The Association of Marina Industries welcomed more than 1,100 attendees and 150-plus exhibitors to the Fort Lauderdale Convention Center this week for its three-day conference and expo.

“When I first started the conference 18 years ago, it was hot and heavy on operations,” Kayce Florio, conference coordinator and AMI vice president of business and finance, told Trade Only Today. “It has evolved to include more content about leadership, so now it’s a hybrid about operations and management. It’s turned into more of a business conference.”

“The association educates and trains marina operators and their employees in the standards of professionalism in the industry,” Florio added. “We make sure that people continue to have positive experiences in every marina they visit. That helps to ensure that their disposable income stays in the marina industry because they’ll keep coming back to recreational boating. That’s the goal.”

In the keynote address this morning, dubbed “Blind Ambition,” motivational speaker Chad Foster delivered a message of resilience and empowerment for those facing setbacks. Foster, who lost his vision at 21, learned to turn that obstacle into a key to his success, and he provided tools and instruction for others to do the same.

At pre-conference seminars Tuesday, in a breakout session titled “Rising Waters: Coping with Extreme Weather,” Margaret Boshek, senior coastal engineer at Moffatt & Nichol, and Wayne Cobleigh, vice president at GZA Environmental, led discussions on a variety of ways marina owners can protect their properties and assets against damage from severe weather, including increasingly common flooding.

“The water is changing,” Boshek told Trade Only Today, “and therefore floodwaters are now impacting a lot of the legacy properties like never before, and a lot of these owners want to know what they can do to make their marinas more resilient. That’s the bottom line of how well their properties will perform through these weather events — how well they were prepared for them.”

In a “Marina 101” breakout session Tuesday, Carl Wolf of Marina Operations led attendees through a multifaceted course on best practices for marina ownership. The course discussed safety issues, proper retailing practices, security concerns, financial reports and other day-to-day matters of marina management.

A marina tour took attendees to three local facilities: Las Olas Marina, Harbor Towne Marina and Pier Sixty-Six.

Later today, Michele Goldsmith, vice president and general manager of the Soundings Trade Only Group, will host a Women’s Leadership Panel with Heather Mess of MarineMax; Maria Nardi of Miami-Dade County Parks, Recreation and Open Spaces; Kim Sweers of FB Marine Group; and Megan Lagasse of Pier Sixty-Six. The panel is sponsored by Sea-Land Insurance.

The conference includes two dozen more sessions on a variety of marina industry issues and concerns. Additionally, attendees are free to confer with the vendors on the main floor of the conference center.

The AMI conference runs through tomorrow.

More information about AMI’s ongoing training courses is available here, or contact Merritt Alves at [email protected].