Dockwa Case Study

Dockwa is the leading marina management software in the US, streamlining operations such as dockage, storage, fuel and more through a single platform. Dockwa’s main business has traditionally been in subscriptions but embedded payments have increasingly become a core to their solution. This is allowing marinas to take payments on-site for various products like fuel or store services.

The introduction of embedded payments came with new challenges. They did not have a seamless way to ensure they were achieving profitability as they lacked visibility of their margins and how best to align processing costs into their pricing.

Revenew’s Impact on Dockwa’s Embedded Payments

With Revenew's no-code solution, they were immediately able to see which customers they were losing money on and were able to devise a firm strategy to increase revenue, reduce churn and unlock additional opportunities in their embedded payments products. These are the results:

Benefit 1: Increase Customer Lifetime Value

A 360-degree view of customers enables Dockwa to analyze the performance of their customers, actively targeting at-risk accounts to reduce churn, uncover upsell potential increase upsell opportunities and renewal likelihood, and tailor pricing to improve profitability.

Revenew’s customer views allowed us for the first time as a business to understand customer margins. Our Commercial team is now able to target key accounts and streamline the renewal process, armed with real data about the marina’s P&L. - Reid Burns, GTM Sales Leader

Benefit 2: Strategic Planning For Longterm Profitability

With Revenew, Dockwa’s Commercial and Finance team members can scenario plan pricing changes, assess their impact on bottom-line, and fine-tune their renewal strategy - reducing risk and boosting revenue.

We have seen our customer take rate increase 30bps, which is massive. This has played a big role in our business reaching profitability for the first time. Further we’ve scenario planned the implementation of a fixed fee in addition to our current variable fee, which will further ensure pricing stability. - Kendall Partie, Director of Finance

Benefit 3: Insights To Negotiate Better PSP Rates

Revenew helps Dockwa track, measure, and optimize payment margins in real time, uncovering hidden revenue opportunities and inefficiencies. This level of understanding has armed them for favourable renegotiations with their PSP.

We used Revenew’s data to renegotiate with our PSP, leading to a high single digit IC++ cost reduction on Cards and 75% of ACH. We’ve already seen a revenue increase of 12.5% for our embedded payments and are projecting this number to double (which would account for all loss-incurring payments to break even, the upshot could be much larger with even a conservative net margin). - Kendall Partie, Director of Finance

Benefit 4: Hours Of Manual Work Freed Up

Revenew automates margin calculations, eliminates manual reconciliation, and delivers real-time profitability insights—saving time and resources. A myriad of static spreadsheets has been replaced by Revenew’s dynamic customer and pricing insights.

Using Revenew’s Pricing Insights tool to scenario plan pricing changes is saving the Commercial department an estimated 20 hours every month and it’s much more reliable as it’s based on real payments and pricing data, embracing the dynamic nature of this space. Revenew’s out of the box revenue and margin calculations that take into account payments processing costs save the Finance department another 15h every month. - Kendall Partie, Director of Finance

Benefit 5: 360 Visibility Into All Revenew Streams

Instead of fragmented raw numbers, Revenew consolidates and analyzes payments data to deliver clear, actionable recommendations.

Not only were we able to dive into the detail and analyze payment margins, but we were able to use Revenew’s holistic macro-level view of how our platform has performed, arming us with clear insights for our board. - Kendall Partie, Director of Finance

Here's How

Upon plugging in Revenew, which took only a few clicks and no development effort on Dockwa’s side, they were able to analyze their strategy at both the platform as well as the marina level, all the way down to each single payment. What they found was that on many occasions, their embedded payments were costing the business and did not bring in revenue. With Revenew pointing out the negatively trending customers, Dockwa was now armed to adjust their pricing for marinas where they were in the red.

Dockwa was now able eliminate uncertainty from their embedded payment products. These detailed insights have enabled the Commercial and Finance teams to model and define their pricing strategy based on actual processing costs, leading to more accurate pricing decisions and profitable business outcomes. Revenew’s ability to segment payments data by marina was something Dockwa had long sought but struggled to achieve. Not only has this newfound capability optimized their operational efficiency, it also played a key role on their path to profitability, by guiding the Commercial team in assessing which marinas needed a pricing update.

Since using Revenew, they’ve enabled an ROI focused sales cycle with a laser sharp focus on customer growth and operating margin. Based on Revenew’s data, Dockwa is now implementing a new commission structure for their Sales reps. Their current commission structure does not sufficiently include their embedded payments product.

Revenew has further armed Dockwa’s Finance team with the insights needed to renegotiate pricing with their PSP, lowering credit card pricing by single digits, and ACH cost by 75%.

What’s Next

The collaboration with Revenew has not only improved Dockwa's pricing and revenue management but truly set a foundation for sustainable growth and operational efficiency when managing their growing marina network. The ongoing collaboration focusses on 3 key areas when it comes to knowing and growing Dockwa’s customers:

Plan: Dockwa and Revenew continue to investigate further collaboration opportunities, especially in the area of empowering Dockwa’s Commercial team to understand and sell payments to their customers with confidence over the profitability of each deal. Revenew and Dockwa are further partnering on the creation of a commission structure that better addresses the embedded payments part of the deal.

Land: Armed with accurate sales forecasting, feeding a complete financial model that takes into account the seemingly unpredictable nature of the modern payments industry, Dockwa is now in a place where Commercial and Finance use a single tool to dynamically pull the very levers that will have the biggest impact on their bottom line.

Expand: Key to Dockwa’s mission to provide a best-in class marina and boater experience. Revenew is dedicated to enabling Dockwa to track and increase customer health, drive marina profitability and reduce churn.

If you too are struggling to get a clear view of the customer performance and payments margins for your platform, you should head over to https://revenew.co/contact and reach out to us.