Commercial Marine Pro: Connecting Operators To Marine Equipment

Shawn Johnson has always been a connector.

Johnson is owner of Commercial Marine Pro, which specializes in sourcing and selling marine equipment, from engines, gearboxes and generators to barges, towboats, tugs, shipyard equipment and more. He founded the company with his wife in 2020, in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic.

But Johnson’s work connecting people goes back long before that. Originally from Dallas, Johnson moved to Lafayette, La., when he was 17 years old. Soon thereafter, he met Tonya, whom he married in 1997. In the years that followed, Johnson got involved in pastoral ministry and eventually began laying the groundwork for a new church in the New Orleans area.

“At the one-year anniversary, we’d grown to about 110 people,” Johnson said. “Then, Katrina hit.”

In the months that followed, Johnson and his team stepped up to serve their community by helping clean out and rebuild houses destroyed by Hurricane Katrina, which devastated much of southeast Louisiana and coastal Mississippi in August 2005.

“We rebuilt over 200 homes with volunteers from around the country that next year,” he said.

He also spent a few months working for CBS as a guide for news crews reporting from New Orleans.

The new church, though, never fully recovered after Katrina, so the Johnsons then got involved with Celebration Church in Metairie, La. Soon, Celebration hired Johnson to serve as a community pastor. In that role, he connected members to opportunities to plug-in to the church and serve in the community.

In 2012, Johnson made a career change and entered the maritime industry. His father-in-law, Ken Brooks, owns Spirit Marine Equipment, which supplies propellers, shafts and other marine equipment to the industry. Brooks asked Johnson to join him in the family business, and that’s where he learned the ins and outs of the maritime industry.

“My father-in-law had been in the boat business for years, all the way back to the early 1980s, against the tide,” Johnson said. “Really, it was out of my relationship with him that all this started.”

By late 2019 and 2020, Johnson was wanting to start a new endeavor, still in marine equipment sales but with a much broader field of view.

“My father-in-law offered for me and my wife to go out on our own and take that greater risk so, sink or swim, we’d own it,” Johnson said.

That was early 2020, a harrowing time to be in business, much less a new business.

“Those first four months there was nothing,” Johnson said.

But it wasn’t long before the tide changed for Commercial Marine Pro.

“After Easter, we got our first phone call, then an email, then another phone call,” Johnson said. “By the end of the year, we’d had about a million in revenue come through.”

Revenue doubled in 2021 and more than doubled again in 2022, with more than $4 million last year.

“It was scary at first, but we are people of faith,” Johnson said. “We work like it all depends on us and pray like it all depends on God. We know we can’t do it all on our own.”

Like his work as a pastor, Johnson and his team’s work at Commercial Marine Pro is all about connecting people, specifically connecting marine operators who have specific equipment needs to people who can meet those needs.

They do that through word of mouth and  a trio of e-blasts each week. One is a call for people with equipment needs. A second targets equipment owners looking to sell. A third deals strictly with vessel sales. So far, Commercial Marine Pro has a client database approaching 6,000.

“And we probably have $8 million in quotes out there,” Johnson said. “I think we’re just four or five countries short of having people from every country in the world go to our website.”

Specific to marine equipment sales, Johnson said operators often encounter emergency needs that the manufacturer simply can’t meet in a timely manner.

“There’s a whole niche market that happens there to keep these boats up and running,” he said.

Johnson gave the example of a dredge operator who had an engine go down on a dredge working in Texas. The engine manufacturer estimated it would be 12 months before it could supply a replacement package.

“The dredge company was like, ‘This is impossible,’” Johnson said. “Low and behold, we had an engine package to meet their need.”

Instead of a year of downtime, the dredge was back to work in a month.

That same scenario plays out all the time, Johnson said, with either used equipment that has plenty of life left or new equipment that’s just never been put to use.

“We’re not your normal dealer channel,” he said, “but we’re the person you call after your dealer.”

The service Commercial Marine Pro provides is also a win for companies with equipment to sell, like engines or gearboxes removed during a repowering project.

“Whatever that company is taking out, if we can help them get some cash for it, that takes some of the sting out of that purchase,” he said.

Johnson emphasized that Commercial Marine Pro doesn’t just operate through emails or phone calls. Johnson or a member of his team often travels to equipment for inspections and shoot photos, and they will meet clients on site or serve as the customer’s eyes, hands and ears during inspections or sales.

“We like to say that we will spend money before we make money,” he said.

Commercial Marine Pro currently has a team of seven, with staff located in Lafayette, Slidell, La., and Atlanta, Ga. For more information, visit www.commercialmarinepro.com.

Caption for photo: Tonya and Shawn Johnson, founders of Commercial Marine Pro.