One of Boston’s most unusual employee perks is hiding in plain sight in the Seaport District.
If you’ve spent time lounging on the steps behind the Institute of Contemporary Art, hoisted a glass of rosé at the new ReelHouse Oyster Bar, or hopped the water shuttle from the Seaport to North Station, the perk has been right in front of you.
Employees of software company PTC have free access to dock space at the Fan Pier Marina. This summer, about a dozen of them are taking advantage of the opportunity to drive their boats to work, tie up, and walk two blocks to the office on Seaport Boulevard. It’s the third summer that the Boston-based company has offered free docking for mariners. The employees who make use of it motor in from home ports in Salem, Scituate, Hingham, and Newton.
“The first time I heard about the slips, I said, ‘That’s not real,’” says Stuart Aquadro, a director of inside sales. Now, Aquadro uses the dock space once or twice a week to cross the harbor from his home in East Boston. “There’s no white knuckling it through traffic,” he says. Occasionally, Aquadro makes a third trip over on the weekend to do some grocery shopping at the Trader Joe’s in the Seaport.
Employees who don’t own boats can hitch a ride in, too. Peter LeBlanc, a senior director at PTC, says that he hasn’t yet obtained spousal permission to buy a boat, but he occasionally makes the one-hour trip to work from the South Shore with a colleague, Stuart Heavyside, who keeps his 35-foot powerboat in Scituate.
The perk was first proposed in 2020, during a conversation on PTC’s roof deck that included the publicly-held company’s chief executive, Jim Heppelman. The conversation was focused on things that might bring people back to the office; PTC, which sells software that is used by architects and designers, had just moved from Needham into a gleaming new headquarters building in the Seaport. “I was literally half-joking when I said, ‘Just like we have a parking garage and bike parking, we should have a place for boats,’” recalls Michael Campbell, at the time an executive vice president at the company. Campbell would sometimes come in from Scituate on his boat, but he’d either pay for a day’s dockage near Legal Harborside, or find a secret spot where he could tie up for free.
Heppelman told him to look into how much it would cost. Campbell sought out a quote, and he remembers a chilly February day when they discussed whether one slip would be sufficient. He got the OK for two. The Fan Pier Marina’s rack rate for one season’s rental of 70 feet of dock space is $30,000, but Campbell says he was able to negotiate a bit of a discount. (It’s enough space for two medium-sized powerboats.) The parking perk came online in the summer of 2021 — along with other back-to-the-office lures, like free lunches. A spot at the marina can be reserved the same way an employee would book a conference room, using the company’s Microsoft Outlook calendar system.
At the end of a Thursday earlier in July, I went down to see the slip for myself. Aquadro and Heavyside had their boats there (“Sea Salt” and “Midlife Crisis”), and a third PTC employee was using an extra spot that happened to be available. It was a calm day in the harbor, pleasant sunshine, slight breeze, the sound of ferry horns in the distance. Heavyside said that there are four or five employees who use the slips a lot, and another five or six who use them more sporadically. The company’s CEO, an avid fisherman, lives in New Hampshire, so he isn’t one of the slip’s regular users, “though he often comes down to sit with us,” Heavyside said.
Heavyside and Campbell say that the boats often get used as al fresco conference rooms, or for socializing after work. “Every single time I took my boat, I would fill the cooler with drinks, and whoever was in my last meeting, I’d say, ‘Let’s go down to the water.’ Or it’d be a beautiful day, and we’d have meetings on the boat. Just being able to be outside in that environment is a motivator,” said Campbell. Often, boat meetings would involve the CEO or other top executives, in addition to employees at lower levels. “There was a mingling that didn’t always happen in the office,” Campbell said. At least once, Campbell said, he was able to offer a colleague from Minnesota a quick ride to the airport at the end of a day of meetings, “so he could enjoy the afternoon, instead of sitting in the Ted Williams tunnel.” Sometimes, the boat owners entertain PTC’s customers.
Boating can be a faster alternative to getting to work by car or public transit, but it’s far from the cheapest way, even with free parking. Campbell says that on a perfect day, he could make the trip from Scituate to the Seaport in under 40 minutes. The typical drive on a weekday can sometimes reach two hours. His average trip was more like an hour, but that could stretch to 90 stomach-churning minutes when seas were exceptionally rough. “Given the short boating season here, I generally try not to think about how much I spend on gas,” Campbell said. But he estimates the round trip cost about $150 in fuel, and that he’d commute by boat 12 to 15 times a year.
Heavyside said that having access to the water is part of what PTC was seeking when it moved from the suburbs to the city just before COVID: a more vibrant company culture. On the Thursday when we spoke, he was planning to go to a dinner with colleagues, and then spend the night in his boat cabin. Aquadro said that having the company headquarters be so close to the harbor without access to it would “be like having an office on a golf course and not golfing.” He not only enjoys traveling to work by boat, and then doing some grocery shopping, but also has three lobster traps in the harbor that occasionally provide dinner.
While PTC doesn’t offer free parking to employees who choose to drive to work, there is a program that covers 100 percent of commuter rail, ferry, or T costs, Bluebike memberships, or subsidizes some of the cost of car parking.
Campbell, the employee who initially proposed the idea, said that he isn’t aware of any other companies that offer dock space as a perk. “We set a precedent, rather than citing one,” he said. But he added that he has “friends on the South Shore who work in the Financial District who have taken this idea to their companies.”
Last fall, Campbell left PTC for an executive role at another tech company, Bentley Systems. Though he will occasionally come into the Seaport on his 36-foot Pursuit powerboat to use the shared office space at a nearby WeWork, he has to pay for his own dock usage.
The free slip, he said, is “one of the many things I miss about PTC.”
Scott Kirsner can be reached at kirsner@pobox.com. Follow him on Twitter @ScottKirsner.
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