Superyacht The ISSUE 123

REPORTFORGET ME NOTA visit to Benetti’s Livorno yard and an examination of the striking FB252 as she neared completion.Page 80

MALAYSIAN POTENTIALA close-up of a haul-out facility that’s located right in the middle of Asian cruising grounds.Page 94

TALES FROM THE SEALessons to be learned from experienced captains around the world.37

ISSUE 123MAY 2011

SuperyachtTheT R U T H • O P I N I O N K N O W L E D G E • I D E A S A N D E X P E R T I N D U S T R Y A N A L Y S I S

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123 covers DPS.indd 2123 covers DPS.indd 2 15/04/2011 15:2315/04/2011 15:23

THE SUPERYACHT REPORT

90 ISSUE 123

PROFILE | FRANCOIS VAN WELL

The Japanese martial art of Aikido teaches students to blend

with the motion of the attacker to redirect the force of the attack, rather than opposing it with brute force. President of the Superyacht Division of Merle Wood & Associates in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Francois van Well, is a practitioner. His time in the dojo informs his approach to making deals.

“Aikido clears your mind and allows you to focus on what’s going on, on the mat,” he said of the sport. “It really is the physical mirror image of what I do in my verbal world and intellectual world when I’m doing business. To be able to have that and see the parallels and be able to move and interact with people in that fashion is very enlightening and provides great peace of mind.”

The sale of a superyacht is an infi nitely complex, detail-oriented, emotionally driven transaction. The brute force offer/counter offer techniques that take place on car lots and in real estate rarely apply when closing the sale of an 80-million-dollar luxury item. The success van Well has had in his short tenure as a yacht broker suggests that his cerebral, philosophical approach to the ancient art of selling may have some merit.

Van Well, 41, is an intense, engaging, type-A personality with a high-beam smile and the ability to speak with authority in Dutch-infl ected English on

a host of subjects from international relations to the relative merits of different hull shapes. A native of The Netherlands, he moved to the United States in 2007. While he is a relative novice at the brokerage game, having joined Merle Wood & Associates in 2010, his roots in the yachting industry run deep, covering naval architecture, design, project management and yacht marketing. He’s a well-known and well-liked character in the superyacht world.

Van Well’s journey to Merle Wood & Associates from his birthplace in Breda, in The Netherlands, is infused with a passion for boats. He built his fi rst boat with his father when he was 10. After receiving an International Baccalaureat at the United World College of the Atlantic in Wales, he pursued a Master of Science degree in Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering at the Technical University of Delft. After a brief period on his own designing small sail and motoryachts, van Well joined the Maritime Research Institute Netherlands (MARIN) as a project manager and account manager dealing with navies, shipbuilders and yachtbuilders on a variety of fronts.

In 1997, he joined De Voogt Ship Design as a naval architect. There he provided both Feadship yards with design and naval architecture services and worked on various technical projects. The next year found him working as sales and marketing manager at Feadship’s Royal Van Lent Shipyard and later, installed as its commercial director. He moved to Fort Lauderdale in 2006 to serve as president of Feadship America.

While van Well’s background provided him with a deep understanding of many aspects of the superyacht industry from machinery to marketing, and while he enabled many deals and had an extensive list of client relationships, he never actually closed a deal in which he had a direct fi nancial stake.

He had worked with Merle Wood on projects while he was at Van Lent and developed an admiration for Wood’s success, his centralised approach to the business and his commitment to the myriad details of making deals. With some business still underway between them, the two men met regularly for lunch in Fort Lauderdale. Eventually Wood offered him a position at his fi rm. After van Well became satisfi ed he had Feadship America where it needed to be and the company’s marketing department in The Netherlands in order, he accepted the position with Wood and hasn’t looked back. “At 40, I wanted to do something else,”

Black Belt BrokerFrancois van Well was commercial director of Royal Van Lent before moving to Florida to become president of Feadship America. Now president of broker Merle Wood’s Superyacht Division, he refl ects on the peculiar art of selling yachts, what he’s learned from his venerable boss, and lessons from the dojo.

“I’m not really doing it for the money. I just love to make the deals happen. In that sense, I’m also a deal junkie. I want to get things done.”

By Kenny Wooton

TYR123 pp90-92 van Well Interview.indd 90TYR123 pp90-92 van Well Interview.indd 90 07/04/2011 13:3207/04/2011 13:32

ISSUE 123 91


he explained. “I wanted to learn something new again.”

Van Well says it was diffi cult to leave behind a good job with a premium marque like Feadship, but he felt representing a company with a single product, a single brand, and only new builds, had become limiting. The job at Merle Wood provides him the opportunity to use his evolved communications skills, his numerous client relationships worldwide and his love of the deal, and, working on commission, ultimately to provide a better future for himself and his family.

Unlike many of the larger brokerage houses such as Fraser, Edmiston, Burgess and Camper & Nicholsons, which operate offi ces in many locations, Merle Wood & Associates has just two: Fort Lauderdale and a two-broker satellite operation in Newport, Rhode Island. Between them there are about 18 brokers. The Superyacht Division, which comprises six brokers, generally deals with yachts of 45m or so, and up.

The Production and Custom Division deals with everything else. According to van Well, those lines are not carved in stone; rather, they’re based more on relationships between brokers and customers. Having almost everyone

in the fi rm on one fl oor in one building lends itself to cooperation that may not be prevalent in other brokerages, van Well proposes – an arrangement he cites as a major draw for him. While he is president of the Superyacht Division, he says the organisation of the fi rm, in practice, is not so hierarchical or bureaucratic.

“We believe very much in a centralised solution where close communication between colleagues is essential to maintaining an intimate

grasp of the market,” he said. “With the group we have, I don’t think there are many questions we wouldn’t be able to answer in 15 minutes. That’s something that makes us very powerful.”

While van Well is a seasoned industry veteran, he is relatively new to the brokerage business. He speaks with admiration of Merle Wood as a mentor. “He’s the ultimate deal junkie,” he said of Wood. “He does it 20 hours a day, seven days a week. A whole transaction is an accumulation of tiny little steps. At the end of the

day, deals don’t get done if people drop things off the table. Merle taught me to be persistent and tenacious about those things. On a personal basis, I can very much appreciate the way he is in business and in life,” he added. “He’s the best around at making deals. It’s always good to be around somebody who’s the best at what they do.”

Van Well says one of the reasons Wood hired him was his international experience and contacts. He has

extensive experience doing business on the international stage, but he says it was his years at the United World College of the Atlantic, which had students from 65 countries, that taught him some key lessons about life that have served him throughout his career. “The experience gave me a great lesson in diplomacy, cultural differences and communication,” he said. “One thing I picked up from that is, communication is about the receiver. It’s never about the sender.”

Communication lies at the heart of his approach to selling. “At the end of the day, you can’t really sell anybody anything,” van Well said. “They have to want to buy it. That may sound contradictory for a salesman, but that means you have to be ready 24 hours a day, seven days a week and be able to observe your clients and be able to recognise the signals when they’re ready to do something. If they’re switched off, there’s no point in talking loud. The moment you feel in your clients’ communication and signals that they’re ready to talk, that’s when you need to engage. I practise that on a different level in the martial art of Aikido.”

He’s well aware, though, that it’s the numbers that count. Closing deals is the prime directive. The measure of a yacht broker’s success and survival

“At the end of the day, you can’t really sell anybody anything. They have to want to buy it. That may sound contradictory for a salesman, but that means you have to be ready 24 hours a day.”



PROFILE | FRANCOIS VAN WELL

depends on getting pens on paper. “The commission structure is very motivating,” he said. “We are judged by our performance. No deal, no money. The irony of it is, I’m not really doing it for the money. I just love to make the deals happen. In that sense, I’m also a deal junkie. I want to get things done.”

And get them done he has. He has several signifi cant sales and listings to his credit, including closing on the 61m Feadship Secret. He considers the moment the Secret deal was signed – his fi rst as broker – a professional high-water mark.

Coming into the rough-and-tumble world of brokering yachts when the industry was deep into the most challenging moments in its history had some questioning his sanity. He shrugs off questions about whether he regrets his decision. “You know what?”

he said without hesitation, “no.”

He sees a tough road ahead for the industry. He notes the fact that the last of the boom-time boats will launch next year and he proposes there will be a shakeout. “There are going to be quite a few players who won’t be able to make it past the next two years,” he said. “The strong will survive and the weak won’t make it. But this time it’s happening on a bigger scale and it’s been amplifi ed.”

Van Well says he’s happy in America and now considers it home. He’s married to an American, with whom he has a young son. Broker-heavy Fort Lauderdale can be a pressure cooker, but he assimilates the good things and minimises the bad. “If you enjoy the plus side of it here in Florida – the weather, the water, the ease of living – then you can put up with the other stuff,” he said.

His ideal day would be to have his three children together (two by a previous marriage live in Australia), to spend some time fi shing from his small centre console, to spend 15 minutes on the phone and close a deal and to fi nish off at the dojo working out with his Aikido pals.

“People say, ‘You’re a really nice guy’,” van Well said. “I say, I work for a company that allows me to be a nice guy.” Nice guy? Without a doubt. But behind the quick smile and engaging demeanour lies an astute negotiator who’s equipped to apply the mental acuity of the martial arts to the ancient art of the deal.

To comment on this article, email [email protected] with subject: Black Belt Broker


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