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Casting off

Seeking some freedom with a self-made marketing millionaire

>BY ANDY HOLLOWAY

SOME PEOPLE golf to blow off steam or hang out with friends, perhaps clients. Advertising strategist Nicholas Kusmich takes people out on a boat. Not his boat, but it may as well be, though it could be a different boat each time he goes out onto Toronto’s waterfront, an expanse that covers 46 kilometres east to west, with the harbour and popular Centre Island plunked in the middle.

Kusmich is part of the Freedom Boat Club, a two-year-old franchise that has two locations in the city handling 20-to24-foot motorboats. “I think everybody, if they were honest, on some level has some sort of interest of being on the water. It’s one of those things where you go by a marina and you’re like, ‘Wow, that’s kind of nice,’” he says. “But I live in Toronto, and I never really saw Toronto as a boating city. I never ever thought about boat ownership in my life.”

What turned the tide was a visit to a friend in San Diego about five years ago. They went down to his boat club and out for a spin on the open water. It was so fun Kusmich decided to see whether the club had a Toronto location. It didn’t, but after a similar trip a few years later, he Googled again and discovered that Toronto did indeed have a club. With COVID-19 tamping down many activities in the city, tooling around Lake Ontario filled both a need to spend some fun time with the family and escape the house now and then without spending hours in traffic trying to get to a cottage.

Kusmich is lucky in that he can work from home and was already used to dealing with clients remotely, given that many of his are located in the United States. He enjoys the work and feels he is making a difference for the small-business owners who depend on his skills, but advertising wasn’t the first stop in his career.

Armed with a drive to make a difference in the world, Kusmich’s faith led to his first break. He was hired as a youth pastor at a local church when he was 17 and was fully ordained by the time he was 19. His belief was strong, but he also knew he didn’t want to rely on the church for a salary to pay the bills, which is how he found

Everybody, if they were honest, has some sort of interest in being on the water

his way into digital marketing and advertising as “a side hustle.” After 14 years of pastoring, he decided to turn the side hustle into his main hustle. “I remember that the Christmas Sunday of 2011 was my last Sunday (at the church),” he says.

At the time, Google was already the “800-pound gorilla,” Kusmich says, “so I said, ‘I don’t want to get into that. Let’s see what else is out there.’ I think a little bit of luck, a little bit of right place, right time, but Facebook had just kind of launched their ads platform in beta. And I said, ‘Well, let’s give it a go.’” It was apparently the right move, and he’s become a self-proclaimed millionaire because of it. Still, he never thought about plunking some of that money down on a fancy boat, as some might have done.

“I never even considered myself a boating guy,” Kusmich says. “But after having the experience at Freedom and getting all of the

upsides to boat ownership without actually any of the downsides to it, it was a no-brainer.”

Taking the hassles out of boat ownership — chiefly, maintenance, insurance payments, dockage and storage — is one of Freedom’s major selling points, says Amit Kumaria, vice-president and general manager of the Toronto franchise, one of the 267 worldwide. With one boat for every eight members, you’re likely to get what you want, when you want. “Basically, all you need to do is show up, take the boat out, bring it back when you’re done and go home,” he says. “We do the rest.”

It’s not cheap to sign up, but it’s less expensive and simpler than buying a boat — if you can find one these days given the demand for them during the pandemic. There’s an upfront initiation fee to join Freedom that ranges from around $5,000 to $13,000, depending on the number of people on the plan, plus an annual fee from $2,000 to about $6,000. Despite the price, the club is catching on and had a banner year in 2020. It’s also expanding to two more locations in the Greater Toronto Area, one in Port Credit to the west and the other on Lake Simcoe to the north.

Better still for members, Freedom has clubs worldwide and they can get a plan to access boats at each of those locations should they happen to be in town. There are a few in the south of France, one in England and a franchise team is dedicated to opening more locations in Europe. “That just gives some of our members even more options in terms of travel and getting out on the water and access to a boat,” Kumaria says.

Of course, you’re going to need more than just cash. Every boater needs a pleasure craft operator card, essentially a licence to drive. Freedom then conducts a mandatory initial training session, via Zoom these days, and new members spend some time on the water with one of the club’s instructors to learn the basics, such as docking, disembarking from a dock area, open water navigation and how to read a chart. If a member gets into a spot of trouble, they just call in.

Kusmich has fortunately never been in enough trouble that he had to be towed back, but does recall a couple of minor incidents, including one where he couldn’t get a boat to start while leaving Centre Island. “I kind of started panicking, because we’re in the middle of the water. I can’t get the thing to start. I’ve got my kids with me here. I called into the dock hands and I’m like, ‘Hey guys, I don’t know if the motor blew or something’s off, but what’s going on here?’ And they said, ‘Well, you have to make sure that the boat is in neutral when you’re trying to start it.’”

The minor hassles certainly haven’t derailed his enthusiasm. “It’s just been an amazing bonding experience with the family. We’ve got young kids, and just to see the looks on their faces every time we can go to a ‘beach’ twice a week. They love that,” he says. “There were also a couple of times where I just went out on my own. And it was very kind of ... therapeutic might be the wrong word, but there’s something about being out on the water on a nice sunny day that I can’t get in my home, maybe because my kids are running around, or I can’t get at the coffee shop or I can’t get anywhere else. For me, it was just an opportunity to completely wind down and not think about the rest of the world that was going on around me for that short hour, two or three that was out on the water.”

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2021-06-10T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-06-10T07:00:00.0000000Z

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