I'd like to ask the ex-Challenger owners out there if they'd share the benefit of their 20-20 hindsight with us ex-OS owners. Please can you tell me what went well for you after Challenger's collapse, what the main pitfalls were, and what you'd do differently if you found yourselves in the same situation again?

If you decided to manage your boat yourselves, was it easier or more difficult than you thought, & would you recommend it?

Thanks in advance,
Mattt.

Hi Matt,

It was easy for us - BCBM rose from the wreckage of Challenger - we appointed them and we haven't looked back. In fact I'd go as far as to say that the whole experience, while a bit alarming at first, turned out to be quite a good one really. We're now in a much better place as a consequence.

In short what we needed to do was:-

- Sort our the immediate issues like mooring, licences and insurance (not difficult really).
- Get a syndicate agreement in place (the old one was with Challenger and when they ceased to exist it no longer was valid).
- Vote on a few things that needed deciding on here and there.
- Appointed a new management company, the aforementioned BCBM.
- Figured out how much we'd lost and registered as creditors with the administrator.
- Got back to boating and enjoyed our new found freedom.

In fact the post-Challenger experience may well have been simpler than yours might be. There were no buy-backs or up-front management fee schemes with us and I'm certainly glad of that. It was a simple matter of £3000 missing from our account.

Don't know about self-management - can't answer that one - but for us, we'd originally bought into a managed scheme and we all wanted to keep it that way.

The BEST thing is the fact that as a syndicate of owners we now make the rules. The management company works for us, we employ them and we're free to go elsewhere each year if they don't deliver the service we want. We're in control.

One word of advice ... don't expect to get any money you lost back in a hurry. The wheels move very slowly in these matters!

Honestly I don't think we'd have done anything differently. There's plenty I wish we'd done before Challenger went bust, but that's a different question!

Hope this helps.

Good luck,

Neil.

Mattt - could you e-mail me please

Philip
boatshare