The sale maker.

• Author: Perkins, David
• Position: Fountain Powerboat Industries Inc.'s Reggie Fountain - Company profile

THE SALE MAKER

Reggie Fountain's secretary peeps in the door. "Brunswick Marine is on the line," she says.

Fountain, whose $20 million-a-year company in Washington, N.C., makes some of the world's best offshore sports boats, has let it be known he's interested in selling out. Brunswick Marine Inc., a division of the Tulsa, Okla.-based conglomerate Brunswick Corp., is the nation's largest manufacturer of sports and fishing boats.

"I'm flattered you're going to come, John," Fountain says into the phone.

"I believe the movement in the industry is toward a few big players, and the way you're going to end up being the King Kong in business - which is what you and I both want to be - is to be associated with the strongest and best team out there. I want to find a home with a big player."

The conversation ends with a barrage of pleasantries. Fountain puts his feet on his desk and smiles beatifically at the reporter in front of him. "That's probably the beginning of Brunswick sucking me up, son."

A week later, Fountain reports that talks have stalled. "We're a mutual-admiration society, and I think I can say they liked what they saw. But they wonder, when the industry is doing so badly, how can they justify spending another bunch of millions to buy me. And we have to consider the fact, too, that I won't sell at anything like our current market price. But there's no question we'd both like some affiliation." (Brunswick officials would not comment.)

Call it sizzle, hype or just salesmanship, Fountain pours it on.

Walk the corridors of his $10 million, 180,000-square-foot plant on the Pamlico River and you can almost breathe the Reggie mystique. There's a framed photo of him at 34, a racing champion posing by his boat, and another of a pileup that sent him to the emergency room with a bleeding kidney. In the board room, his larger-than-life portrait looms over the conference table.

And here, in an office with a trophy-covered wall and wearing a fire-retardant racing suit while he talks on the phone, Reggie Fountain, 50, is still in the running. At 5 feet 9 inches, he's a big name with an ego to match. "Donald [Trump] had it right," he says. "People buy the image."

Image is important in this business. From 1982 to 1988, recreational-boat sales doubled, soaring from $9 billion to just under $18 billion, according to the National Marine Boat Manufacturers Association. But overproduction and a drop in luxury buying over the past couple of years have scraped the industry hard. Boats sit like stranded whales in sales lots. And several manufacturers have sunk into bankruptcy court.

Buoyed by a superior product and glamour marketing, 11-year-old Fountain Powerboats has managed to stay afloat, but it hasn't been smooth sailing. After selling a record 238 boats in 1988, it sold 224 last year, its first downturn ever. Net income dove from $426,374 in 1988 to $130,371 in 1989, according to President Leon P. Smith. (These numbers are disputed. See below.)

Sales surged from $10 million in 1987 to $20 million in 1988 but slipped last year to just under $20 million. And profits were particularly thin - the margin in 1989 dropped to less than 1 percent, from an already skinny 2 percent in 1988.

Any profit, Fountain says, was a miracle after a fire destroyed part of his manufacturing plant in fall 1988, halting production for...