The Quick’s story: one step at a time, without ever stumbling. Michele Marzucco and Alfonso Peduto tell us how two friends who had worked installing onboard equipment have created a company, which turns over 30 million a year
by Niccolò Volpati – photo by Andrea Muscatello
“After 35 years’ working together, it is difficult for me to call him a partner because, for me he is above all a friend”. The friend/partner is called Alfonso Peduto, while the person telling the story of the company is Michele Marzucco. The former handles technical issues, the latter management and sales. Peduto is a telecoms engineer. Marzucco is also a technician, but an electrical engineer. 
They are two sides of the same coin, people who know them say. It looks as though they do different things in the company, and that is indeed the case, but each is perfectly able to do the other man’s job, and vice versa. The story began on 4th January 1983.
The two friends started a company after many years spent installing equipment on board pleasure boats along the Emilia-Romagna coast. «We started by working with battery chargers in 1986, then, in 1992, we took over Quick, a small company that didn’t have any employees and turned over 150 million in old Italian lire, and produced accessories for anchor winches», recalls Marzucco. And in the words of a gentleman from the Far East, who became famous as the Great Helmsman, «A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step».
When you listen to Michele Marzucco’s story, it seems to be following the strategy of a great multinational company. He explains they have always gone one step at a time, without ever stumbling. They have often taken on parts of other companies because they were interested in the products that they produced.
And so the range of nautical accessories which they were able to offer visibly grew. In 1995, three years after taking over Quick, they moved from producing winch components to producing their own anchor winch model. After buying the Milan-based Scotti company, they started to produce boilers, navigation lights and battery master switches.
In 2007 they threw themselves into a blind date. The date was with the lighting sector and, clearly, the future quickly lit up. At that stage LED lighting was completely unknown, but in just a few years it had moved into all areas of industrial production, including the nautical one.
In this case you could certainly say that the risk was worth it, and the investment led to notable increases in turnover. The latest acquisition was made just over a year ago. It was the MC2 gyroscopic stabilisers range by Item Mare for boats that displace between 5 and 250 tonnes. They bought the product, but haven’t settled for simply marketing it. Perhaps that is one of the secrets of Quick’s success. A secret that has a name: Catt. Catt is the jewel in the crown, and it is no coincidence that here too Michele Marzucco and Alfonso Peduto are each 50% owners, but it hasn’t been brought within the Quick company.
The brand is still separate, and is the place where research and development is carried on, where products are studied and the technical solutions are found to optimise them. Catt is located in the same facilities as Quick, with 20,000 square metres out of a total area of 54,000, a few kilometres from Ravenna. 
The group has 180 employees and twenty of these only do research and development. Before being bought by Quick, Marecalmo was pretty much just a nice start-up. Technicians and salespeople have transformed it into an industrial company which wins significant acclaim. It deals with gyroscopic stabilisers and if it were just that, you could say there was nothing extraordinarily new about it. Mitsubishi and later Seakeeper were already doing them, but these are different.
How exactly? The rotational axis is horizontal and so the rotating mass is vertical. The big advantage is that when they are at work, you never have the feeling that the stabiliser is pushing back against the helmsman’s manoeuvre. To avoid this kind of problem, the companies that produce vertical axis gyroscopes recommend using them only until the boat reaches a certain speed. Beyond that they could actually turn out to be more of a hindrance than a help.
But that is not what happens with horizontal axis devices like Quick’s. They can be left running even when you go at top speed in rough seas. When it turns vertically the iron pole will always fulfil its role as a stabiliser, without obstructing the manoeuvre that is taking place. Essentially, it doesn’t rush to go where it isn’t wanted.
The same goes for when you are going very slowly. Horizontal axis stabilisers have the characteristic of working well in any condition and, in this case too, there is no danger of being hindered during harbour manoeuvres. Stabilisers are in fashion and their effectiveness is not in question. A trial carried out using the model for boats of up to twenty tonnes, the MC20, showed that rolling can be reduced by as much as 86%.
That is a significant difference. Without a stablisiser you bounce around, whereas with one you can enjoy a comfortable time in the harbour, even if there is undertow or if the bay is so crowded that it is continually swept by bow waves from other boats.
Stabilisers mean comfort. And if you pay a bit of attention, you realise that a number of prejudices against them are unfounded. It is true that they need energy, but not an excessive amount. The MC20 uses 2.5 kW, but a 20-tonne boat often already has an on-board generator in its plans.
The smaller models, the MC5 and MC10, which are for boats of up to five and ten tonnes respectively, can also be driven by one inverter, two inverters and a good battery array. It doesn’t take up a lot of room, given that the MC20 measures 60x60x60 centimetres. Who doesn’t have room in the bilge well or the engine room for a 60 centimetre cube?
Also, if the boat is new, it has become an accepted fact that boatyards should add strengthening specifically to allow for the installation of a gyroscopic stabiliser. Nothing in particular is required, and it is normally done in the same material as the hull, so fibreglass, carbon fibre, aluminium or whatever the boat is made from; the important thing is that they are fixed to the structure.
The weight is actually not that great. If we again use the MC20 we saw at work as an example, the stabiliser weighs 500 kg compared with a boat that can be up to twenty tonnes. So that means a fortieth of the weight is added.
The price is also not out of reach. «I think that in a short time the cost of a stabiliser will settle at around five per cent of the price of the boat», Michele Marzucco says. We aren’t far off that, in part because the Quick models currently come in at seven per cent of the total final cost of a boat.
(Quick, watch your STEP! – Barchemagazine.com – February 2018)
