Click here for Part I & Part III

Giving boaters the freedom to explore—without unnecessary costs and frustration

Dan Cowens is the founder of Snag-A-Slip. Launched in 2015, Snag-A-Slip is a boat rental service that makes it easy for boaters to explore new marinas and book boat slips across coasts in North and Central America. Customers can use their personal computer or mobile device to browse marinas and reserve a vessel in minutes, with no booking fees. Dan, a US Army veteran, is also the founder of Oasis Marinas in Annapolis, Maryland.

EDWIN WARFIELD: Tell us about building your businesses. Has it been a challenge to work with and aggregate all these different marinas across the map?

DAN COWENS: We picked up Harbor East Marina as our first one. And, I say we launched Snag-A-Slip—we were under full development. Oasis Marinas picked up its first marina in September of 2014. As we picked up Harbor East Marina, we picked up our second marina in July of 2015, which was Horn Point Harbor, and then Atlas.

The first question people ask me—and it’s not really a question, it’s more of a comment—is “the first one must have been the hardest to get.” And, the answer to that is no, it wasn’t. The first one was one of the easiest to get because it was based off of my relationship and my previous reputation with the group and the folks that are running Harbor East. The second one was the hardest one to get because I had no relationship, and it was all based on what we were selling that we could do. That was the hardest. And then we picked four in the span of 90 days.

Currently, today, we have nine. Our latest one is in New York. We’ve now expanded up to New York, and we’re looking forward to future expansion in the Great Lakes and down the East Coast, heading into South Florida.

We picked up 22 locations in February on Snag-A-Slip. Snag-A-Slip’s milestones are really exceptional growth. We have over 600 marinas now on Snag-A-Slip that are partner marinas with us.

It should be a no-brainer to be on Snag-A-Slip because it doesn’t cost you anything to be on it, and it doesn’t cost anything for the boater to use it. The way that we get paid is when there’s an actual booking, we get a piece of that—a commission of that sale, just like a Travelocity or Expedia or anyone else. We’ve got just over 600 marinas now, and we picked 22 just last month, and the momentum is just continuing to pick up as we go.

There’s no aggregator in this space today. I lived this in the hotel world, and I lived it in the parking world, as these groups came in and really turned the travel agency world on its ear. We want to be a disruptor. There are three choices: we can buy it, we can build it, or we can partner with someone. And there wasn’t anybody in the space that was doing it, so there was nobody to buy or partner with, so that only left build. Well, the other option, other than if you’re not going to build it, is you have to wait for someone else. And because of my experience in my previous life, I played the movie for ‘em. I said, “In year one, if we do not do this by the end of the year, there’ll be two to three competitors in the space. At the end of year two, there’ll be between eight and 12. By the end of year three, there’ll be roughly 15 to 18. By the end of year four, there’ll be two or three.” And, so far, as we’ve watched, that movie has been playing out, as we look at the competition that’s happening within the space.

Q. How have you managed to run two companies simultaneously?

A. We bifurcated the team. Half the team went on the Oasis side and built out that model. The other half of the team went over to Snag-A-Slip and really started running at 100 miles an hour building out Snag-A-Slip.

We started with the two separate teams. Oasis is managing marinas, as well as doing consulting. The interesting thing about the marina world is it’s a little different than my previous life, because in my previous life we only oversaw one aspect of the guest experience. In the marina world, we are essentially the asset manager, the entire asset manager for that property. We manage class A office space, class B office space, restaurants, retail, fuel docks, in addition to the marina itself. There’s a lot going on. That was really a learning piece for us, but that’s what Oasis is. And, I explain Oasis as Oasis—we want to be the Marriott of the marina world. We don’t want to own any marinas; we just want to operate them. Marriott has done a pretty doggone good job doing that. If we can just emulate that, I think we’re going to be fine. Hire the right people that truly love to serve other people and get out of the way.

Snag-A-Slip is, again, it’s like the Hotels.com or even now more the OpenTable for boaters and for marinas themselves. If you think about the way that a marina would typically have worked, if you wanted a slip, you would have to call the marina Monday through Friday between 9am and let’s call it 4pm. Somebody may or may not answer, and they’re probably taking your reservation on a piece of paper in a book. And if they’re really advanced, they would’ve taken it on a dry erase board. We wanted to simplify that experience for the boater, as well as the marina. So, we’ve given tools now to the marina to use Snag-A-Slip as a marketing arm, where we bring the crowd, but then we also work with marinas on allowing us to simply process the crowd that they already have. That’s how our model is set up. There’s two different rates, if you will, for which if we bring the crowd or if they bring the crowd. Because, if I’m a marina, I have limited hours of operation, so having the ability to have reservations come in off-hours, and having the ability to lean on our concierge team and our chat function on our site to answer questions for boaters, lets me focus on what’s most important to me, which is getting out on the docks and serving my customers. It’s a win for the boater because the boater now has eyes and access to all these locations, and they can see the amenities and the pricing, and they can book. And it really helps the marinas streamline their operations, where they don’t necessarily have to have somebody in answering the phones all day long. And now they’re a 24-hour operation, and they have a team that is helping them 24 hours a day, even when they’re not there.

Connect with Dan on LinkedIn

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