Poor decision?
I've tried to be honest and open in my previous blogs and it seems to have got me into trouble. It's always a fine balancing act between what to write and what not to, particularly in relation to what we're doing to our boats and this is where we came unstuck.Fair Freedom has featured heavily in my text on this blog; how she's been in need of being taken apart and rebuilt and the process of doing this. I made no secret of the enormity of the job which is some we simply didn't appreciate until we started getting her apart; emerging work all so often swallows more time than you ever imagined the job would.
Well, the Easter customer happened to read the blog and emailed in horror as they realised it was their boat. A week before we got that email, we were quiet confident of finishing her off for Easter but as that week went on, we had major problems with engines which just swallowed our time on other boats. This left Fair untouched for the week.
The next week, we had more engine problems with the fleet.
And the next. In all, we've hoiked out four engines in March with each one being stripped and rebuilt - sadly two were too much work for the time allowed and so replacements were sourced.
All this meant that Fair Freedom is still in bits up at Richardson's and our customer was upgraded to True Freedom.
We'll be back on Fair over the next few days.
Test of strength
Easter was a success with an empty boat yard for the first time since the October 2009 half term holiday. Sadly, the weather put paid to walk-up bookings for some of the day boats, but all things considered, we've done well in terms of both getting the fleet ready (though I'd have been happier if we could have done some more polishing) and in terms of the booking levels.However, it was not without its problems. Quite apart from the occasional engineering call-out which we half expect on the first busy part of the season, our roller iron started blowing the main fuses on Saturday. This is catastrophic; this old-faithfull bit of kit is a king-pin in our laundry system. Replacements cost over £900 and we simply had to have it working for the Monday turn arounds. Luckily, we found the problem and now it's a good as ever, but, for a while, there was panic.
Panic over, it's now 7:15am and time for me to head back to the yard for another day.
2 comments:
Well Andy, we were on one of those Easter boats that had a slight engine problem and needed a mechanic call out, well, more of a hic up really, when the accelerator linkage became loose and we lost all power. I would like to say though that the speed in which you responded, and the speed in which the mechanics reached us, was outstanding, and I am sure that your bigger competitors such as Blakes, Hoseasons etc, could not of responded any quicker and more likely would have taken longer. It is clear that you care about your customers, and I just felt I should share our thoughts with your readers. Yes we had a problem, but when a customer does have a problem, then it is often the most critical time when a business can wow a customer or lose a customer. This was our first time with freedom, but you wow'd us, and it certainly wont be our last time with you.
Thanks for that. It makes a real difference to us to know that we've performed well.
We had a really stressful week; Tranquil's partial refit went right down to the wire on Thursday and had a clening team on it until late into the night, we had engine problems left right and centre throughout March and yesterday we realised that the Tranquil's head gasket had blown too, so I'm rebuilding the head today; it goes out on Friday.
Having the bookings rolling in is so important to the business, but having comments like this is so important for morale.
Many thanks.
Andy
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