A STORY IN MOTION

It all began in 2005, when I got the job as Charlie and Gary’s joint PA. My experience of yachting was limited at that point to a first post-graduate job at Sunseeker, but Charlie and Gary made sure I was exposed to different aspects of the business very quickly. Soon, I started working for Gary as his Executive PA, looking at broader business interests and given my own ad-hoc client projects to run with. In 2014, when the business was growing significantly, I was promoted to Chief Strategy Officer, and then to Managing Director in 2017. Both promotions took me by surprise, if I’m honest. But it’s typical of Charlie and Gary to push people out of their comfort zone and give them the support they need to grow. A combination their continued mentoring, executive education and coaching helped me hugely, as did, and still do, all of my colleagues at Y.CO. Our team is very supportive and multi-disciplined, allowing us all to continually learn from each other and evolve together.

Some might call it being thrown in at the deep end. But in fact it’s about allowing people continual opportunity. And if at first you don’t know how to do something, you work it out pretty quickly!

Sometimes, though, the quieter moments can be just as rewarding. The ones when you’re just watching your colleagues going about their day, and you reflect on how much they’ve grown as people since they started at the company, how much responsibility they’ve taken on, how much they’ve achieved. Opportunity is everywhere at Y.CO. Luckily we tend to attract the type of people who want to really go for it. And that’s why we now have an incredible richness and diversity of expertise in-house.

There’s a lot of talk about sustainability in yachting. There has to be. For us, sustainability is about respect for each other, and the planet. About supporting people in remote destinations that yachts are privileged to have access to, and understanding what teams and crew members need from the places they live and work, such as compatible hiring, and maintaining an environment that nurtures and empowers individuals. And it’s of course about helping to minimise the industry’s footprint in whatever ways we can – from helping to research plastic pollution in our oceans, to supporting pioneering new energy programs in the destinations we sail to, to helping our fleet measure, understand and improve their operational efficiency.

How has the industry changed in the two decades I’ve worked within it? Perhaps one of the most significant changes is that yachting has become just as much about the people that bring that asset to life as the asset itself and the life-defining experiences they help to create. It’s now pretty much universally recognised that there’s no ‘super’ in superyacht without a motivated, inspired and responsible crew. Owners have become increasingly altruistic, using their yachts for greater purpose. And inclusive hiring practices have meant that the yachting industry is no longer the male-dominated, socially confined world that it used to be. There are some extraordinary women working as shipside engineers and captains, now, and many brilliant people have progressed through the industry that would not have had the same opportunity to do so 20 years ago.