Boatsetter co-founder and CEO Jaclyn Baumgarten has found immediate success from her first ever business venture. From its founding in 2012, she has expanded her company Boatsetter into one of the leading boat-sharing firms in the country. Already, the “peer-to-peer boat rental platform” carries a fleet of almost 20,000 boats across over 600 locations.
For her work at Boatsetter, Jaclyn Baumgarten has been named a finalist in the EY Entrepreneur of the Year 2020 Florida awards. She is the leader of “one of the region’s most successful startups,” having earned over “$31 million in venture capital raised for her boat-sharing marketplace.”
Jaclyn Baumgarten and Boatsetter were meant to be. After all, Jaclyn is a disruptor who comes from a long line of entrepreneurs. Currently, she is the right leader for the company during a pandemic that has grown demand for its services.
At Boatsetter, Jaclyn Baumgarten started a company that “combines the rental mechanics of Airbnb with the on-demand labor dynamics of Uber,” and provides “a hassle-free boat rental experience for all stakeholders.” The company is a “peer-to-peer boat sharing platform” that “connects individuals seeking a day out on the water with boat owners and captains looking to charter their goods and services.”
Check out more interviews with marine industry disruptors here.
Fiercely protect your time. Jaclyn Baumgarten, Boatsetter
Jerome Knyszewski: What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?
Jaclyn Baumgarten: Boatsetter isn’t just a transaction between people and boat owners. It’s sharing the on-the-water experience and cultivating the next generation of boaters. I’ve always seen Boatsetter as a way to build and grow the entire recreational boating industry, bringing entirely new demographics and Millennials and Gen Z into what had, up until Boatsetter, been the rapidly greying world of boating.
We are creating a marketplace where people can share water and outdoor leisure with those who may have thought boating was out of reach, whether because of the cost associated with it or inexperience on the water.
Jerome Knyszewski: Which tips would you recommend to your colleagues in your industry to help them to thrive and not “burn out”?
Jaclyn Baumgarten: Fiercely protect your time. It is your most valuable resource as an entrepreneur, and you only never can have more than there are hours in a day. Keep working hard and trust the data. Equally important, is investing in your company. I see myself as a servant leader and that means, investing in your tech, your employees, and your customers. Hire people smarter than you are in the areas you are lacking, let them explore their field and test and fail and then test again. Refine your tech with the end user always in mind so they are surprised and delighted with the ease of use and practicality.
Jerome Knyszewski: None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story?
Jaclyn Baumgarten: No one can do things alone so taking the time to make a social investment is a wise decision. Building a strong and effective circle of advisors and mentors is how you open up access to experienced professionals and expertise that is often costly. An effective group of advisors and mentors can help you avoid unnecessary mistakes, open up doors, identify partnership, employees, investors, funding, and other groups that align with your mission and can help you execute on that vision. I would recommend anyone thinking about starting a business to do this today, right now. Building your network of advisors is an investment you need to make; ask for help from those who have more experience than you do and are better at the traits you may lack. In my case, I’ve brought on advisors for Marine Industry Expertise and Product Expertise & Marketplace Expertise to help guide decisions, but also to help us think outside the box. Our goal is to open up access to a legacy industry and having that foundational expertise is important to mapping out where boating is going in the future.
Invest culturally in supporting innovation, which means changing the dialogue with the team and giving them room to try news things and even giving them the opportunity to fail. Invest in your employees.
Jerome Knyszewski: Ok thank you for all that. Now let’s shift to the main focus of this interview. The title of this series is “How to take your company from good to great”. Let’s start with defining our terms. How would you define a “good” company, what does that look like? How would you define a “great” company, what does that look like?
Jaclyn Baumgarten: For Boatsetter, our goal is to be the number 1 destination for on the water experiences. Boatsetter will lead the digital transformation in the boat rental industry and plans to expand beyond just boat rentals to include many verticals similar to the “Amazon of Boating.” That requires a continued investment in our technology, making it more intuitive and easy for the customer. When I first launched, I had the dream of taking the experiences of being on the water and making them accessible to everyone. I envisioned harnessing technology to completely shift the way people experience the boating world. Who you are, what your boating background is, and how much money you have in the bank shouldn’t be barriers to accessing boating experiences. The boating industry has an enduring reputation for being a luxury activity reserved only for an elite few with the financial means to access the water. Stats on boat ownership demonstrate the industry’s exclusivity and total lack of diversity: almost completely white, male, mid- to high-end net worth, average age 58 years old and rising yearly. Boatsetter is changing who the average boater is: Nearly 80 percent of our renters are under the age of 45, half are millennials, and more than a third are women. And our fastest growing demographic is Gen Z. As we’ve seen in industries like hospitality and real estate, technology has the ability to open access to experiences that were previously unreachable. Boatsetter was built with the vision that boating, and the incredible experiences people can enjoy on the water, should be available to everyone. That is what a great company looks like and what we are working to achieve.
Jerome Knyszewski: What would you advise to a business leader who initially went through years of successive growth, but has now reached a standstill. From your experience do you have any general advice about how to boost growth and “restart their engines”?
Jaclyn Baumgarten: Invest culturally in supporting innovation, which means changing the dialogue with the team and giving them room to try news things and even giving them the opportunity to fail. Invest in your employees. It’s easy and often most comfortable to bring in and surround yourself with people who are pretty much like you. But, that creates an echo chamber. Having the courage to hire great professionals who challenge your way of thinking. That will make you a stronger team and it will help shake things up when you need it most. Investing in your employees is incredibly important. Let them be creative, let them go outside their own comfort zone and refine and learn new skills. That will lead to new ideas and new ways of thinking that will shake loose stagnation. You also have to invest in your technology. Reexamine how your tech is working and put your efforts towards improving it with the end user in mind. How can you make changes that will surprise and delight your customers? Doing so will pay dividends in the future and give you a leg up over our competitors that are investing in customer acquisition and driving lead generations for sales teams to close. But, this also ultimately goes back to the culture you create. When you are a servant leader — empowering your team and challenging them to go outside their comfort zone — you cultivate an environment that constantly evolves and innovates.
Jerome Knyszewski: Generating new business, increasing your profits, or at least maintaining your financial stability can be challenging during good times, even more so during turbulent times. Can you share some of the strategies you use to keep forging ahead and not lose growth traction during a difficult economy?
Jaclyn Baumgarten: During the first month of the pandemic, I was incredibly nervous about the impact this would have on Boatsetter. Now, more than a half a year later, it’s clear that the way we usually socialize has changed for the foreseeable future, if not irrevocably. It’s an intense, uncertain time and no one is immune to the stress of this moment, which is why identifying safe ways to reconnect with loved ones, and be outdoors, will be more important than ever to manage our physical, mental and emotional health this year. Instead of looking at this year as an insurmountable challenge, we decided to remember our core principles of investing in our people and our tech- and it paid off. Boatsetter provides a seamless way for people to reconnect at a time when our collective health and wellness is dependent on our personal safety. We recognized that as many of us have experienced the stress of countless hours in front of screens, social isolation, or the chaos of managing children out of school, the opportunity to spend a day on the water can be the perfect local refuge. We doubled down on what we know worked best for our team, and leaned into serving the fundamental human need to connect with loved ones and nature. The global pandemic has had a profound impact on how people travel and enjoy leisure experiences. More families are “stay-cationing,” travelling regionally and finding creative ways to take advantage of activities locally or regionally, evidenced by surges in planned RV trips and short term rental bookings. People are spending much less time planning vacations and more time spontaneously looking to escape the monotony of everyday life in isolation. That’s why Boatsetter saw a drastic change in booking behavior. Pre-COVID, bookings were made at least two weeks in advance — now, most bookings are made less than 48 hours in advance of the outing.
Jerome Knyszewski: In your experience, which aspect of running a company tends to be most underestimated? Can you explain or give an example?
Jaclyn Baumgarten: How hard it is to successfully execute your vision. It requires maintaining cross-functional discipline and building the right processes and procedures to ensure consistency. Entrepreneurship is an opportunity to take a vision that you have, invest all your creativity, intellect, energy and passion in it, and create something amazing that changes your life, and possibly the lives of millions of others. But, without a well-thought out execution plan, without internal and external process, you can’t hope to bring that vision to life. Processes have to be crafted and tailored to your business. Crisis can happen when the wrong processes are put in place and you fail to execute on the right ones.
Entrepreneurship is an opportunity to take a vision that you have, invest all your creativity, intellect, energy and passion in it, and create something amazing that changes your life, and possibly the lives of millions of others.
Jerome Knyszewski: Great customer service and great customer experience are essential to build a beloved brand and essential to be successful in general. In your experience what are a few of the most important things a business leader should know in order to create a Wow! Customer Experience?
Jaclyn Baumgarten: Build-up, cultivate and constantly support the team of people behind your technology. Ensure that, behind your beautiful and seamless computer interface, are knowledgeable and emotionally intelligent human beings that are building technologies and systems based on years of expertise, industry intelligence, and an intuitive experience based on deep understanding, not assumptions. I don’t take this lightly, which is why I’ve invested in creating a user experience that is backed by years of groundwork that makes the peer-to-peer rental process easy and truly safe for owners and renters.
Jerome Knyszewski: What are your thoughts about how a company should be engaged on Social Media? For example, the advisory firm EisnerAmper conducted 6 yearly surveys of United States corporate boards, and directors reported that one of their most pressing concerns was reputational risk as a result of social media. Do you share this concern? We’d love to hear your thoughts about this.
Jaclyn Baumgarten: Social media opens up access to industries for all demographics. It opens doors into people’s lives to make a product, a lifestyle, or concept attainable. That’s what we are doing here at Boatsetter and social media has been a large part of allowing people know that the boating experience is now available to them through Boatsetter, all around the US and across the world. We strive every day to open up the boating industry to the next generation of boaters. Wealth, experience, gender and ethnicity should no longer be a factor in accessing the boating lifestyle. Boatsetter was built with the vision that boating, and the incredible experiences people can enjoy on the water, should be available to everyone. That message is something we want everyone to see, feel, and hear. Social media helps open that channel of communication between us and our customers. Is there risk of reputation harm if someone posts something negative? Of course, but that is a natural part of actually listening to, and being aware of reality, and having your company reacting to and serving the real world. I would personally rather know if someone had a bad experience so that my team can have the opportunity to fix it. It all goes back to dialogue. When you have two-way communications with your customers, when you are open and accessible, you can turn a negative into a positive experience. Being in the dark is the real reputation risk.
You have to build a team that is filled with the most talented people in their fields. Jaclyn Baumgarten
Jerome Knyszewski: What are the most common mistakes you have seen CEOs & founders make when they start a business? What can be done to avoid those errors?
Jaclyn Baumgarten: For me, it boils down to not investing and trusting your team. You have to build a team that is filled with the most talented people in their fields. You have to bring together people from all backgrounds, experiences, and languages. Doing so gives you the best chance for amazing outcomes. Letting your team challenge the way you think. You want debate within your team. You want team members who see the world from different perspectives and can call out and fill in the blind spots in each other’s thinking so you are a company that makes fewer mistakes and creates a better product.
Homogenous teams get you nowhere — they tend to run you quickly, unchallenged, in one direction, and by the time you realize you’ve rushed down a dead end path, you’ve missed your opportunity to make a graceful course correction.
Jerome Knyszewski: Thank you for all of that. We are nearly done. You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂
Jaclyn Baumgarten: We are doing it in so many ways here at Boatsetter. I have a deep love and respect for nature. Being on the water is the best feeling in the world. However, without clean water, without investing in our environment, that experience changes. At Boatsetter, we want to take care of the environment because it’s what makes this experience a spectacular one for so many people.
Jerome Knyszewski: How can our readers further follow you online?
Jaclyn Baumgarten: @boatsetter on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook
Personal Twitter: @JaclynBaumgarte
Personal Instagram (although I don’t post as much as I should): @jaclynbaumgarten
Jerome Knyszewski: This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for the time you spent with this!
