Marina CFO services: financing an eight-month season

Cash flow across a season, not a calendar

Slip and storage deposits arrive concentrated in spring and fall, boat sales cluster around the winter and spring shows through the summer, and payroll, floorplan interest, and fixed dock costs continue through the quiet months regardless. Property taxes, shoreline maintenance, and insurance renewals often land in the same off-season window as the deepest part of the cash trough, and a forecast that misses that overlap is the one that gets a marina into a line-of-credit conversation it did not see coming. A generic monthly budget smooths all of that away and hides the real risk, which is a cash trough in the off-season deep enough to force a bad decision in February. We build a rolling forecast — similar in spirit to the 13-week cash flow forecast approach — mapped to the marina's actual seasonal pattern rather than an even twelve-month split.

The forecast also has to account for the timing mismatch between when a boat sale is agreed and when the floorplan payoff and cash actually land, since a strong order book in January does not turn into cash until units are delivered months later. Deposits collected on those same January orders are real cash in hand well before delivery, so the forecast has to track deposit timing separately from delivery timing rather than assuming the two arrive together.

Sizing the floorplan build before the shows, not after

Because new-boat inventory is largely ordered once ahead of the winter and spring boat shows, the floorplan decision is really one annual bet on how many units the coming season can move. Overbuy and unsold units carry interest and curtailment payments into a season that has already ended; underbuy and the strongest weeks of the year sell out of inventory you do not have. We size that bet from last season's actual sell-through by model and price point, not from what a manufacturer's allocation happens to offer.

Slip and storage yield: occupancy is not the whole story

A marina at 95 percent slip occupancy priced below market is leaving money on the table just as surely as one with empty slips, and the two problems look identical on an occupancy report alone. We track yield — revenue per slip against what comparable capacity could command — alongside occupancy, and use the waitlist, if one exists, as pricing information rather than just a sign of demand to be proud of. A long, stable waitlist for a particular slip size is usually the clearest signal a marina has that next season's pricing can move without losing tenants.

The same yield discipline applies to winter storage, which is often priced as an afterthought to the slip business even though it can carry margins that rival or beat the boating season itself once heated indoor storage and shrink-wrap services are factored in properly rather than bundled at a flat rate.

Is this one business or three?

Sales, service, and slips have different margins, different seasonality, and different capital needs, and treating them as one blended profit and loss statement makes it hard to tell which is actually funding the others. A season where boat sales are soft but slip and storage revenue holds steady can still look like a bad year on the combined number, when the more useful read is that one segment underperformed while another carried the business through it. We build segment-level numbers for each so decisions — expanding dock capacity, investing in the service department, or leaning harder into boat sales — get made against the segment's own economics, not the combined average. In practice, slip and storage revenue is often the most stable and highest-margin of the three once it is isolated, and seeing that clearly tends to change how an owner thinks about growth priorities. That segmentation also feeds directly into whether the business should be structured as one corporation or more, covered on our incorporation page, and it starts with clean books from our marina bookkeeping service.