FLOE Docks and Lifts in Forest Lake, Minnesota

Blake Dalbec grew up in the marine industry. His parents opened Forest Lake Motorsports in 1989, and he started out cleaning snowmobiles, moved into parts, then service, then sales, and was running the dealership by 2004. In 1998, at sixteen, he asked a customer a question nobody at that counter was asking: would you like me to put the dock in, and pull it back out again next year. Six docks came out of that first season, installed after work, standing in the water. By 2012 he was installing and removing for about a hundred and forty families every spring and every fall.

When his parents sold the dealership to Tracker Marine in 2012, Tracker held the FLOE line for the Forest Lake territory, so Blake could not sell FLOE at all even though he had grown up around it. Five years later the line came back to him. That is why the installation business dates to 1998 and the FLOE dealership dates to 2017, and we would rather publish a nine year dealership we can date than a thirty year one we cannot.

In 2018 we were losing sales at the bottom of the market, so we added an entry level line. On paper it worked and revenue went up. Then the calls started, and around half the people who bought that line told us the dock felt wobbly or the lift did not work right. That is not a defect rate, it is a satisfaction rate. We dropped the line in 2020 and went exclusively FLOE. It is the most expensive decision this business has made and we would make it again tomorrow, and our Google reviews are where you can see how that turned out.

We install what we sell, on the same water, every week of the season. The full line is on our own site: docks, boat lifts, canopies and dock accessories, along with what a setup actually costs and the ten lakes our crews are on every week. Give us an address on one of them and we can usually tell you the depth, how far out you have to go and what the bottom is doing under it before anybody drives out to look.

Everything we do runs from ice out to November. Spring installation and fall removal book by the season, and when a storm puts a lift on its side, storm recovery is its own job with its own barge. Every FLOE dock and lift carries a 15 year limited warranty, and the four things that quietly void it are worth reading before you buy. Whether you are buying a whole system or replacing a cable, you get the same crew and the same answer.