It was never the boat. It was the structure.

Bring what you've got

Whatever is on your desk makes the call sharper, and if there's nothing on it yet, that's a perfectly good place to start. Either way there's nothing to prepare.

• A boat already yours. Last season's slip, insurance and yard bills. You'll leave knowing what an hour on the water actually costs you, written down, which almost no owner has ever seen.
• A deal on your desk. Bring it and I'll tell you if I'd walk away from it.
• Five answers from an operator. What you'd own, how you'd sell it, the resale fee, how your price gets set when you leave, and what happens if a co-owner stops paying. Bring their answers and I'll tell you which one they answered too fast.
• What your club charges you. Bring the invoice and we'll do that math out loud.
• None of the above. Then bring the boat you keep opening in another tab.

How the fifteen minutes go

• You talk first. Who's aboard, how often, how far out, whether the sun is down before you're back at the dock. Everything else is arithmetic once I know that.
• I run the math out loud. Owning outright, a share, a club, a charter. The same day on the water, four very different deals. A member described his as “a day on a million-dollar vessel without million-dollar headaches.”
• You get the sheet. Your numbers in four columns, down to the ones that never arrive as a bill. Depreciation is the one nobody counts.

Nothing to install, nothing to fill out first, and you're not signing anything on a fifteen-minute call.

What you walk away with

The sheet is yours whether we ever speak again or not. Plenty of men sit with it for a month and come back with sharper questions, which is exactly what it's for. A number on paper is something you can decide against. A feeling just follows you around.