Updates tailored to you.
Our Startup Spotlight series introduces you to the entrepreneurs in our community, sharing their unique journeys as founders.
This week, we put the spotlight on Kenneth Richards founder of Herons Marine, who are building a software for the marine trades that handles scheduling, invoicing, and project management, so professionals can spend less time on admin and more time on the water.
What’s your story? How did you come up with the idea for your business?
I’m an entrepreneur and academic by training, but at heart I’m a lifelong waterman. I grew up surfing, sailing, and spending as much time as possible on the water. In recent years I’ve crewed on blue-water racing teams, winning races like Newport–Bermuda and Marblehead, Halifax, and I’m just as comfortable poling around the salt marsh in a center console. My love for boats, the sea, and the community of people who work on them is the foundation of this venture.
After exiting my previous company, I began working part-time as a marine surveyor. That’s where I saw a fundamental problem in the marine trades: demand is booming, but the people doing the work are overwhelmed, and the tools they rely on are outdated. With my co-founder, Jeremy Frederick, I launched Herons Marine to solve this. We’ve built a field-service and business-operations platform designed specifically for the marine trades.
Running a small marine business is incredibly demanding. Whether you’re a solo mobile mechanic or a small shop, admin tasks, customer management, scheduling, and financial tracking can quickly become barriers to growth. They drain time, energy, and revenue, and they’re rarely why anyone got into the marine trades.
Herons gives tradespeople a modern, streamlined way to run their businesses “in the time it takes to walk down the dock.” With better tools, they earn more while spending less time buried in admin. And as a bonus, boat owners finally get timely service and repairs.
Read more: Startup Spotlight – Hooper Quinn
I love building things and solving real problems. Working closely with marine professionals, helping them earn more and reduce daily headaches, has been genuinely rewarding. Creating win-wins is what motivates me.
It took more than 18 months of research, prototyping, and trial-and-error to truly understand the problem. Everyone in the industry is so busy that getting time with them was difficult. But we needed insights from a broad set of perspectives, not just our own. Understanding the problem turned out to be harder than finding the solution.
We’re focused on building a community of marine professionals. In three years, we aim to have national distribution across the US and Caribbean. In five years, we plan to expand into the UK, Europe, and the Med.
Be patient and present. Take the time to understand the problem deeply. Do things manually before you start coding. And remember: not all money is equal, choose supportive, honest investors.
“Tides rise, ships rise.” When we help each other succeed, everyone wins.
