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Ethan Zone

Ethan Zone

CEO & Managing Director at Tingdene Group, a UK-based family-owned operator of marinas, residential parks, and holiday parks.

Jul 29, 2026

16:41
Yeah, because that's a beautiful combination, isn't it, of bringing new ideas with young people into the business, but also the invaluable experience of those who've been through those cycles of ups and downs and how they've handled them and what they've done to get through those moments, which you've obviously done because the business is still successful, is really invaluable to have around the table, as you say, isn't it?
17:08
Yeah, we have it on every part of our business.
17:10
I'm at this conference with Steve Arbour and Neil Mallandane, our marina and boat sales director.
17:15
And for those in the sector, everyone knows Steve, and he's been chairman of Tyhal for the last two years, just recently stepped down from that role.
17:22
But you can't replace that.
17:24
You really can't.
17:25
And when we go through challenging times and we see market dips, you have to be able to lean on those characters to say, it's all going to be okay don't worry about it we can do these things we've done these things in the past those things don't work and that's great because sometimes our new ideas they come through and you go you want to test those ideas you want to try them and sometimes they go we did try that this is why it didn't work okay great we can do it a little bit differently we can try a different way boat clubs as a prime example of that at the moment they see everyone's talking about them freedom boat club individual boat clubs everyone's working hard to find new ways to get people into the sector And I know people have done that for the last 10, 20, 30 years.

9 MINS LATER

27:16
And the whole group.
28:18
Mm-hmm.
28:18
But you've gotta spend time with those guys and you've gotta, you gotta learn.
28:21
And we've got up and coming men and females coming up through the business, which is great.
28:26
At the moment, we're a majority male leadership group and one female director, but we hope in the future that we'll have more females on that board because that's only gonna help us in terms of diversity of thought and discussion pieces, and that's a really important factor of what we do.
28:40
And actually that's been driven from all the team over the last 10 years to get people to these positions.
28:45
People who have started receptionists are now assistant managers and managers are general managers and are senior managers, which is brilliant.
28:51
So we wanna keep that journey going and keep promoting that positive messaging and finding opportunities for people as part of that space.

15 MINS LATER

44:13
And not necessarily their education, just the, them as a person, what do you look for?

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