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“I look forward to working with him again…”

I’m the purchaser of a small boat your company listed.  The broker is Russ Schafer.  The process began simply enough.  Over a year ago, my wife and I started looking for an intermediate boat to enjoy on the fresh water lakes around Atlanta.  We owned a 380 Sea Ray and I have a pretty extensive fresh and salt water boating background.  We dearly loved our 380, but with all the use it got, it simply wasn’t big enough to handle our now thirteen year old daughter and her friends during their stays.

Things got even more pressed when our three older children and their spouses and friends visited.  I sold my company a couple of years ago to WebMD, and have a couple more years on my workout, so I really didn’t want to get anything extravagant on this run and wanted to try and lose as little as possible on the next transaction, while keeping the wife and daughter in the manner to which they were rapidly becoming accustomed.  We looked at dozens of boats all along the coasts of Alabama, Florida, Georgia and South Carolina.  We made offers on a couple, and even made arrangements almost a year ago to see Russ’ listing in Ft. Lauderdale while we were in Florida looking at some others.  I made arrangements to see it, then schedules changed, and Russ and I weren’t able to connect, although we did email and text pretty extensively.

Nearly a year later, still not having found the perfect boat, I got an odd email from Russ, dated April 14^th 2014.  It was simply a follow up to a year earlier email about scheduling that had gotten lost somewhere in the email cloud.  I chuckled, responded to the email and took a quick look to see what that boat sold for…found that it hadn’t sold, the price had dropped pretty significantly from what I recalled and it now made sense for us at a number of levels.  Pure coincidence…but here we are, about six weeks later, pretty close to closing on a boat and I think we are happy and the owner is happy.  Despite the intervention of fate, this still might not have happened without Russ Schafer.  I am a detail guy, and Russ probably answered a hundred emails and calls.  He picked me up from the airport for the sea trial.  He brought sandwiches and coffee that tasted awfully good when I realized that I was so consumed by the process that I had forgotten to eat along the way.  He showed humor, and patience, and grace and availability and went above and beyond any reasonable expectations anyone would ever have for a yacht broker, especially one dealing with something not much bigger than some tenders, and probably less expensive.  He was informed, unfailingly polite, and made a geographically clumsy process move smoother than it had the right.

Not only would I recommend him to a friend, I look forward to working with him again as the stock freeze lifts from my work out in a couple of years and we get something more substantial.  Boating for me is something of an obsession, I know a fair amount, and knew enough to know that Russ could easily have cut corners when no one was looking, and he didn’t.  I trust him now and going forward, to do what he says he is going to do and to be honest and forthright about it.  Russ took time from his family to make this happen, and I profoundly respect his professionalism and commitment to the process.  I can’t imagine what he could have done to make the process better…but I suspect that if I had thought of something, and mentioned it, he would have been accommodating.

Charles T. Robertson on Russ Schafer