Celebrating 40 Years

On July 23, 1981, Steve Zimmerman opened Zimmerman Marine.

A note from Steve:

Four decades?…that’s hard to believe.  In 1981 I started Zimmerman Marine at the age of 27. Fortunately, I didn’t know much about business – if I had, I would have talked myself out of it. Three years in we could barely pay our bills and it seemed like an insurmountable hill. I went to see an accountant and he told me he would study the numbers and get back to me. He called a few days later and told me he knew what the problem was and told me to come in the next day. When I arrived, he slid the pile of financial statements across the table and said, “Your problem is, you are bankrupt and you don’t know it.” He wanted to be paid before I left.

The boat that stole my heart and launched me into boatbuilding--the ketch, ROSA II

That evening I sat down with a legal pad and starting writing down ideas for how to save and grow my fledgling foundering boat yard. I stayed at it until I filled the page. And sure enough, slowly but surely, we started to climb out of the hole. We’ve grown from a small yard with an old railway on Mobjack Bay, to an employee-owned company with seven locations and about 85 employees. There never was a grand plan -just continual adjustments to the prevailing conditions. A course change here, a sail trim there, next thing you know a lot of miles are under your keel.

Employee owned feels so right to me – what better way to honor and acknowledge the hard work and dedication they have contributed that translated into our success?

Forty years sounds like a long time, but it doesn’t feel that way. We are always between our bow wave and our wake, and I have always found the bow wave more interesting. Sometimes it is nice to look back at the fading patterns in our wake, but I remain intrigued and excited by what lies ahead.