The Accidental COO

Sliding behind the upholstered seat of Miss Stacey II, a 26-foot Hacker-Craft Runabout on the sparkling waters of pristine Lake George in upstate New York on a gorgeous late-summer afternoon, Erin Badcock looks at home. It’s no coincidence. Her father was a wooden-boat aficionado, and the Badcock family had summered on the lake since she was a kid, earning her first boating safety certification at the tender age of 10. So, when Erin put the stick shift into gear and turned the knob on the dashboard that throttles up the Ilmor 5.7-liter, 365-hp inboard engine, it most clearly wasn’t her first time. Moments later, with Miss Stacey II creaming along over 30 knots at 5,000 rpm, Erin was in her element.

As well she should be, for these days she’s no longer a youngster on vacation but the COO of Hacker-Craft, which was launched well over 100 years ago by an eccentric, brilliant naval architect and engineer named John L. Hacker. There are few women running legacy brands of boatbuilding enterprises, but Erin was the right person at the right time. More than a decade ago, her dad bought the business as a labor of love after learning it was on shaky financial ground. When he needed someone he trusted to manage day-to-day operations, he turned to his daughter, a recent graduate of Fordham University with a political science degree.

“I told him I’d work for him for a year,” says Erin, with an ironic laugh that seemed to suggest she’d found her calling. That was 14 years ago.

The Steinway Of Runabouts

John Hacker founded his company, then known as the Hacker Boat Co., in Detroit in 1908. An inveterate inventor and tinkerer, Hacker became famous not only for his pioneering V-shaped hull designs and his prodigious output of runabouts, racers, commuters, and tenders, but also for the floating biplane he conceived for the Wright Brothers. Hacker’s friends and customers included another Detroit stalwart named Henry Ford, who founded the Ford Motor Company; and he created some of the world’s fastest speedboats, including Kitty Hawk, which topped the then-unthinkable speed barrier of 50 knots. By the 1920s, Hacker’s boats were coveted by Hollywood stars, far-flung royals, and corporate magnates, all of which earned them a heady nickname: “The Steinway of Runabouts.”

The zenith of the original Hacker era concluded with the economic calamity of the Great Depression in the ’20s and ’30s. Later, a New Yorker named William Morgan took the reins and moved operations east to his home state, where it began to resume its earlier levels of output and prestige. Morgan sold the company in 2004, and in 2011 Erin’s dad, George, took control as Hacker-Craft’s majority investor.

“He always had wood boats and loved the brand,” says Erin. “He wanted to see it continue and improve. I’m not sure anyone else was necessarily going to step up with that passion or willingness to make the investment. When we acquired the company, we decided we needed to address the quality standards in the builds and implement that into the culture. It was a big upheaval of trying to right a ship that deserved the accolades that would measure up to its legacy.”

After the move to New York, Hacker-Crafts were initially built in the small hamlet of Silver Bay on Lake George’s northern shores; Miss Stacey II was docked at the modest boathouse there that the company still owns. Following a short stint at another facility in Ticonderoga, in 2021 they moved to their current headquarters in Queensbury, a more centralized site that houses a 15,000 square-foot plant and adjacent 9,000 square-foot building for staging and storage. It was an important move for several reasons, including the area’s skilled-labor pool; Hacker-Craft currently employs a staff of four dozen workers.

The Hacker-Craft Artisans

One of those prized employees is engineer Jeff Brown, who grew up nearby and whose early passion for Lake George boating led him to pursue a career in naval architecture. After initial studies at Maine’s Landing School, he earned his degree in yacht and power craft design at Solent University in Southampton, England. Following a stint at the cutting-edge Gunboat catamaran company, he returned to his New York roots at Hacker-Craft more than a decade ago. At first, Brown’s main task was to make sure that Hacker-Craft boats were meeting U.S. Coast Guard standards and to oversee quality control. Today, along with supervising restorations and refits – an ongoing and substantial part of the business – Brown also drafts his fair share of custom designs, which account for about 30% of the company’s new builds.

Brown has also represented a real-life bridge between Hacker-Craft’s former seat-of-the-pants building techniques to employing contemporary high-tech design tools like CAD software and 3D modeling. And that shift in the company’s evolution is a credit to Brown, who was at the outset of his career, and an old-school boatbuilder named Tim Gautreau, who was on the backside of his working days and in many ways became the young designer’s mentor.

Brown remembers the early days of their partnership and learning things he wasn’t taught in graduate school. “If Tim needed to do a custom layout or something, he drew and lofted in full scale,” said Brown. “With an engine layout, in terms of where he was going to lay the keel, he’d draw it on a cinder-block wall and the blocks would give him some datum points with the plan view right on the wall.”

To his credit, Gautreau was open to new ideas, including the fast-changing technology of modern naval architecture. “He was one of the hardest workers you’ll ever know,” Brown says of Gautreau, with whom he worked for about seven years before Gautreau retired in 2015. “A lot of people might’ve said, ‘Well, this is how we’ve done it for 15 years.’ Tim loved and lived the boats. And if we could make them better, and he could learn some new things in the process, that was great.” Together, Brown and Gautreau embraced the brand’s proven DNA of classic wooden-boat craftsmanship and merged it with the latest, best building and design practices. It was your basic win-win outcome.

Modern-Day Powerboats

Today, Hacker-Craft offers two separate and established lines of models (though almost all are customized to some degree). The Legacy collection is the traditional series and includes the Sport, Runabout, and Racer models, while the Aquavant line is a more recent addition to the brand and features the Center Console and Commuter craft, as well as the new Electric Series. The first Electric model, a 27-foot Sport, has been delivered to its new owner on Lake Tahoe. In a somewhat novel arrangement, Hacker-Craft has partnered with Ingenity Electric, a subsidiary of Florida-based Correct Craft, for its propulsion systems. Correct Craft installs Ingenity systems in its Nautique line of boats, but Hacker-Craft is the first company that is not under their umbrella to use them. “It’s been an incredibly supportive partnership,” says Erin.

Though the defining image of a Hacker-Craft may be their varnished mahogany hulls cleaving across a tree-lined lake in the Adirondacks, Erin notes the split between fresh- and saltwater owners is about 70/30, a growing number of boats are being shipped to Florida and California, and the company has even enlisted the services of a dealer in Thailand. She says the ownership demographic is changing, too, with younger customers seeking a family boat, not a cocktail cruiser.

As far as refits go, Hacker-Craft does everything from full reconstructions to bottom replacements to maintaining varnish. Brown also said the company does a fair bit of repowering with newer, more powerful engines. “We have a lot of car enthusiasts as customers,” he says. “If you’re a motorhead, you can be one across the two different avenues: autos and boats.”

Keeping A Legacy Thriving

Among the new projects currently underway, Erin was particularly excited with one scheduled to be launched next summer. “It’s a custom build,” she says, “a 35-foot, twin-engine Gentlemen’s Racer, with a pair of Ilmor supercharged engines. It was designed in-house by Jeff and is very, very cool.”

Going forward, Erin says Hacker-Craft will evolve. “We’re not going to build the same boats for the next 100 years. We’re founded in those classic designs and want to maintain that timeless façade while continuing to add to our portfolio. We have a lot of communication with our customers, and those relationships are a big part of our success.”

Erin has embraced her role as the young face of a historic brand that shows no signs of slowing down, while also as the visionary leader of a boat company she’s steering into the future. Just as she showed driving Miss Stacey II across those iconic New York waters, her course ahead is straight and true.