ArticleBringing accountability to the dock

We have spoken with hundreds of businesses across the country and there is one thing that we have consistently heard. How difficult it is to get your 18-22 year old dockhands to follow the right procedures to best protect the business. Too often we hear of signatures that never get signed on waivers and rental agreements or safety briefing steps being missed. All of these things can leave your business open to liability if left unchecked. While we know the majority of owners make this a priority, it is unfortunately impossible for the owners to launch every boat themselves. Because of this, we needed to dive deeper into the problem and identify the core issues driving the pain point. What we found is that there was a lack of incentives for dockhands to facilitate the process the right way. Currently, for a dockhand, you are going to be paid and the owners will be happy as long as renters are getting out on the water and money is coming in the door. The only time blow back would occur is when that once in a blue moon scenario happens where there is an incident. Unfortunately, in this industry, those situations happen all too often...and when they do it can be catastrophic.

This issue couldn’t be ignored, so we worked with our business partners to identify a solution and bring accountability to the dock. We implemented proprietary technology to give business owners oversight on exactly what is going on at the dock through our vQRecord function that allows all rental launch processes to be recorded on the tablet. We have also accomplished creating incentives for the dockhand by linking payments (including their tip) to successfully completing the required safety steps that we facilitate through the system. Now dockhands are more incenvitzed than ever through vQuip to have the owners best interests in mind as it can directly affect what is going in their pocket. Overall, being able to create this level of accountability and incentive for your dockhands will create a safer rental experience for your customers and provide more peace of mind as a rental business owner.