2024's Gratitude Post - A Year in Review
This post is written by the company's CEO, Mitja Mirtič.
“The struggle ends when the gratitude begins.” — Neale Donald Walsch”.
It is time to write my favorite blog post of the year AGAIN. You can check our 2021, 2022, and 2023 editions. The year 2024 was hard, but very successful and we can look back with lots of pride and satisfaction. Let's go:
New Company's Dress Code
Santa Claus brought all our employees a special budget, which they could use to dress up, and an hour of personal advice from a professional designer who told them what kind of clothes fit them the most. Our sales conversion rates went up and our cost per lead in marketing went down.
People felt better about themselves and self-confidence skyrocketed from 9,1 to 9,5 per person after people started to dress up better. Was it connected just with this? Who knows :-) But we all look better, and that was an awesome move.
Goolets event:
We organized an event for the yacht owners in our fleet, where we:
- shared our company's long-term vision
- explained our goals for 2024
- presented our sales and marketing efforts
- had a great time and did our best to strengthen our relationships with yacht owners.
New Management Team
In 2023 the company grew from 10 to more than 20 employees. In 2025 we plan to grow the company up to 35 employees and a strong Middle management team/structure is a must, if we wish to continue to grow and provide superb services to our clients, yacht owners, and partners.
After more than 1,5 years of educating our guys into this position, I can very confidently say we succeeded. We now have a superb team of leaders, who understand the vision of the owners, share their passion, are 100% trustworthy, and are turning themselves into superb leaders and managers. This was/is a very hard transformation for them and the company, but we did a hell of a job.
Upgrade of Goolets’ Business Model
In the last 3 years, we experimented with our business model and after lots of experimentation, hustle, work, headaches, small wins, and small losses, we all agreed on the new model, which we all believe will enable Goolets company to grow faster, but in a more controlled fashion.
In the last 20 years in business, our main mantra has been: How can we 10x this? Now we set up SMARTER goals, we have a 3-year plan and we are aiming for stable growth with as little stress as possible.
Yacht Shows 3.0 and Our Central Agency Fleet
- We visited 10 different yacht shows from all over the world.
- We exhibited in 2 of them. And we presented our yachts at 2 yacht shows in Croatia.
- Our fleet of 15 yachts is now I can say famous in the yacht industry.
- We operated with 10 “mini cruisers” type of ships and I can proudly say that we put this type of yacht on a world map. Yachting industry fully embraced this concept and I can say we had a lot to do with it.
- We also had a first full season with Yacht Maxita, a 6 cabins motor sailor, the first of her kind in our fleet. She was fully booked in 2024 and as it seems in December 2024, as I am writing this post, I can very optimistically say she will also be the best-booked motor sailor in Croatia in 2025. They deserve it, as their crew, services and the yacht itself were on the highest possible level!
- We also operated with 5 gulets, where we can also say the bookings were good and the owners happy (in most of the cases).
Which brings us to the next point.
The 2024 Booking Season took work!
The 2024 season was challenging. We had the Olympic games. World Cup in soccer. Inflation. War in Ukraine and Israel. Threats of the recession. Prices went up significantly. The 2023 season was breaking all the records, so the appetites for 2024 were high from all sides.
All sectors (hotels, bareboats, villas,...) and all of the destinations where I was checking (Croatia, Turkey, Greece, Spain, Italy, French Polynesia,...) said the tourism sector/bookings are down big time.
Also, season 2024 was booked slowly. We did increase our marketing efforts by a lot and looking back, we invested into:
- Advertising and social media
- Video content and we expanded our video production team
- We expanded our SEO department
- Visiting more than 10 yacht shows
- Our Referral and Repeated customer projects
- Creating a ton of new blog posts and other types of content
- Our sales team sending out more than 96,000 emails. We did not count the phone calls :)
And in the end, we managed to fully book 90% of our Central Agency yacht fleet. We did not come to 100%, which was our only failure from 2024. This happened due to the bad content / below-average presentations, we had on those particular vessels and a mistake we will not repeat again! The crazy thing is, that all those efforts and investments from the 2024 season had an incredible effect on our bookings for 2025, where most of our “mini cruisers” are already fully booked.
New Goolets Slogan
We are proud of our Goolets slogan, which we used thus far: Life is Good! This slogan had a deeper meaning explaining that hard work, good results, and working on hard projects in connection with celebrating good results later on, give you a life worth living.
After many years, we realized that the slogan was too “vague” and also too similar to one other company logo (hint: LG). So we created a new company slogan, that will be presented to the Goolets team and to the world in January. I can not disclose it here yet, but after 6 months of brainstorming, we have it and I am grateful we have a super awesome slogan now :-)
Goolets Team
All of the results in the company happened, because of our awesome team. I think we are making huge steps forward because we have a team of:
- Passionate individuals, who are at Goolets because they are unique, skilled, and interested in working on their careers as well as on Goolets' vision and mission!
- Joyful people, that enjoy coming to work and have fun while doing so.
I had a couple of moments in 2024, where I saw my team in action and told to myself wow…..that is awesome.
- When I saw our brokers in action at the Croatian yacht show I was super proud of them.
- When I have seen our marketing team passionately talking about what to do for our next advertisement campaigns…
- When I have seen how our guys solved hard customers during the summer season.
- When I have seen in the office, how the team joined forces to help each other when some unexpected problems occurred
- When I read the long reports on how our Turkey team solved a very hard customer and were on top of things until 2 am in the morning everyone was happy.
There were many more occasions like that (this is probably another blog post), and I think we are evolving nicely as an entire company.
When I look back almost 20 years from now, when the idea of gulet type agency was born me and my wife started an agency from zero, I can say I am proud and grateful to see how we have grown to almost 30 people at this point.
With Alenka, we have grown as leaders a lot in 2024 as well. I can say “leadership” is for me the hardest job I ever had, but I look forward to new challenges in 2025, and with the team we had, I think there are good things ahead.
2025. Here we come.
Mitja Mirtič
