Growth Spurt: How Freedom Boat Club is Conquering the Globe
By Tony Esposito
FBC president Cecil Cohn talks to IBI about the race to get to every market
Since Brunswick Corporation’s acquisition of Freedom Boat Club (FBC) in 2019, it has all been about growth – scaling the shared ownership business model to literal global proportions to ‘be everywhere people want to boat’, luring new boaters and delivering new member experiences with no slowdown in sight.
FBC president Cecil Cohn, who has been at the helm since the beginning, ticks six years of milestones casually off his fingers: from 170 to 410 locations; membership growth from 20,000 to 60,000 – equating to near 100,000 individuals based on 1.5 people per paid subscription; and tripling the fleet from 2,000 to 6,000 vessels, mostly from the Brunswick Boat Group (BBG).
In the EU and UK, the club has gone from three franchises to more than 40 locations and over 1,000 members. Madrid, the south of France, the London suburbs and the southern coast of England with two locations in Denmark.
Global Growth and Member Retention
FBC’s Cecil Cohn: “Being able to deliver a remarkable and exceptional experience in a consistent manner across 410 locations and 60,000 memberships that collectively are boating 600,000 times per year is one of our biggest opportunities and challenges”
“Not to be outdone, our team in Australia has really hit the mark. We landed there in January of ‘23. We’re entering our second full peak season and we’re already at over 250 memberships,” Cohn told IBI recently. “We have one corporate club as well as five franchisees. We just signed all of New Zealand to a franchise owner, and we’re up to, I think, 12 locations total amongst those six clubs.”
While in absolute numbers, Cohn said, North America continues to lead, the serious future growth will come from overseas. “There’s a lot of tier-one open markets in the EMEA [Europe, Middle East, Africa] and APAC [Asia/Pacific] regions. So, as we’re evaluating prospects, these are really exciting opportunities, whereas in North America, we have a few open markets that are very attractive, but by and large, a lot of the best markets already have been cultivated by Freedom for years, whether it be by the corporate club footprint or by our franchisees.”
The corporate/franchise model requires balance and interaction between the two, Cohn said. “If our ultimate strategy is to be everywhere that people want to go boating, I think doing that with a purely corporate club model would not be an advantageous way to go. We’re in a race to get to every market and to scale our presence. “In each of the global regions, it’s very helpful to have at least a corporate club where we can help facilitate new franchise training, new member training, best practices, all of that. But the power of the franchise model is our franchisees are one of the single greatest strategic assets within how Freedom goes to market and how we extend our market leadership. They’re out solving day-to-day business challenges in order to ‘make boating made simple’, actually simple.”
FBC still experiences about 10% annual attrition; or as Cohn prefers it, 90% retention – impressive numbers for a luxury subscription service, and new members last year out-paced the churn. “We’re not local and small anymore. And so being able to deliver a remarkable and exceptional experience in a consistent manner across 410 locations and 60,000 memberships that collectively are boating 600,000 times per year is one of our biggest opportunities and challenges,” Cohn believes. But internal data shows – and in addition to capturing the hearts and minds of boaters, Freedom Boat Club is exceptional and capturing their data – the more members use the club, the more they enjoy the experience.
“The more trips our members take on an individual basis in a year, the more satisfied they are with the club and the more likely they’re to stay with the club long-term,” Cohn shared. “They love the boats, they love their dock staff, they love what we’re delivering every day.” That same data shows FBC members gravitate not only to certain types of vessels but specific individual boats. Toward that and other ends, and based on data, Freedom is launching a mobile app, which among other functions will push available inventory to the user. “We are measuring very closely how many clicks it takes them from when they open the app to when they book a reservation, and we want that to be a dramatic reduction versus what they do on our web-based platform,” said Cohn.
“We also want to showcase all of the reciprocal boats that are available in other locations. If their home location doesn’t have boats available tomorrow, we want to show them all the other locations within a 30-mile radius or whatever the case may be in order to get them boating and get them experiencing different parts of the club.” Slated for full release this spring, a soft launch of the iOS version of the app began last autumn among select clubs, but word has been getting out, Cohn said, resulting in tens-of-thousands of downloads thus far. “We’re getting really high satisfaction ratings, and we’re seeing members boat more frequently, which is exactly the result that we’re looking for.”
At one point, Brunswick and Freedom thought that the club may serve as a conduit between the boating public and electric boating, even entering a six-month evaluation program with Canadian electric boat builder Vision Marine Technologies. While a number of clubs have a handful of electric boat offering, Cohn said, “it is very, very low use case and penetration. “We want to make sure every asset that we’re bringing into the club is getting really strong utilisation because it’s tying up a slip, it’s influencing our member to boat ratio.
“Typically speaking, the uptake from a member boating trip standpoint has been relatively low on the electric product. “In other industries electrification has really gone from early adopter or cutting edge to the mainstream, typically volume is a main ingredient in order to unlock that success. And so, to the extent that we can help Brunswick and the industry advance electrification, we certainly view that as an opportunity, especially as the product and the horsepower and that sort of thing increases to the point where it’s more comparable to the experience our members currently get.”
Larger Boats & Exclusive Experiences
Where FBC is seeing greater member interest is in twin engine boats over the typical 25ft, single outboard category most of the club fleet falls into. The Amenity Boat Program is offering larger – not surprisingly – Sea Ray and Boston Whaler models with the latest technology like JoyStick Controls in select markets to see if members would pay an additional per-use fee for the vessels or pay a higher monthly subscription fee for access to the larger boats as with the rest of the fleet.
Training for the twin engine fleet was offered as part of an expanded experience program in which FBC wants to expose members to new on-water activities and products. Brunswick’s acquisition of Fliteboard led to some cross promotion for the foiling technology. “We partnered with the Flite team and they brought Fliteboards and instructors into pop-up events for a long weekend in each market. We made that available to the members for a very nominal upcharge, and it was exclusive to Freedom members,” Cohn said.
One thing that has come down is cost of membership versus owning a boat. Six years ago, it was about comparable, but today, based on interest rates and geography club cost is now lower than buying a boat. “I usually don’t offer that up is most people when they’re considering Freedom are not considering buying a new boat,” Cohn said, adding there is very little overlap between potential FBC members and new boat buyers. “We sometimes see overlap in people that are considering buying a pre-owned boat, but most people that join Freedom or any boat club for that matter, are much more experience oriented.
So, they’re debating, should I join Freedom or should I go on the Disney vacation this year? Should I join Freedom, or should I do some other kind of recreational experience? “Over a third of the people that joined Freedom have no prior experience boating. So, one of the things that made Freedom and the boat club model so attractive to Brunswick and the industry is it truly is growing the pie. And that hasn’t changed since we acquired Freedom in 2019. That’s been something that’s very consistent year in, year out.”