How We Calculate ROI
The boat builder ROI calculator makes a claim about your money. This page is where that claim is checked — every default, where it came from, and the ones no industry body publishes at all.
The Model, in One Paragraph
Eight cost lines a boat builder carries today because the build and the handover run on phone calls, email, paper and memory. Each line is a quantity you know about your own business, times a cost that can be sourced or that you can price yourself, times the share the platform removes. You can edit all three. Seven lines are direct savings; the eighth — repeat purchase — is upside, and it is switched off by default, so nothing in the headline depends on a loyalty argument.
Four rules the calculator follows
1. Never lead with a product claim. Every line starts from a fact about your business, not ours.
2. Removal is never 100%. The share the platform takes out runs 25–90% depending on the line. Nothing is modelled as eliminated.
3. Published anchors where they exist; labelled assumptions where they do not. Every input on this page is marked sourced, derived or your number. Nothing is presented as a benchmark unless a real source says it.
4. One model everywhere. The full calculator and the three per-tab calculators run the same arithmetic on the same inputs. Numbers you type follow you between tabs.
Why It Shows a Range and Not a Number
A single large number reads as a vendor claim. The calculator computes three calibrations of the same model on every keystroke and leads with the band between Documented and Full exposure. The two facts that are actually yours — boats delivered a year, and average selling price — are never overwritten when you switch between them.
| Calibration | What it uses | Per year | Per boat | % of hull |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Stress test | The most hostile reading — every assumption at its lowest at once. A floor, not a forecast, and not an end of the headline band. | $44,036 | $4,404 | 0.18% |
| Documented | Every figure that has a published source behind it, at the top of its range; the ones nobody publishes held at credible values. | $151,444 | $15,144 | 0.61% |
| Full exposure | Everything the research supports, including the figures only you can confirm. | $248,782 | $24,878 | 1.00% |
At ten boats a year and a $2.5M average selling price, with the repeat-purchase upside off. Change either figure and all three move with you. Edit anything else and the calculator stops claiming a calibration and says Your numbers instead — a preset that stayed lit after you had changed it would be dishonest.
Why the headline band starts at Documented, not at the stress test
The stress test is built by setting every input to its minimum simultaneously — which is the mirror image of Full exposure, and exactly as unrealistic. Spanning both would give a 5.6× band, and a range that wide reads as “we do not know” rather than as analysis.
So the headline runs Documented to Full exposure, a 1.6× band. The stress test stays one click away, honestly labelled, for anyone who wants to know what survives the most hostile reading of our own research. That is a question we think you should be able to ask.
Read the top of the band as what it is
Every input in Full exposure sits at the top of a researched range, and no single one exceeds what the evidence supports. But setting fifteen inputs to their high simultaneously describes a builder who is worst-case on every dimension at once. Any one line is defensible; the combination is improbable. That is exactly why the sliders are there — walk them down to your own operation and the number that comes out is the one worth discussing.
Every Input, and Where It Comes From
Defaults shown are the Full exposure calibration. The band is the low and high supported by the research; the calculator will let you go outside it, because your records beat our range.
Your profile
| Input | Band | Default | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Boats delivered per year | — | 10 | your number Yours. Never overwritten by a calibration. |
| Average selling price | — | $2,500,000 | your number Yours. Never overwritten by a calibration. |
| Sales / project-management cost per hour | $40 – $105 | $105 | derived Boat-building wages from BLS OEWS, escalated to a May 2025 basis and burdened using Employer Costs for Employee Compensation (×1.43–1.50). A project manager works out at about $81/hour and a general or operations manager at about $105. Federal data counts 3,160 project management specialists in ship and boat building against 330 customer service reps — at 5–50 hulls a year, the call lands on a manager. |
| Share of the build you fund yourself | 8% – 15% | 15% | sourced Sanlorenzo publishes net working capital at 10.4% of revenues (FY2025); Ferretti derives to 12.6–13.1%. Customer milestone payments fund most of a build — but all three listed builders report positive working capital, so “the customer funds everything” is false and checkable. |
| Your cost of money | 4.8% – 9.0% | 9.0% | sourced US bank prime 6.75% (Federal Reserve H.15, 3 September 2026), plus the marine floor-plan spread of up to 2.25 points. European builders should use roughly 5.5%. |
| Warranty cost as % of sales | 1.0% – 3.5% | 3.5% | derived Bracketed, not measured. Floor from Ferretti’s disclosed provisions line (0.8–2.7% of revenues — and that line also contains impairment, so true warranty sits below it); ceiling from US production builders’ SEC-filed accruals (1.5–3.7%). |
| Share of warranty telematics can see and you warrant | 15% – 40% | 40% | your number Engines, generators, stabilisers and thrusters are usually warranted by the companies that made them, not by the yard. Your own exposure is gelcoat, joinery, delamination, leaks and finish — none of which appears on a data bus. Most custom yards will answer well under 30%. |
| Years each boat stays supported | 1 – 10 | 3 | Mirrors the three-year telematics subscription included with the platform. |
| EBITDA margin | 15.8% – 18.8% | 17% | sourced Sanlorenzo 18.8% FY2025 / 17.7% H1-2026; Ferretti 16.5% / 15.8%. Listed custom builders report by nature under IFRS and disclose no gross margin line at all, so a gross margin here would be invented. Used only by the repeat-purchase upside. |
1 · Status calls and updates
boats × calls per build × (minutes ÷ 60) × staff cost per hour × share removed
| Input | Band | Default | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Status calls per build | — | 12 | your number No published source exists for status-call volume. Ask a sales coordinator to tally two builds. |
| Minutes per call, including looking it up | — | 15 | your number |
| Removed by self-serve status | — | 80% | Our estimate. The whole point of a status page is that the call does not happen. |
If you object that a salesperson takes the call rather than a project manager: boat-building sales reps run about $79/hour burdened. There is no role at a custom yard that makes $65 an hour look inflated.
2 · Delays waiting on the customer
financing per day = price × share you fund × cost of money ÷ 365
slot per day = (price × contribution margin ÷ build days) × share unrecoverable
annual = boats × share delayed × days × share removed × (financing + slot)
| Input | Band | Default | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Builds delayed by a customer action | — | 25% | your number |
| Average delay | — | 10 days | your number |
| Delay removed by action items and reminders | — | 60% | Our estimate. |
| Contribution margin on a boat | 20% – 32% | 32% | your number |
| Working days to build one boat | 200 – 450 | 200 | your number |
| Of a day lost, how much you never get back | 0% – 50% | 50% | your number This is the weakest number in the model and it drives most of this line. No yacht-specific figure for overhead per build slot per day is published anywhere. If your yard is not capacity-constrained, set it to zero and only financing applies. |
Liquidated damages are deliberately excluded. Under standard yacht construction contracts a delay caused by the customer postpones the delivery date and is excused, so there is no penalty income to claim here.
3 · Selection errors and concessions
| Input | Band | Default | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Builds with a costly selection error | 5% – 25% | 25% | your number |
| Average rework or discount | $7,500 – $35,000 | $35,000 | derived Construction data on rework caused by poor data and miscommunication implies roughly 2.4% of project cost. We keep only 10–25% of that for a yacht yard, which gives $6,000–$15,000 of expected loss per hull. For scale: a professional two-part topside spray runs $3,000–$8,000 in labour on a 30-footer. |
| Removed by the audit trail | 30% – 70% | 70% | derived An audit trail removes ambiguity and attribution failure. It does not remove a yard misreading an unambiguous record, a supplier substitution, or an owner who changed his mind and denies it. |
Even at these figures the expected loss is $1,800 per hull — 0.072% of the build, still below the bottom of the discounted construction band. And the line counts only mis-captured decisions you absorb, never owner-requested changes you re-price and bill.
4 · After-hours support
| Input | Band | Default | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Technical contacts per boat per year | 3 – 15 | 15 | your number No published figure exists — not in marine, not in RV, not in powersports. Take five hulls delivered 12–24 months ago, count the warranty claims, service tickets and inbound calls from those owners, and divide by five. |
| Cost per contact, blended | $40 – $215 | $215 | derived $40 is phone-only, resolved first call, business hours — almost exactly half an hour of a loaded boat-building project manager. A dispatched visit is $250 call-out plus two hours at $190/hour specialty labour = $630, before overtime, weekend multipliers or mileage. Blend the two at a 10% escalation rate and you get about $100; the default assumes a harder mix. |
| Deflected by AI Mechanic® and orientation videos | 30% – 70% | 70% | Our product claim, and we label it as one. It stays an estimate until we can publish real deflection data from AI Mechanic® usage. |
A sense of scale for this line: six contacts at $100 is $600 per boat-year against a documented marine warranty spend of $27,500–$100,000 on a $2.5M hull. The conservative calibration captures under 1% of documented post-delivery cost.
5 · Paper handover kits
| Input | Band | Default | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Materials and assembly per kit | $200 – $1,200 | $1,200 | derived Built bottom-up from 2026 commercial printing, large-format schematic, binder, custom tab, branded USB and assembly-labour prices: about $167 for a thin black-and-white set, about $560 typical, about $1,855 for a multi-volume colour package. Page counts are our assumption, and they are the biggest swing factor in this line. |
| Eliminated | 50% – 90% | 90% | derived CE and RCD rules require an owner’s manual, safety documentation is conventionally carried aboard on paper, and equipment makers ship their own. What goes away is duplicate sets and reprints on revision, not the primary set. |
This line is a garnish, not a headline. The dominant cost of yacht documentation is authoring, not printing — and that is a larger number than anything modelled here.
6 · Warranty claims avoided
| Input | Band | Default | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Claims avoided with an operating record | 0.5% – 5% | 5% | derived Our reasoned estimate, not a fetched statistic. No source states a figure for this in any industry, and we will not invent a citation for one. The high case needs all of: a data-access condition in your own warranty, systems you warrant yourself rather than pass through, and a willingness to actually adjudicate. |
What this line is not
It is not claim denial. In heavy equipment — the most telematics-mature industry there is — the trade position is that it would be myopic to use telematics data as a club to deny warranty coverage, and Caterpillar, with the deepest deployment in that industry, has never written telematics into its warranty instrument. On a $2.5M yacht the economics are worse still: win a $40,000 argument, lose one referral in a small and highly networked buyer pool, and you are down an order of magnitude.
What a verifiable operating record actually does is shorten arguments and discourage the marginal bad-faith claim, usually without a denial ever being issued. That is real, and it is why the default is 5% of a slice of your warranty bill rather than 10% of all of it.
7 · Warranty diagnosis and mobilisation
| Input | Band | Default | Basis |
|---|---|---|---|
| Warranty service visits per boat per year | 1 – 4 | 4 | your number No published marine figure exists. It is in your service records: technician hours per claim, mobilisation cost per claim, repeat-visit rate. |
| Cost to mobilise one service visit | $400 – $1,200 | $1,200 | derived $250 call-out plus two hours at $190/hour specialty technician = $630, taken straight from published yard rate cards and deliberately excluding overtime, weekend multipliers, the winter surcharge, mileage and any travel beyond the call-out. The high case is an overseas mobilisation, which on a cruising yacht is routine. |
| Visits avoided or shortened with fault data | 15% – 40% | 40% | your number |
This is what every mature connected platform actually sells, and the published examples say so plainly: a fault found over the weekend, the dealer and manufacturer notified automatically, and by Monday morning the claim created, the part ordered and the visit scheduled. The boat is in the Mediterranean and the yard is in Florida — knowing the fault before the technician flies turns two trips into one.
8 · Repeat purchase — upside, off by default
Default 3% of deliveries, band 1–5%, and it is your number. The line is switched off unless you turn it on, and the headline never includes it. We looked hard for a defensible marine loyalty statistic — SuperYacht Times, Fraser, SuperyachtNews, the Monaco Yacht Show report, Edmiston and Northrop & Johnson — and none publishes a repeat-versus-first-time split. Rather than quote something unverifiable, we left the lever off.
Two Formulas That Are Ours, Not a Citation
Both replaced earlier versions of this calculator that were wrong. We are publishing what changed, because a model that names its own limits survives scrutiny and one that does not gets discarded whole the first time an objection lands.
The cost of a delay
The first version applied a dealer floor-plan rate to the full retail price of the boat. Floor plan is what a dealer pays to carry finished inventory he already owns — it is not what a builder pays on work in progress that customer milestone payments are largely funding. The financing term was overstated by roughly nine and a half times.
It happened to land near the right answer only because it left out the real cost of a delay entirely: the build slot. With order books running well above annual revenue, a lost slot-day is lost throughput. The formula now models both, and the slot term is a slider you can set to zero.
What telematics is worth on a warranty bill
The first version claimed 10% of warranty cost avoided because telematics proves operator misuse, and that one line drove three quarters of the total. It would not have survived a serious conversation. The systems telemetry can see are mostly warranted by the companies that made them rather than by the yard; nobody in a telematics-mature industry actually denies claims this way; and 10% happens to equal the published estimate of total warranty fraud across all industries — a figure a CFO will recognise on sight.
It is now two lines. A small claims-avoidance term applied only to the share of warranty you carry yourself and that a vessel’s data can see, plus a larger and far better-founded line for diagnosis and mobilisation — knowing what is wrong before anyone books a flight.
What We Do Not Know
Seven inputs in this model have no published source anywhere, and between them they carry a large share of the total. We would rather you heard that from us.
| What is missing | Why it matters | How you close it |
|---|---|---|
| Support contacts per boat per year | The largest single line at the top calibration rests on it. | Five hulls delivered 12–24 months ago: count claims, tickets and inbound contacts, divide by five. |
| Warranty service visits per boat per year | Drives the diagnosis-and-mobilisation line. | Your service records already hold it, along with what a visit costs you to mobilise. |
| How much of a lost day you never get back | Judgment, not evidence, and it drives most of the delay line. | You know whether your yard is capacity-constrained. Set it to zero if it is not. |
| Our own deflection rate | The share of technical questions AI Mechanic® resolves is our claim until we publish usage data. | We are collecting it. Until then, treat it as an estimate and move the slider. |
| Custom-builder warranty accrual | No custom or semi-custom yacht builder publishes a warranty-specific number, so ours is a bracket between European provisions lines and US builders’ SEC filings. | Yours is the only real one, and you have it. |
| What a handover documentation package actually contains | Page counts are our assumption and they swing the paper-kit line. | Weigh one. Genuinely. |
Sources
All fetched and read September 2026.
Warranty cost
- Brunswick Corporation FY2025 Form 10-K — warranty provisions $113.6M against net sales of $5,362.8M (2.12%); FY2024, 1.59%. SEC filing
- Malibu Boats FY2026 Form 10-K — $29.8M against $914.6M (3.26%); FY2025, 3.67%. The same note carves out components “separately warranted by the manufacturer or supplier (such as the engine).” SEC filing
- MasterCraft FY2025 Form 10-K — 2.26%. SEC filing · Marine Products FY2025 — 1.58%, and states that component claim costs “are generally absorbed by the original component manufacturer.” SEC filing
- Ferretti Group 2025 Annual Report — the disclosed “provisions and impairment” line runs 0.81–2.71% of revenues across 2023–2025, and it mixes warranty with impairment and bad debt. Annual report
- Warranty Week, 22nd Annual Product Warranty Report (2024 data) — US manufacturers averaged 1.329% of product sales on warranty claims. Report
The US and European figures are not like-for-like. Under IFRS much warranty work is charged straight to cost of sales, so European provision lines understate true spend against a US accrual; and a balance-sheet provision stock covers a 12–24 month tail and must not be divided by one year of revenue.
Working capital, margin and cost of money
- Sanlorenzo FY2025 results — net working capital +€99.8M, 10.4% of revenues; EBITDA margin 18.8%; backlog €1.96bn. Results
- Ferretti FY2025 — net working capital +€161.5M (about 13.1%); EBITDA margin 16.5%. Press release
- US bank prime rate 6.75%, 3 September 2026 — Federal Reserve H.15. H.15 · Marine dealer floor plan is quoted at prime plus up to 2.25 points. NMMA
Labour, support and marine service rates
- BLS OEWS, ship and boat building (NAICS 336600) — project management specialists $53.41/hour with 3,160 employed, against 330 customer service reps at $25.17. OEWS · May 2025 national figures. OEWS national
- BLS Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, March 2026 — manufacturing total compensation $48.27/hour against wages of $32.20, a burden multiplier of 1.50. ECEC
- NMMA / Discover Boating — marine labour “between $70 and $120 per hour”; a factory-certified marine diesel technician “may cost more than $175 per hour.” Discover Boating
- Published yard rate cards — Seacoast Enterprises: general boatyard $120/hour, specialty technicians $190/hour, emergency service 1.5×, 25% surcharge 15 December to 10 March. Rate sheet · Marine Diesel Inc.: standard $215/hour, overtime $322.50, travel $160/hour plus $3.00/mile. Rate card · Thunderbolt Marine 2026: in-house trades $60–$150/hour. Rate sheet
- Gartner, “Benchmarks to Assess Your Customer Service Costs” (2024) — $13.50 per assisted contact against $1.84 self-service. Gartner · MetricNet via HDI on how escalation stacks: level 1 $22 a ticket, level 2 $62, field support $196. HDI
The technician earns about $25 an hour and the yard bills $120–$215. That gap is the real economics of a service dispatch, and it is why knowing the fault before you send someone is worth more than any call-deflection statistic.
Rework and the cost of catching an error late
- GAO-25-106749, Navy Ship Modernization (December 2024) — of more than 9,000 growth-work contract changes, 29.4% were attributable to drawing, specification or technical-document issues; 47 days on average to process one change against a 7-day goal. GAO
- Autodesk / FMI (2021) — bad data caused 14% of all construction rework in 2020. An earlier study by the same sponsor put the figure at 48%; we use 14%, the weaker of the two. Study
- McKinsey, “From design to aftersales: unlocking value in boat and yacht building” (November 2025) — yacht-specific: advanced procurement and preassembly delivered a 25% reduction in rework. McKinsey
- Stecklein et al., “Error Cost Escalation Through the Project Life Cycle” (NASA / INCOSE) — an error caught at the requirements stage costs roughly an order of magnitude less than the same error caught during build, and one to two orders less than after delivery. Paper
Contracts, delay and telematics
- SEC-filed shipbuilding contracts — payment is heavily back-loaded (10% signing, then milestones, 50% on delivery), and on buyer default “the Delivery Date shall be automatically postponed.” This is why the model claims no penalty income on a customer-caused delay. Contract
- Volvo Penta International Limited Warranty, marine leisure — coverage is “conditional upon Volvo Penta being able to gather, access and use data from the Product at any time for warranty purposes.” Note who wrote that clause: the engine maker, capturing the value for itself. Warranty document
- Brunswick / Nautic-On — a fault found over the weekend, dealer and manufacturer notified automatically, and by Monday morning the claim created, parts ordered and the visit scheduled. Panbo
- McKinsey, “When warranty costs rival R&D spend” (June 2026) — 58% of respondents expect proactive quality analytics to reduce warranty costs by 5–10%. That is the return on an entire analytics programme, which is why we model a fraction of it. McKinsey
- Yacht warranties explained — hull and engine warranties are nearly always separate, many hull warranties exclude gelcoat crazing, and navigation electronics, stabilisers, thrusters and air conditioning may not be included at all. YachtBuyer
Our own research
- YACHTWAVE Boat Owner Survey, June 2025, n=400 — 66% chose used over new; 56% reported documentation gaps; 70% said the delivery experience shaped their view of the brand; 67% called their handover suboptimal. Ours, and labelled as ours.
- Interviews with over a dozen boat builders, 2023–2025 — the source of the challenge list the calculator prices.
What we took out
An earlier version of this calculator cited a J.D. Power figure on repurchase intent. We went to check it and the number does not appear in the release it was attributed to, so it has been withdrawn rather than footnoted — along with four contact-centre cost citations that turned out to be vendor blogs quoting each other, one of them reproducing the NMMA rate we already cite, which made one source look like two.
Now Put Your Own Numbers In
The defaults are ours. The ones that matter are yours — and every one of them is editable.
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