November 2006

The best thing since SDG&E energy rebates and the motorboat

Knight & Carver YachtCenter hired Sam Brown in 2001 to turn around the company and open up more revenue channels. Man, was that a smart move.

The National City-based company had long been known for its yacht-building and yacht-repairing capabilities since it first opened up its doors in 1971. According to Brown, however, building yachts, surprisingly, was getting to be an increasingly tough business to be in-culminating in the '90s, when many yacht-building companies underbid jobs and lost money in the process.

Truth be told, Knight & Carver was not immune to what was going on and needed some revival. In steps, Brown and the company began to reinvent itself. Well, sort of.

"When I came in, one of the challenges was to take the company and competencies that existed and make money," says now President and CEO Brown, adding that one of those areas he looked to expand immediately was yacht repair, while scaling down the yacht-building side of the operations.

Then he started to tackle other areas related to the business, the first being its small wind blade division. Brown admits that he quickly realized that there was money to be made in the fast-growing wind industry. Not wanting to pass up the opportunity, he soon began to expand the division. In 2003, Knight & Carver YachtCenter was awarded a six-month, $2.3 million contract by Florida Power & Light, a wind-energy-generation company in Juno, Fla., to produce 400 blades. The wind blade division, which was already growing, got a big boost in May 2006, when Knight & Carver was honored by the U.S. Department of Energy for its $2.8 million shared-cost research and development project that will soon lead to the production of a blade that can produce energy in low wind speed regions throughout the country.

Says Brown, "That's an innovation that we hope will carry us forward."

Knight & Carver's other recent major innovation appeared in the form of a military vessel. Spawned by its decades of boat-building experience, the company contracted with San Diego-based M Ship Co. and the U.S. Department of Defense's Office of Force Transformation to build the $6 million M80 Stiletto, believed to be the largest carbon-fiber vessel ever built and one of the world's fastest boats, reaching speeds of up to 55 to 60 mph during sea trials. Revolutionary carbon fiber construction and its innovative hull design enable the 88-foot vessel to operate in shallow water, with little or no wake for stealth travel.