Half the Marine Contractors in America Have Fewer Than Five Employees
By Priya Raghunathan, Port authority procurement analyst. Reviewed by Amanda McCallister, editor.
Marine Construction | Boat Lift Installation October 2017. Port of Everett, Washington. The water was 48 degrees and the color of old tea. I was standing on the stern of a 24-foot dive boat while the owner unscrewed the fill cap on his own compressor and smelled the oil. His company, he said, had three people. Him. His son. A part-time tender. I nearly walked away right there. The procurement manual said 'contractor must have a designated safety representative.' He didn't have one. He had a pair of pliers and a coffee can for oil changes. I disqualified his bid, and we awarded the job to a mid-size firm with a laminated safety org chart. Their diver had never worked with their tender. The deck was chaos. The job ran three weeks over, and the client was furious. The three-man outfit, meanwhile, was doing a hull inspection for the tenant next door and finished it in half the estimated hours. I keep a spreadsheet. Since 2016, we've received 38 bids on port maintenance jobs. Nineteen of those bidders listed five or fewer employees. Half. From where I sit in procurement, that title is not hyperbole. My near-miss in Everett is why I stopped treating small as a red flag. Small is normal. The skill is in how you buy from them. Here are the five checks I now run on every bid from a five-person contractor.
The owner is the safety program. Test it.
Don't ask for the binder. Ask the owner to walk through the job: What's the tidal window on your slip? Where's the entanglement hazard under your dock? What happens if the diver gets hung up nine feet down in zero visibility? A real supervisor answers from memory because he has been on every job his company has ever done. If the best he can do is point at a folder, the safety function is decorative. Then ask what he would change about the last similar job he ran. The strongest small outfits are brutal self-critics. The rest recite the same story every time.
Read the gear the way a diver reads it
A five-person firm has one boat, one compressor, one set of helmets. That is not a weakness; it forces them to keep those tools alive. Before the bid, ask to see the compressor's carbon test tags, the date stamps on every umbilical, and the hyperbaric chamber maintenance log. Ask for the most recent breathing-air quality report, emailed directly to you. A well-run small outfit forwards it in ten minutes. A poorly-run one goes quiet and then says it's 'probably fine.' Probably is not a QC program. Walk away.
Certifications belong to people, not companies
On a large firm, the quals live in an HR file and the crew is interchangeable. On a small firm, each person is a load-bearing wall. Require a named crew list with each diver's commercial dive certification, medical fitness document, and first-aid/CPR dates attached to the bid, not promised at mobilization. If the job requires flame-resistant clothing, ask where it gets laundered. Home washing destroys the NFPA 2112 rating; contract laundering runs $4 to $15 per employee per week. An owner who blinks at that number is washing the gear at home and calling it certified. That is exactly the kind of shortcut you are paying not to inherit.
Price the model, not the number
A five-person firm will often quote a flat lump sum or a day rate that bundles vessel, crew, and compressor. Fine. Force the breakdown anyway. How much of that number is mobilization? How much is vessel time? How much is actual bottom time? A straight answer tells you they have run this job before. A mumble tells you the price was invented over breakfast. Price the model first, then compare totals. And ask how they handle weather stand-downs. A one-vessel firm that sits through a three-day blow has a different cost structure than a large fleet, and you want to know that before the weather, not during it.
Pin the people and the boat to the bid
The last check is the contract language. The bid should name the dive team and the vessel. If it says 'the crew' or 'a vessel,' ask which one. The thing you are buying from a five-person firm is that the person who negotiated the price is the person who will go under your pier. Put their names in the contract. If they want to swap someone out, require prior written approval and documented equal qualifications. And get an insurance certificate that names the vessel and the work class, not a broker's generic letter. Ask straight whether the policy excludes diving operations. On small policies, that exclusion is common. It is also fatal.
Frequently Asked Questions
Your own manual requires a designated safety representative. How do you square that with hiring a three-person outfit? I changed the manual. The requirement is now a safety function, not a titled position. The owner of a well-run small firm is the safety program: he checks the gear, writes the JSA, and stands on the dock while his son goes over the side. A title without authority is just an org chart. I want someone who can describe the hazards under my pier without opening a binder. If half the marine contractors in America have fewer than five employees, doesn't that mean the industry is full of fly-by-night operations? It means the industry runs on small units of trust. A five-person firm that has survived a decade has solved cash flow, insurance, and repeat customers. Its real risk is concentration: the owner gets sick and the schedule stalls. Mitigate that with milestone payments and a named backup, not with an arbitrary headcount requirement. Do I demand the same insurance limits from a five-person firm as from a 200-person firm? Yes, for the same risk. But read the certificate. Ask for an ACORD form that names the vessel, the work class, and a waiver of the diving operations exclusion. If the broker hesitates, you have just learned something about the contractor's attention to detail. That information is worth a lot more than a limits check.