A Long Way From the Stage

For twenty-five years, I worked in show business. I started as a sales assistant in 2003 and worked my way up to senior director of the live-entertainment division of a major Quebec media group, with stops as an agent, a marketing director, and a producer along the way. I produced tours, negotiated contracts, signed artists, and spent more nights than I can count making sure something complicated went off without the audience ever seeing the machinery behind it.

Underneath all the noise, it was a job about people. About earning trust quickly, hearing what someone actually needed rather than what they first said, and guiding them through decisions that mattered to them. I was good at it because I cared about the part that's easy to treat as secondary: the relationship.

I have also sailed since my college years. Time on the water was the thing I kept coming back to, the counterweight to a career built on adrenaline and deadlines. So when the chance came to bring everything I knew about guiding people into an industry I already loved, it didn't feel like a career change. It felt like the same work, finally pointed at the right thing.

The trip that made it click

A while ago, I delivered a boat from Nassau to New York with my son aboard. Days at sea, just the two of us and the passage, and he asked questions the entire way. How does this work, why is it done like that, what happens if. I answered all of them, one after another, for the length of an ocean.

Somewhere in that crossing I understood something about what I actually do. The value was never in having the answers. It was in being willing to explain them, plainly, to someone who started with none, without ever making him feel the question was beneath asking. By the time we reached New York he understood the boat, because someone had taken the time to walk him through it honestly rather than hand him a brochure.

Why I write

I have always liked to communicate, and the same thing kept striking me as I got deeper into this world: people are most curious about yacht ownership at the moment they understand it least. The questions are big, the numbers are large, and the patient explanation, the kind that treats someone as an intelligent adult making a serious decision, is harder to find than it should be.

So I write it. This site, the journal, the guides, all of it exists because I would rather explain this world than rush anyone through it. I share the same thinking on social media, in shorter form, for the same reason. The writing has to be useful whether or not you ever become a client. That's the standard I hold it to.

How I choose what to write about is simple. I ask myself what I would have wanted someone to tell me, back when I was the one starting out and about to spend a great deal of money. That question has never once led me wrong.

How I work with people

I am a consultant for Dream Yacht Group, and I'll always tell you that plainly, because where my information comes from is part of what you're weighing. My job is the part that comes before the paperwork, and the part that connects to it: helping you work out what you actually want, which path fits your situation, and what to ask the professionals who handle the tax and legal side.

In practice that's mostly listening, then honesty. I'll tell you when something doesn't fit, including a program I represent. I'd rather someone wait a year and be sure than sign quickly and wonder. The people who feel guided are the ones still glad they called a few years later. The relationship was always the point. The boat is just what we happen to be talking about.

If you've read something here and decided the smart move is to wait, or to do nothing at all, then I've done my job. And if you want to talk it through, you know where to find me.