How Freedom Boat Club of Northeast Florida modernized fleet ops across 135 vessels.
At a glance
135
Vessels managed across the franchise.
24/7
Reservation coverage on voice and chat.
5
Dock locations unified under one platform.
2024
FBC Technology Trendsetter of the Year.
About the customer
A five-dock franchise with a mandate to lead.
FBC Northeast Florida operates five dock locations and 135 vessels across the Jacksonville corridor. The franchise was founded by an operator who wanted software that actually matched the way a modern boat club runs. After six months of running BoatTech across all five docks, the platform is being productized for other operators. The franchise has been recognized as the 2024 FBC Technology Trendsetter of the Year.
The challenge
Six tools, two spreadsheets, and a whiteboard.
Reservations, membership, and service lived in different systems that barely talked.
Member calls went to voicemail on the weekend, and the Monday cleanup burned hours.
Inspections piled up on a shared drive nobody read until something broke.
The approach
One tool at a time. Operators first. Ship weekly.
Month 0 · AI Voice and SMS
The first tool shipped was the one that made the most member-facing pain disappear: 24/7 coverage on calls and text, with reservation and service intake built in.
Month 1 · Fleet Inspection AI
Claude Vision compares photos per vessel, overnight. The first morning report replaced three weeks of backlog.
Month 3 · Churn & LTV Dashboard
The Monday call list went from intuition to signal. Member-success stopped calling the wrong people first.
Month 5 · MarineOps AMS
The service workflow became real software: templates, estimates, PDF invoices, Fleetio sync, a Socket.IO board.
Month 6 · Fishing Companion
A member-facing PWA gave anglers a reason to open the club's app — not a competitor's.
Results
Early signal, honestly labeled.
We won't publish hard numbers in public copy until we can stand behind them. Methodology: cohort comparison vs. prior year; full details under NDA.
Same-minute
Off-hour call handling, up from voicemail-to-Monday.
Next-morning
Inspection-to-flag cycle, up from weeks.
Weekly
Retention call list in the member-success workflow.
Fleetio-clean
Service records reconciling across parts, labor, and invoices.
Network-leading
Post-trip survey response rate across the FBC system.
Growing
Weekly active usage on the Fishing Companion app.
The short version: the back office stopped being the reason our members had a bad day. And the dock managers started going home on time.
What's next
Productization for the network.
The same platform is being prepared for the rest of the FBC franchise system and for independent operators. Brunswick-level rollups, franchisee-level tenancy, and the same suite of AI tools — ready to deploy across 100+ locations.
SOC 2 Type I in progress. AES-256 at rest, TLS 1.3 in transit. Customer data is never used to train foundation models.