Leading a company in the healthy of economies can be a challenge but image taking over during the middle of a pandemic. That was the challenge facing Price Taylor as he took over as the company president for MYCO Trailers in Bradenton, Florida.
Taylor took on the position in the midst of the company voluntarily closing for four weeks because of the Covid-19 pandemic. The company is building trailers once again and playing catchup on a backlog of orders that were in the pipeline and new orders coming in.
There’s a lot to be said about some of our long-term employees,” Taylor said. “That’s one reason we elected them during our four- or five-week shutdown. Although we weren’t working, we elected to pick up our employees, so they didn’t miss a paycheck and they didn’t have to go through (filing for) unemployment.”
Taylor has nearly 30 years of boating-industry experience, working for the Brunswick Boats Group for most of his career before spending the last five years with Malibu Boats in Australia. With five grandchildren in the U.S., Taylor and his wife were eager to return to the mainland.
Taylor’s role is to continue growing the company, which has seen strong demand for new recreational trailers the past several years. Taylor said MYCO Trailers has started another production line and he’s in the process of finding a new, larger facility for the company.
While MYCO Trailers is one of the leading builders of recreational trailers, the company is making a bigger play for local, state and federal government contracts. MYCO Trailers in recent years started building cradles for dry rakes, lifts and transport.
“We’re looking at police center consoles with three or four engines on it, things that would have been unheard of years ago,” Taylor said. “We’re one of the few trailer companies that can accommodate a product of that size and having our own mechanical engineer on site. (Mechanical engineer) Don King has seen it all done it all, and there’s no new product out there or anything that surprises him anymore. We have the resources to be able to accommodate anything that’s out there.”
Taylor feels there’s still room to grow in the recreational market and will be drawing on his contacts in the marine industry. “I think it’s just a matter of us probably building relationships with more of the builders,” he said.
Taylor is expected to provide steady leadership after Bill Tweedie, who led MYCO’s sales and marketing for 35 tears, retired in late 2019. Tweedie continues to do some consulting work for the manufacturer.
“I’ve seen it all in the downturns and the upticks, and built a lot of great relationships within the industry,” Taylor said. “Most of the people you’ll find in the industry long love boats, love boating and love the customers, it’s not just a job. It’s always something we’ve enjoyed doing.”
