MYCO FACTORY TOUR

from June 2021 Speedboat Magazine

KEY WEST SPRING POKER RUN

story by Brett Bayne

FACTORY TOUR

Speedboat heads to Bradenton, FL, to tour the legendary 47-year-old trailer manufacturer’s factory.

The performance boating industry has seen a great deal of companies come and go over the years, but one constant element is MYCO Trailers. Whether it’s a state-ofthe-art model or a decades-old relic, it’s practically guaranteed to have sat atop a MYCO trailer.

The firm launched in 1974, during the Nixon administration. Since then, MYCO has become the world leader in custom, all-welded boat trailers—each designed around the boat by the company’s mechanical engineers to forge the most precise-fitting and best-towing trailers in the industry. In the fast-boat industry alone, MYCO has been an OEM supplier for MTI, Mystic, Nor-Tech, Outerlimits, Cigarette, Apache, Sutphen, DCB, Skater, Fountain, Donzi, Baja, Eliminator, Sunsation, Cougar, Statement and numerous others. Even the U.S. military has MYCO build its very specialized trailers for assault boats.

MYCO custom-built products are built in Bradenton, FL, where the company principals oversee production: President Price Taylor, engineer Don King, and the sales and marketing team of Ronnie Moran and Jon Smiley (who took over longtime employee Bill Tweedie’s duties when he retired last year). Together, the team keeps the production moving at a brisk clip, with sales figures steadily on the increase year after year.

The factory floor looks like fabrication plants everywhere—trailers in staggered levels of assembly, welding going on in various places, grinding in others, and workers coming and going with parts.

The next area that sets MYCO trailers apart from the crowd is its elaborate parts room. Most trailers are delivered with torsion suspension axles, LED lights, sealed bearings and hydraulic disk brakes; even the brake lines are made from the best stainless steel tubing money can buy, and are connected with double flare fittings—no compression fittings allowed. Then there’s the elaborate paint booth.

Above left: MYCO President Price Taylor, engineer Don King, Sales VP Ronnie Moran and Sales & Marketing Manager Jon Smiley Above: King working on an oversized gooseneck trailer design.

Above left: Eric welds an adjustable coupler for a military trailer. Above right: In the parts department, Max cuts and preps parts. Top and above: Auggie and McGuire fabricate a trailer for a military craft. Far left: Ochie grinds and prepares a bow stop. Near left: Matt installs a forward coupler.

Above left: Randall grinds and sands out for tail lights to go into a trailer. Above right: A trailer for an MTI catamaran.

MYCO trailers are painted in the longest paint booth we’ve ever seen—it can comfortably hold a trailer 50’ long. Of course, the majority of trailers are constructed of welded aluminum, which was a MYCO first.

“The custom boat trailer business has grown exponentially in recent years,” explains Price Taylor, who came aboard as company president in 2020. “As each manufacturer continues to build longer, wider, heavier, and more complex vessels, the need for an engineered trailer has never been greater. Million-dollar assets certainly deserve equally special transportation, and MYCO delivers that time and time again for our valued customers. We have seen a conversion of mostly steel trailers to mostly aluminum trailers.”

A major component of MYCO’s success is due to the company’s devoted team, each member of which contributes at all levels on a daily basis. Most employees grew up in either the marine or trailer business, and each one takes enormous pride in what they do, with an uncompromising commitment for the product.

One of the most critical figures at MYCO is engineering guru Don King. Each trailer starts with an engineer’s drawing from either an extensive archive of previous jobs, or a completely fresh design from King’s computer. For the past 37 years, his custom designs have been engineered to the highest standards and are well known throughout the industry, and his contributions have been paramount to the success of MYCO. He’s been working with 3D computer simulations since long before most engineers had access to such programs. His portfolio is on a level of sophistications usually reserved for the aircraft industry. MYCO has had mechanical engineers on staff long before its competitors did, although this came with a heavy financial obligation. The investment has paid off with the precision fit and trailering attributes afforded to a MYCO trailer.

On the sales side are Sales Vice President Ronnie Moran and Sales & Marketing Manager Jon Smiley, both of whom are well-known in the industry, and who you may have met at any number of events representing MYCO trailers. Moran is a 16-year industry veteran, while Smiley has a background with marinas and storage. Both of these key players know their customers and understand their needs, and that formula has translated into strong sales in recent years, with 2020 having the highest sales in MYCO’s 47-year history.

“Traditionally we see an increase in OEM and dealer sales in advance of boat show season—late spring, early summer and early fall,” Moran says. “Year after year, we have seen election years prove challenging to our sales. However, that was not the case this past year.”

Staying ahead of the competition has always been a priority for MYCO, she adds. “We strive to attend as many industry events as possible, from boat shows to poker runs and dealer meetings to get a feel for what our clients are looking for in our products and how we can meet those desires. Having a strong engineering team certainly helps, and we have recently added personnel to that team to bring fresh, new ideas to the table.”

Smiley’s impressive resume includes a stint as Harbour Master at the Sanibel Harbor Yacht Club, a five-star 450-slip dry storage facility that included countless Nor-Tech owners as members due to its close proximity to Nor-Tech’s manufacturing facility in Cape Coral. Smiley worked closely with vendor MYCO as the marina developed a growing need for dryrack cradles to accommodate bigger boats with catamaran hulls, stepped bottoms and quad engine configurations.

“We needed a safer way to lift and store these complex boats,” Smiley says. “We started having members ordering them back to back to back. And MYCO did something that truly impressed me. After each unit was delivered, they’d call and say, ‘How was it? How’s the fit? Is there anything you’d like to change on the next one?’ Our facility practically became a test and development center for MYCO’s dry-rack cradles and the result is the worlds best cradle system.” And that’s how Smiley launched a relationship with the company he would ultimately represent himself.

Meanwhile, MYCO’s operations group is made up of some of the most highly

Above and bottom: This is a steel trailer for a Baja 342, before and after painting. Left: Louie uses a 2x6 bunk board to prep and measure a trailer for carpeting.

skilled steel and aluminum welders in the industry. The welding team at MYCO are true craftsmen. From the parts cutters to the paint and rigging teams the manufacturing group has an unwavering commitment to make sure their customers receive the quality-driven, reliable products that they’ve come to expect from MYCO for the past 47 years.

According to Smiley, the performance boating market represents around 60 percent of MYCO’s business, while another 20 percent belongs to big offshore fish boats like Freeman Boatworks and Invincible Boats, with the remaining being compromised of specialized military builds.

For Taylor, coming on board as president during the year of Covid presented a unique challenge. But as the entire industry recovered from the initial hit, his navigational skills proved indispensable. “We had to make some very quick decisions, knowing they would have an impact on the long-term financial wellbeing of MYCO and our employees,” he says. “We made the decision during the first and succeeding weeks of the government-mandated shutdown to fully compensate all of our employees while they were forced to stay home. We made sure that not a single MYCO employee missed a paycheck. Although some companies may have seen this as a difficult decision, and one that financially impacted the com-

Above: This trailer is for a 36' go-fast catamaran, such as the Wright Performance 360.

Right: Here’s a lift cradle ideal for a fish boat made by Freeman Boat Works or Invincible Boats. It would sit at someone’s dock to hold the boat.

Left: This trailer will accommodate a 36' vee bottom boat; it was made for a 36' Cigarette Gladiator. In addition to standardconfiguration trailers, MYCO also builds tilt trailers for those extrawide boats for trailering on the highway—a concept that MYCO pioneered.

A trailer for a Concept 32 center console in the paint booth; it’s painted a Lamborghini pearl gray color. pany, MYCO saw it as the right thing to do for our employees and their families.”

Once businesses were allowed to open back up, every single MYCO employee returned. “We did not lose one employee that had been here prior to the pandemic shutdown,” Taylor says. “A few months later, our return orders started pouring in. This one single decision and having every one of our experienced team members back allowed us to ramp up production to meet the increased demand.”

The current challenge, he says, is faced by the entire marine manufacturing industry: “The ability of our suppliers to keep pace with demand for our product. Customers continue to want quality and having the return of an experienced workforce put us in the driver’s seat to be able to deliver.”