Ryan Gwillim – CFO & CSO, Brunswick

From a Conglomerate to an Ecosystem: The Strategic Reboot That Defined The Modern Brunswick

Coming out of the global financial crisis, Brunswick faced a question that many legacy companies never get around to asking honestly: what do we actually want to be? The answer required real discipline. Over the course of several years, Brunswick divested its bowling and billiards businesses, sold its Life Fitness cardio equipment division and Hammer Strength brand, and exited several other recreational categories it had accumulated during a period when diversified conglomerates were in favor with investors. The investor community had moved on. If investors wanted diversification, they could build it themselves. What they were rewarding was focus.

What Brunswick focused on was marine, and within marine, not just boats. The strategic insight was that new boat sales, while important, are inherently cyclical and volatile. The ecosystem around boats, engines, parts, accessories, services, and shared access, is far more resilient and generates recurring revenue that compounds over time. Brunswick’s outboard engine business, built around the Mercury Marine brand, grew from a market share position in the low thirties to nearly 50 percent in the United States. Parts and accessories became the dominant earnings contributor. And the company began investing in technology and innovation not as a branding exercise but as a direct response to what customers said they wanted: experiences on the water that were safer, easier, and more enjoyable.

The ACES Strategy: Autonomous, Connected, Electrified, Shared

Brunswick’s technology roadmap is organized around four pillars that Gwillim describes as the ACES strategy: Autonomous, Connected, Electrified, and Shared. Each represents a distinct dimension of how boating is changing and where Brunswick is investing to stay ahead of it.

On the autonomous side, the most visible product is AutoCaptain, a system that allows a boat to dock and undock without the captain touching the steering wheel. A guide point is set on the multifunction display, and the combination of sensors, cameras, and propulsion systems handles the rest. For anyone who has watched an experienced boater sweat through a crowded marina on a windy day in front of a full restaurant patio, the significance of that capability is immediately clear. On the connected side, Brunswick is developing AI agents that allow boat owners to monitor and manage their vessel remotely, with real-time system alerts and an app-based interface that keeps captains connected whether they are on the boat or not. On the electrified side, the focus extends beyond propulsion to the full systems architecture of the boat, replacing traditional generators with cleaner, easier to maintain battery systems that handle all onboard power loads. And on the shared side, Freedom Boat Club represents Brunswick’s most consequential bet on how the next generation of boaters will access the water.

Freedom Boat Club: The 60 Million Dollar Acquisition Worth Half a Billion Today

When Brunswick acquired Freedom Boat Club in 2019 for approximately 60 million dollars, the thesis was straightforward: get people who would not otherwise own a boat onto the water, let them fall in love with boating, and eventually convert them to ownership. What happened was even more interesting.

Freedom Boat Club operates as a membership model, described by Gwillim as a country club of boating. Members pay a down payment of roughly five thousand dollars, a monthly subscription of three to five hundred dollars, and get full access to boats at their home location plus reciprocal access to all 450 locations across the network. Boats are cleaned, fueled, and waiting in the slip. Members reserve through an app, use the boat for the day, return it, and leave. No ownership costs, no slip fees, no maintenance headaches.

The conversion thesis turned out to be only part of the value story. The lifetime economic value of keeping a member in Freedom Boat Club, driven by the parts and accessories consumption from high-use boats that cycle out of the fleet every two to three years, turned out to be equal to or greater than a single boat purchase. Brunswick no longer needs every Freedom member to eventually buy a boat. Keeping them in the club is itself a compelling economic outcome. The business has grown from 170 locations and roughly 25,000 members at acquisition to 450 locations and nearly 100,000 members today. Gwillim is direct about what it is worth: half a billion dollars or more, on a relatively modest multiple, and it is not for sale.

Tariffs, Vertical Integration, and the Build Strategy

As tariff pressure on Chinese-sourced components has intensified, Brunswick has accelerated a vertical integration strategy that was already underway. The company has reduced its exposure to China from approximately 10 percent of cost of goods sold to below 5 percent, and is on track to reach 2 percent or below by the end of next year. Some of that reduction comes from resourcing to other geographies. A significant portion comes from bringing manufacturing in-house, including furniture fabrication and seating production that was previously sourced externally.

The Navon adventure boat line is an example of what Brunswick can build internally when it commits to doing so. Created from scratch rather than acquired, Navon has grown to approximately 20 percent of the adventure boat market. That track record is part of why Gwillim is straightforward about his lack of enthusiasm for acquiring additional boat companies. With the capital allocation options available through the ecosystem strategy, buying another boat brand ranks well below investing in technology, innovation, engine development, and the infrastructure that supports recurring revenue growth. The partnership model fills the gaps that internal development and acquisition do not. A recent collaboration with Textron on unmanned surface vehicles is served as an example of how Brunswick can bring its marine expertise, hull design, Navico electronics systems, and Mercury propulsion, to a defense-adjacent application without needing to develop the surrounding technology from scratch.

Two Reboots and the Career Nobody Planned

Ryan Gwillim’s path to the Brunswick CFO and CSO seat did not follow a conventional finance track.For the better part of a decade, he enjoyed working as a lawyer at Baker McKenzie, one of the world’s largest law firms, and excelled at cross-border mergers and acquisitions Then he hit a wall. A prolonged deal in India that kept him away from home for months, a compressed associate pipeline coming out of the financial crisis, and accumulated exhaustion all combined into a moment where he walked into his managing partner’s office and said he was leaving. There was no backup plan. There was a short detour into legal services outsourcing that he quickly recognized was not the right fit. And then there was a phone call to Brunswick, a former client, whose general counsel had a role open on her team.

The step down was significant. He went from cross-border global M&A at a major international firm to commercial legal work for a single company. But, he did not regret it. Over the next five years he worked through nearly every role in Brunswick’s legal department and built a deep operational understanding of the company that a purely financial background would not have provided.

The second reboot was equally unplanned. In the fall of 2017, the CFO came to his office and told him  investor relations needed emergency coverage. The person groomed for the role had taken another opportunity. Gwillim said yes, studied an accounting textbook on vacation to refresh the financial metrics that were second nature to everyone around him, and spent the next two and a half years navigating one of the most eventful periods in Brunswick’s recent history, including activism pressure, the Life Fitness divestiture, and multiple contested M&A situations. “What I saw in two and a half years,” he said, “you could write a book on a lifetime of IR.”

Looking back, he describes investor relations as an underrated career development tool for anyone who wants to sit in a CFO or CEO chair. Understanding how to communicate with the street, what metrics matter to investors, and how to message a strategic transformation clearly are skills most executives develop too late. At Brunswick, cycling high performers through investor relations is now a deliberate part of how Gwillim develops his team.