Who We Work With
Different sides of the deck,
different conversations.
A yacht is one workplace with four constituencies, and their problems only look similar from the dock. Find yours below — each conversation starts in a different place.
Owners & Family Offices
The asset performs the way its people do.
You didn't buy a boat; you built a program — and its returns are human before they're mechanical. Crew turnover, a strained captain relationship, tension between family and crew: these cost more in a season than any advisory fee, and they never show up on the yard invoice.
Susan has spent twenty years as confidential counsel to CEOs, boards, and principals — including family enterprises, where ownership, management, and family are three different rooms. That is precisely the geometry of a yacht.
- Owner & Captain advisory — standing, confidential, on both sides of the relationship
- Family-at-sea dynamics — multi-generational programs where the vessel serves the whole family
- New-build crew formation — stand up a full crew as a team before delivery, not after the first crossing
- An annual read on the crew — a quiet, independent assessment for the family office's file
Yacht Management & Placement
Every early departure lands on your desk.
You manage the fleet, place the crew, and absorb the fallout when a hire doesn't hold: the emergency replacement, the repositioning, the call to the owner. The industry treats that churn as weather. We treat it as a solvable team-composition problem.
Meritage builds cohort and team programs for organizations that run on distributed, high-pressure teams — private equity portfolios, technology firms, healthcare systems. A managed fleet is the same shape.
- Compatibility assessment in your workflow — candidate-to-crew mapping before the placement, licensed under your flag or ours
- Fleet-wide team programs — our six-week crew development program, coordinated centrally across your boats
- A standing line to a coach — quiet, confidential help your captains can reach for when something's brewing aboard, before it becomes a crisis
Captains & Senior Crew
Command is a leadership job with no bench.
You're responsible for a nine-figure asset, a guest experience with zero margin, and a crew living where they work — and the industry gave you a license for the first item only. There's no HR aboard, no peer at the next desk, and the owner is not the person to bring it to.
We coach executives who carry exactly this kind of weight. The setting is new; the work isn't.
- The Captain's Circle — a confidential, facilitated peer forum. By invitation
- 1:1 coaching for captains, chief stews, and chief engineers stepping up
- Crew compatibility mapping — know your team's friction lines before the season does
- Dockside intensives — a real team program, timed to the yard period
Maritime Businesses
The industry ashore runs on teams, too.
Shipyards, brokerages, charter houses, provisioners — businesses with demanding clients, seasonal crunch, and leadership pipelines that grew up on the job. This is Meritage's home ground: executive development for teams, cohorts, and rising leaders, delivered the way we've done it for two decades ashore.
- Executive coaching for principals and senior leaders
- Team development programs for the departments that carry the season
- Rising-leader cohorts — the managers you're about to promote, made ready first
Not sure which door is yours?
Write to us anyway. The first conversation is how we find out — and it's confidential either way.
Request an Introduction