. I gave up my Brunswick job, and it’s been an uphill climb ever since,” he jokes.
There were tenuous times, of course. “When I left Brunswick, that didn’t make my wife too happy,” he recalls. “We had a 3-year-old daughter, and our son had just been born. But it all worked out.”
Indeed it has. That daughter, Kathleen, and her brother, Brian, are running the company these days. And Joanne, Gordon’s wife, must have forgiven him as well. She’s been involved in the payroll and banking end of the business ever since.
“Soon I was selling many kinds of boats: Cape Dory, Columbia, Endeavor, Ericson, Irwin, O’Day, and Helsen & Watkins, along with the Albacores,” he recalls. “Currently, we sell primarily smaller boats: Butterfl y, Laser, JY, Vanguard, Pram, Sunfish, and Precision. But we commission as many boats now as we did then.”
Bought more property
No matter how you cut it, sailboats take up a lot of space, and Gordon’s garage wasn’t going to contain a busi-
ness of this nature. Pretty soon he bought the service station next door. “Then the marina across the street was for sale and I bought it,” he says. That property became the service department. They added docks. In those days the largest boat they needed to accommodate was 35 feet. But times have changed. Next the company built an inside heated storage building and soon built an addition to that. Then the ship’s store was expanded.
“I bought pieces of property, a little at a time. That made it affordable . . . almost. Five years ago we bought the last available commercial property in the area and filled it with boats.” There wasn’t a grand plan behind all this, he says. “It simply grew like Topsy.”
As the number of properties grew, the size of the loans from the bank grew, and the number of people on the payroll grew too. There had to be a moment of truth when Gordon Torresen realized he had a tiger by the tail. The most frightening period had to be when the fiberglass sailboat manufacturers went out of business one after another in the 1980s.
“I don’t know who foresaw the boating crash,” he says matter-of-factly. “But they didn’t tell me. A whole bunch of companies overdrove their headlights. We were stuck with a lot of boats that were hard to sell. These companies went down holding our deposits. But we survived. We were offering service, storage, slips, a sail loft . . . we had a lot going that balanced things out.”
Internet pioneer
The company saw at least one thing coming before the rest of the sailing community caught on, however: the Internet. “I can’t take any credit for that,” Gordon says. “Our store manager, Chris VanOosterhout, started playing around with the Internet and asked if we could make up a site and see what happened.” In fact, Torresen Marine’s venture into the world of the computer started with bulletin boards, for those of us who can remember back that far. That was in 1994.
“People had to use their phones to dial into our computer, one person at a time, because we only had one phone line connected,” Chris says. “I remember how excited we were when the first out-of-state customer called in. It was someone from Indianapolis.” But the Internet was just beginning to catch on, and Torresen (thanks to Chris) caught on early. Before six months had gone by, he had led the organization in that direction and away from the world of bulletin boards. He had a website up by May 1994.
“It was content-driven . . . value-driven,” Chris says. Torresen started by offering sailing news. Chris posted information about the Chicago-Mackinac race, which he says, “showed us that people were going to see the Internet as a way to fi nd sailing information. That sounds like a no-brainer now,” he says with a laugh, “but you have to remember the times.”
Indeed, no one knew what the Internet would become for several more years, but when it reached maturity, Torresen was already there with a large presence. The coverage of major Great Lakes sailing events grew to the coverage of Great Lakes sailors and how they were doing at races such as Key West Race Week. All this grew into a national and international coverage now called Around The World Of Sailing, or ATWOS to Chris and the three others who administer the site these days.
Biggest and best
Links were big in those days, and Torresen had the biggest and the best. They also offered to maintain the links for other sailing companies. Good Old Boat has had that relationship with Torresen’s Internet-savvy staff for several years. They started hosting sites for non-profit sailing organizations, such as yacht clubs, festivals, and circumnavigators. They still host sites for approximately 30 marine services.
Last year Torresen posted an incredible database of parts catalogs for 776 marine engines. These days the company sells marine products, brokerage boats, sailing school lessons, and much more, right along with all the free content it offers. Chris says more than 260,000 products are available online from Torresen Marine.
In the beginning the website concept was very much the “if-you-build-it-they-will-come” philosophy; Torresen built it and they came. These days, peak season traffic to Torresen Marine websites exceeds 100,000 visitors viewing more than 1,000,000 web pages per week.
Gordon, of course, says it was Chris’ idea. But Chris points out, “Gordon understood the importance of what could be … the potential of the technology.” The Muskegon Area Chamber of Commerce recognized Gordon as the Entrepreneur of the Year in May 2004. That honor was in large part because of the company’s early venture into the Internet.
Full-service business
Nowadays Torresen Marine has a large brokerage business, offering more good old boats than most; a big chandlery business; a full-service marine business; and much more. “If it’s got a mast on it, we do it,” Gordon smiles.
When Jerry and I visited in early October 2004, a couple of 60-ton Travelifts and a large yard trailer were bustling about, moving boats out of the water for winter storage. By wintertime approximately 600 boats would be stored on the Torresen lot. The operation appeared to be busy, efficient, and in constant change. One building was being renovated; more office space was in the making.
The size of the operation is no longer astounding to Gordon or the rest of the family. “We’re large enough and stable enough now. Our challenge is to do what we’re doing and to do it better,” he says. When asked about the transition to the next generation of Torresens, he says, “Kathleen is the general manager. She does everything inside. Brian does everything outside. I stroll around in awe.”
Thank you to Sailrite Enterprises, Inc., for providing free access to back issues of Good Old Boat through intellectual property rights. Sailrite.com
