Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, June 10, 1995 TAG: 9506120021
SECTION: BUSINESS PAGE: A-6 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: F.J. GALLAGHER STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
On a warm summer day, the prospect of spending several hours in a boardroom hashing over productivity projections can depress even the most enthusiastic executive. But one businessman has what he thinks is the solution.
"It looks like something you'd see in a slightly funny movie about Mayberry," Loch Haven Lake owner Sky Preece said, referring to the bucolic setting of television's old "Andy Griffith Show."
"It" is a floating boardroom of sorts; a wide pontoon complete with a picnic table, old-fashioned wooden lawn chairs and a big green umbrella to provide refuge from the sun.
Hollins College administrators and faculty have held meetings on the boat. Loch Haven's own board of advisers held a session adrift Friday morning.
With classical music coming from a tiny portable player, the advisers clambered aboard the 8-by-16-foot-boat and took their seats at the picnic table set with flowers, fine china and silver. Board member Dianne Bowman handed each one a copy of the meeting's agenda, and they shoved off.
Powered by a small electric motor, the boat cruised slowly around the private recreation facility's 10-acre lake in North Roanoke County. The occasional chirp of a cellular phone could be heard across the water.
"There's nothing like it," Preece said. "You just think differently when your walls are 500 feet away."
Indeed, the float may be the only facility of its kind available to small groups for meetings, although Roanoke Valley Convention and Visitors Bureau representatives think they could come up with something just as creative.
"We usually deal with bigger groups," said the bureau's Nancy Burnside. "I'm sure there are plenty of places, I'd just have to think about it and research it."
She said she had organized a pig roast on Mill Mountain and a meeting at the Virginia Museum of Transportation for groups in the past. "Other restaurants and hotels in the area have nice outdoor facilities that might be available for smaller groups," she added.
Preece, who recently acquired the boat, said at first he didn't think of the craft as a place to hold meetings.
"We're always trying to make new picnic areas for our members," he said, "and as I got it in the water it started to look like something out of an old romantic movie."
At that point, he said, the idea of making it available to small groups for meetings occurred to him.
"It's a little like the 'Field of Dreams,''' Preece said. "Build it and they will come." So far, only a few groups have used the pontoon, which is available to nonmembers for $75 per day.
Freelance photographer and Loch Haven Lake member Paul Calhoun plans to use the boat for meetings as he tries to get a new venture off the ground.
"We want to have our meetings in a more casual atmosphere," he said. "We do business in a more casual style, and it's tough to convey that impression in a stuffy boardroom somewhere."
by CNB