Editor’s note: This commentary is by Jan van Eck, director of D.J. Engineering, manufacturers of technical engineering assemblies including aircraft landing gear components.
[O]ne of the peculiarities of Vermont’s valuable tourism sector is that the bulk of the income streams go to corporations located out of state or out of country. Meanwhile, as was noted in this commentary section on June 7 (Walter Carpenter: The workers behind the tourism dollars https://vtdigger-tagsmigration.newspackstaging.com/2019/06/07/walter-carpenter-workers-behind-tourism-dollars/), the wages paid are at or near minimum wage and the local workforce struggles. The structure is that you have these great skills, yet the ski resort is owned by some corporation in Colorado that gets rich off high ticket prices and affluent customers from Boston and Connecticut, while the locals get up in the dead of night and work in bitter cold for poverty wages.
Yet that dismal picture need not be the case. Vermont has local entrepreneurial businesses that can profit from tourism, especially in the restaurant and lodging trades. Can this trade be expanded, by tapping into new areas? But of course; let’s take a look.
The lakes as a profit center
The large international lakes of Vermont, Lake Champlain and Lake Memphremagog, beckon for new opportunities. The day-tripper and weekender are poorly served for enjoyment of the lakes, unless they own a boat and trailer it up for the day. Aside from the logistical issues, that is hardly cost-effective. Yet these are large lakes; renting a rowboat is hardly effective, especially so considering the prevalent winds and waves that do develop. Sailors could delight, but the skilled sailor represents a small subset of tourists. Fast powerboats are expensive to acquire and maintain for a short summer season in Vermont, so that is not going to make any money.
That leaves low-powered launches, and that is an interesting market. If a launch can be found that is stable in seas, operator friendly, zero maintenance, and cheap to build, yet can be rented for a moderate sum, it has all the prospects of being a real winner. Montreal consists of some three million urbanites only 70 miles away, who would be delighted to come down to Vermont and spend a pleasant day or weekend out on the water. Those folks would putter out, go fishing, swimming off the boat, use the launch as a start boat for dinghy racing, off to an island for a picnic (or have one on the boat!). What a splendid way to spend the day or weekend out of the city, out on the clear fresh water of a nice lake. So: how do we do this? Let’s take a look.
The inboard launch for fun and profit
In casting about for a solution, I found a neat design for a decent-sized motor launch. This one is 28 feet, built solidly, unsinkable even if tipped and flooded, can be operated by an unskilled person, will not sustain damage in a collision or grounding, and is powered by a small three-cylinder 34-horsepower inboard diesel, so you don’t have a fire hazard. It can be built all-in for about $12,000. That is sufficiently cheap that you would not have to insure them, other than for liability. As they are one-design hulls, you can set up an operation to build them indoors in the winter, on a production line, and sell the boats to operators in other states – thus creating a new value-added revenue stream through the manufacturing of the rental product.
As this putt-putt runs about 7 or 8 knots, the customer can get some decent distance in over a morning yet not be at risk to himself or others. That super-solid hull can withstand being banged around, so even if it takes abuse, running into a dock, that sort of thing, it is not going to suffer. The diesel is bullet-proof, press the starter button and off you go. A simple lever for the transmission and you are all set.
The design lends to flexibility, as you can fit it with a soft top, side screens, even a porta-potty, and the fleet can be mix-and-match, so the renter has options to select. Here is a picture of a prototype:
This is the distance-swim committee boat (note the side ropes for the swimmers). You would sell these at a mark-up to summer camps around the country, a nice spin-off business. This is an irresistible product. Set up a production line to crank these out, spread the overhead over a hundred extra units a year, and bingo your work force starts at $25/hour, a long way from that minimum wage that perpetuates worker poverty. Value-added is how you create prosperity.
Now you can take that basic hull design and work a myriad of variations, both in deck finish, seating, rain tops, whatever you can fancy. Here is my other example of how this can be done:
Those metal poles hold the top and side curtains (the side panels being soft clear plastic sheet) so you can enjoy the view, even with a rain squall outside and the renters stay nice and dry. Snap them off and stow in the under-seat compartment and you have an open launch.
The idea is that if you come to Burlington or St. Albans or Newport, you and your group can rent a day-trip launch and go putter about, enjoy the water, pay maybe 50 bucks for the rental, and spend your cash on the existing shore restaurants, hotels and B&Bs. The trick is not to get greedy and jack up the rental price, so that you continue to entice those city dwellers to come again and again. What you want to do is increase the number of tourists and have them do something else than ski and do leaf-peeping. Especially those millions of Quebeckers, right next door.
Now what this does is create seasonal employment in the rental end, which is great for students looking for summer jobs, creates spin-off wages in the restaurant and hotel sector, creates new work at decent wages in construction, increases floor traffic in the shopping sector (after all, these tourists are not going home without buying some Vermont maple syrup, now are they?), and creates new manufacturing jobs and profits in building the boats (and even boat trailers).
Creating an expanded market through franchising
Another obvious spin-off for these launches is water tourism on the Connecticut River. Each community could set up a rental dock and the tourists can take a boat at one end and travel the length of the river, looking at eagles, fishing, whatever they like. Then it can be left at the other end and a pickup and trailer can bring it back. Buy some used stretch limos from those operators on Long Island for $2,000 each and you can ferry the tourists back to their cars! That makes yet another interesting side business.
The same formula is further usable as a form of franchise, where other operators would purchase the launches from your nascent boat-building factory and duplicate the concept elsewhere. I can see tourists wanting to use these launches to explore the Erie Canal. As they are so stable, you can rent them to run down the Hudson River, or on Lake Huron, or out on San Francisco Bay. You can develop an interesting export market for operators renting launches on the Thames River, and those tourists see London from an entirely new perspective. There is lots of business out there, and money to be made.
The point is that you are only limited by your enthusiasm. If you can develop a new product or a new service that will induce an increase in tourist volume then that brings revenues into the state, puts the unemployed to work, and creates its own prosperity. Then you can back-engineer your new product up the supply chain, manufacture for franchisees and other out-of-state and out-of-country markets, and kick the product line into high gear. That is how you make money. And making money is how you generate prosperity.
