MoistureShield Specialist of the Year Dockside Boat Lifts

Q. How did Dockside get its start?

A. My wife was partners in another boat lift company, and they asked me to come in and help them. Then we split and we became Dockside. We were doing boat lifts for a lot of other contractors or dock builders, and we had one in particular that did premium, higher-end deck work. When he retired, we basically didn’t have anybody to refer that decking business to anymore and so we kind of we just started doing it.

Q. Why do you prefer MoistureShield?

A. The reason is we just don’t have any board failures. We don’t have any problems with it so it’s basically put it down and you kind of forget about it. It’s a perfect fit for water application because you have basically very minimal expansion and contraction of the boards. We can also install it over a boat lift so that actually the entire deck raises and lowers into the water because MoistureShield’s okay with direct water contact or actually being submerged. We don’t have any issues. Now we use it almost exclusively. I would say probably 95% of our new work is

Owner: Les and Sandy O’Brien

Location: Montgomery, TX.

Year Founded: 1996

Website: docksidelifts.com

Instagram: @exoons

Facebook.com: DocksideLifts

Specialty: Docks and composite decks

MoistureShield composite. And the other thing is that Cool Deck. That’s something new they came out with and because obviously when you’re doing docks you have no shade unless under a boathouse. Most of our docks on our lake—you’re not allowed to have a boat a roof over it. The Cool Deck really comes into play and most of what we’re doing now is the Cool Deck colors because of the fact that you can actually walk on it barefoot in the middle of the summer.

Q. What’s next for Dockside?

A. We’re booked out close to a year, so somewhere between eight to 12 months, and we’ve stayed six-plus months probably for the last five years. We need to expand by adding more crews, but we really don’t want to do that because every time we do that then you lose some of your quality because you can’t manage. After 25 plus years, we finally decided we’re going to stay around you know 23 to 25 employees— probably never get over 30. We run crews so we do two main carpentry crews and then we have people that go ahead of those to drive the pilings or to build the boat lifts or whatever that are separate.