A marvellous way to sell a boat

Imagine trying to buy a boat without any photos - only a written description - to guide your choice. It might not be too hard to contemplate in the case of well-known and popular production craft or one-design sailing classes, but what if the boat is custom built or modified to suit its previous owners' tastes? Would the specifications alone provide you with much of a picture?

And how would you go about valuing that boat, without having others of similar dimensions and fitout to compare it against? After 25 years of Trade-A-Boat magazine - and the more recent development of the Internet paving the way for websites like Trade-A-Boat's BoatPoint - those questions are purely rhetorical. Thousands upon thousands of Australian boaties buy this magazine or log onto BoatPoint on a regular basis because they provide the solution - an accessible marketplace for boat buyers and sellers, both commercial and private, plus page upon page of dreams.

But that was all in the future when Max and Dorothy Morton and their son Stuart returned to Melbourne in the early 1970s, after two years cruising Australia's east coast and the Pacific on a homebuilt yacht.

"When we came back I did have trouble selling the boat," Max recalls. "I didn't find a yacht broker in Melbourne who really knew the value of it. I thought the brokers would be experienced and tell me what it was worth, but most of them asked me what I wanted for it."

When he phoned other owners with boats for sale, Morton says: "It was just impossible to get an idea of what a boat was like. It might be 40ft long with a 9ft beam and a 5ft draft, but that didn't give you any idea what it was like.

"There are a lot of very individual yachts - people have them designed especially for themselves to win a race or go cruising. So ads without pictures don't tell you anything.

"I remember one little girl saying 'Daddy's out' when I called about one boat. I thought she might know if it was ferro-cement so I asked her 'Do you you know what the hull is made of?' When she said 'Daddy said it's a hulk', I thought I wouldn't ring back about that one."

Morton did sell his boat, but the experience was to lead to the foundation of Trade-A-Boat. Always an ideas man, whose business ventures have ranged widely from industrial panelbeating through automobile muffler and battery services to beekeeping (to name just a few), he came up with the idea for a new type of boating magazine several years later, after landing back in Melbourne following another overseas trip.

He explains: "I had nothing to do so I approached Alex [Morrison] and some other friends and said 'I'm back home, here to stay, and I need something to do to fill in my time, anyone got any ideas?'

"Alex came up with the idea of becoming yacht brokers; he had premises down at Williamstown. But I didn't feel like being a yacht broker - in those days there weren't any marinas down there, you had to row prospective buyers out to each boat and most of them just wanted to sit in a boat and talk about boats.

"I remembered the difficulty I'd had getting a valuation on my boat. Also by then I'd see a magazine called Auto Trader in America, which had photos to go with the ads. I thought 'What a marvellous way to sell a boat, with a photo!' So that's what I suggested to Alex - a magazine like AutoTrader for boats."

Morton and Morrison had originally met through a mutual friend, Lex Lundmark, who owned a 44ft topsail schooner, and they had become firm friends. Originally an industrial chemist, Alex by this stage had changed career tack to establish a marine chandlery in Nelson Place, Williamstown - one of Melbourne's most nautical neighbourhoods. He had the office space and facilities to establish the new venture while Morton had the time to devote to it.

They put up $8200 in total between them to start the new business, produced a four-page flyer to sell the concept to boat brokers, with a masthead logo designed by Dorothy Morton's brother, and then Max hit the road.

He recalls: "For the first three weeks of each month I'd be travelling to visit all the yacht brokers. One month I'd drive to Adelaide, turn around and come back through all the coastal towns which had brokers until I got to Brisbane, and then I'd come back again. The next month I'd go straight up the coast as far as Cairns and all the way back again. On the fourth week of each month I'd return home, we'd put the magazine together and get it off to the printers.

Although the contact telephone number of the fledgling magazine was always for the office above Alex's chandlery, where his role was to "answer the phone, sort out the accounts" the first issues of Trade-A-Boat were put together under Max and Dorothy Morton's house at Gruyere, on the northeast fringes of Melbourne.

Dramas such 'the washing machine incident' (in which runoff from said machine caused a deluge through the floorboards onto all the pages of one issue, laid up for printing) were not enough to prevent publication.

Neither was Morton and Morrison's utter lack of previous printing or publishing experience. "It was an advantage," Alex says. "We probably wouldn't have attempted it if we did have experience in that area."

He continues: "I remember going to Southdown Press [the original printers] where they were talking about point sizes and em rules and we didn't have a clue about any of those things..."

"We never complicated our lives with all that technical detail," Max adds.

"Our policy was if it looked okay to our eyes, then we reckoned it would be okay for the readers - it was as simple as that," says Alex.

For today's staff here at Trade-A-Boat, as well as our contributors and advertisers, it's becoming hard to remember - or imagine - those earlier days of publishing, when every word and photo had to be processed and physically stuck onto cardboard sheets before a magazine could be printed. In this age of clever computer programs, digital cameras and the Internet, much of the material in these pages is sent in to us via email or FTP site and when the pages are completed they are all sent as electronic files via computer from our Melbourne office to the printers, Rotary Offset in Sydney.

It wasn't like that in the early days of Trade-A-Boat, however. Max says: We only had a week to do it, and in that time I had to get all the photos together and mark them up, take them to Southdown Press and run them past their process camera, get all the typesetting done, take it all home and lay it out, then get it all back to Southdown Press for printing.

"Then I'd be off again on the next trip around the coast. We did an awful lot of miles..."

For a short while, some of those miles were covered by air rather than road, as Max sought to combine his own interest in piloting small aircraft with the demands of the new business (reflected also by the magazine's subtitle "Used Boats & Planes" during its first decade.

The first issue - dated July 1977 - only had 28 pages. Some of the brokers who advertised in that original Trade-A-Boat - people like Bob Holmes, David McKay and Maurie Drent, to name three examples - are still with the magazine today.

Max thinks the first print run was around 2000 copies, of which "we probably sold 1500." (Today's sales of Trade-A-Boat exceed 30,000 copies in peak months.)

To start with, Max says: "We listed everything free and charged a small commission if we sold it. Fortunately there were enough honest people around to keep us in money until some of the brokers began to see us as a threat - they thought we might be planning to start selling boats ourselves once we'd got the magazine up and running, which was something we never planned to do. But by that time we'd built the magazine up sufficiently that we could start charging a small amount per page, rather than a commission on sales."

Morton and Morrison say they never had to put in more capital than the initial investment of $8200, but neither of them drew an income from Trade-A-Boat for the first four years. Max says: "It supported itself to start with - we both had other income - but after four years it started to wear a bit thin. I did consider giving up on one or two occasions and if it wasn't for Alex's enthusiasm that's what we might have done. It all depended on Alex at that stage; he convinced me that it was about to take off, so we carried on."

Magazine sales gradually grew. "We used to deliver it to yacht chandlers and all sorts of places; that was one of my jobs on the way up and down the coast," Max says. "That's where all the yachties went to find it, until eventually the newsagent distribution took over."

The magazine was never free: "It always had a price tag on it, although sometimes we didn't get paid for every copy that sold," Alex says.

Max thinks the tide starting to turn when sales reached somewhere around the 6000 figure. "I'm pretty sure that was where it started to take off."

By this time the number of pages had increased markedly, too. "When it started we thought if it got to 50 or 60 pages we'd have a successful magazine," Max says. By 1984, Trade-A-Boat was regularly sized at more than 300 pages.

The publication weathered an early threat to its existence mounted by the advertising department of a large metropolitan daily, which sought to woo the boat brokers away by citing large circulation figures compared to those of Trade-A-Boat. Max says that when brokers withdrew their ads from Trade-A-Boat, however, they found their phones stopped ringing. He says: "What we had was different - with a circulation of 4000 or whatever we had then, that was 4000 boatbuyers. Plus we had very low costs."

Alex agrees: "Our cost structure was fairly carefully controlled. I was always trying to economise on costs; I was always a miserable bugger."

Early changes included the addition of staff - Pam Milner, the first field representative Morton and Morrison appointed in 1979, is still busy to this day visiting brokers around northern NSW on behalf of Trade-A-Boat. And magazine production was shifted to the Williamstown office, where a photo typesetting machine was installed.

Pam recalls visiting the office and finding scenes of apparent disorder. Alex and Max laugh when told of this recollection, but Alex is quick to say: "The system we set up was crude but simple. It was robust, there were no complications about it - and it worked."

There was much to learn along the way. Max says: "We were inexperienced; we didn't realise the value of commercial advertising at first. I remember a paint company rang up and wanted to buy a page and we thought, well, a yacht broker's page is worth $80 or whatever, and we don't really want a paint company for $80, so we said 'go away, we don't want you.' They probably couldn't believe their ears!.

"But we learnt as we went, and as we got a bit wiser we'd say to companies wanting to place an ad, well, we'll charge you twice what the yacht brokers would pay for that space."

Alex says: "That wasn't a bad thing because one of the strengths of Trade-A-Boat was always that it was all straight, hard content - hard information for boat buyers - and it was accessible, a place where people could say 'I've got this boat to sell, this is what it looks like and this is how much I'd like to get for it'.

"We tried to cultivate the private ads; they give the magazine credibility and people think I might find a bargain here."

The innovative approach taken by a number of the brokers also added strength to the publication. Max says: "I remember a powerboat broker in Cairns bought the back page and every photo he used showed boats that were sunk or a wreck or something. He ran ads like 'historic schooner, once the pride of Queensland coast, needs some restoration', and there'd be a photo of some ribs sticking out of the sand..."

Another broker once advertised the US battleship Missouri for sale in these pages, Morton recalls.

As Trade-A-Boat flourished, Morton extended the concept to a series of new publications. He and Morrison launched a real property version, which failed, so when Morton floated his next magazine idea, Deals on Wheels, for the trucking industry, Morrison declined the opportunity to be involved. Morton launched it with another partner, following up with Unique Cars and Auto Supermarket. All were winners.

Alex says: "Max was the innovator; he always has been. He is a man full of ideas, some of which are utter rubbish, but the 10th one is magnificent. The challenge is to sort them out...

"Give me a better percentage rate than that, Alex!" Max says. "Give me at least one in five..."

By the mid-1980s, the four thriving titles were attracting interest from the big end of town. In 1986 Australian Consolidated Press made "an offer we couldn't refuse", Morton says, buying the four magazines and retaining his services as a director for several more years. The man who made the offer was Gregg Haythorpe, who is Trader International's CEO today.

During the next few years ACP went on to launch several more successful titles - 4x4 Trader and Farms & Farm Machinery.

Trade-A-Boat has continued to flourish in the ACP stable, which now includes an entire division, called Trader International Group, devoted to publishing magazines inspired by the original Trade-A-Boat concept.

Within TIG is the Pacific Marine Media group, publisher of Trade-A-Boat and its successful younger siblings Trailer Boat and BlueWater Boats and Sportsfishing, and Australia's most popular marine website, BoatPoint.

Appropriately for a special anniversary year, the PMM group is also embarking on an exciting new venture, to launch a large-format, high quality quarterly powercruising title called Big Boat, based on its former annual title, Big Boat Collection. The new Big Boat is scheduled for release at next month's Sydney International Boat Show, coinciding with a special function to celebrate Trade-A-Boat's 25th birthday.

It all seems a long way from the original 28-page booklet that Max and Alex produced in July 1977. Morton has gone on to establish a business which organises Computer Swap Meets, while Morrison "plays with financial stuff", is the immediate past commodore of the Royal Yacht Club of Victoria and recently sold his classic Eight-Metre yacht, Frances.

Trade-A-Boat, meanwhile, remains firmly committed to its original concept of providing - "a marvellous way to sell a boat, with a photo!"

Here's to those first 25 years - and the next 25...