Chartering a yacht can be a tedious process, involving long back-and-forths with multiple brokers. After moving to Miami and helping friends go through this process several times, Patrick Curley saw the chance to introduce something new — so with co-founder Nicholas Cardoza, he started Yachtlife.
Yachtlife is an online platform for chartering and buying yachts. It allows yacht owners and sellers to list their boats directly, helping them reach a broader market while cutting out the middleman. By aggregating multiple listings, Yachtlife offers a lower-cost, streamlined chartering and buying experience.
Behind the scenes, Yachtlife relies on a lot of savvy salesmanship. As business picked up steam, the company found themselves facing more demand than they could deal with. The volume of leads meant they weren’t addressing each one as effectively, which meant “not doing a good job developing relationships with the biggest clients.”
Realizing the risks this posed, Yachtlife turned to Magic.
Not Just More Sales — Better Ones
To keep up with rising demand, Yachtlife expanded their Sales team significantly: They sourced four sales assistants from Magic and hired five salespeople for their internal team.
The two-pronged approach to expanding their team helps them boost both the quantity and quality of their sales activity. Assistants focus on qualifying leads, organizing sales databases, and encouraging repeat purchases. “Simple tasks,” Patrick says, “where if you’re taught how to do it properly, you can do it over and over and over again.” This allows internal hires to focus time and effort on cultivating relationships with important clients.
Thanks to these improvements, the sales team recently closed a major deal: a 110 foot Riva sold for $13.5 million — their biggest yet, in terms of both the value and the boat itself.
Free Up Time for Your Priorities
The success of Yachtlife’s Sales team demonstrates a general benefit of having remote assistants: with someone else attending to routine work, your internal team can focus on high-priority tasks.
This holds true for Patrick himself. In addition to the sales assistants, he sourced the services of an executive assistant. Russel attends to staff payroll, broker commissions, and compiling reports for investors and on sales taxes. “And I just review and release it,” Patrick says. “All those tasks were taking up a lot of my time, and now that she’s doing it, it’s allowed me to use my time to do more productive things.”
Any company that is looking to expand and free up time for people to do more productive tasks [should hire remote assistants].
Cost and Efficiency
Getting remote assistants has helped Yachtlife reach greater milestones while saving on costs and time. Patrick sees remote assistants as an advantage for just about any business. “Almost every company has a sales team, has a marketing team, has an executive… I think it’s a great solution.”
Onboarding has been something of an obstacle to expanding Yachtlife’s staff. But where Magic was concerned, this went smoothly too. Patrick’s team got together to discuss how many assistants they needed and what they needed them to do — and “within a week, [they] had [their] first three assistants onboarded.”
“The assistants are getting along with the rest of the company, they’re producing good results.”
