Marine surveyor business setup: a practical first-year guide

Setting up as a self-employed marine surveyor — insurance, tools, marketing, and how to land your first 20 paying surveys without burning out.

Going self-employed as a marine surveyor is a particular kind of cliff jump. Unlike most trades, you can't just buy a van and start. You need credentials, insurance, software, and a referral network — and most of that has to be in place before you can take your first paid booking. Here's the first-year guide nobody hands you when you finish your IIMS.

Month 0: Get the non-negotiables in place

Before you take a single booking:

  • Professional Indemnity insurance: minimum £500k cover, expect to pay £600–£1,200/year.

Brokers like Hiscox and Markel underwrite marine surveyors specifically.

  • Public Liability: £2m minimum, often bundled with PI.
  • Business structure: sole trader is fine for year one. Limited company makes sense

once you're past £50k turnover.

  • Business bank account: even as a sole trader. Mixing personal and business money is the

single biggest reason small operators end up in HMRC trouble.

  • Accountant: budget £600–£1,200 for the first year. They'll save you that in tax.

Month 1–2: The tool stack

The pre-internet tool list was a moisture meter and a clipboard. The 2026 list:

  • Moisture meter: Tramex Skipper Plus or Sovereign Quantum (£450–£650)
  • Digital camera or smartphone: smartphone is fine if it's recent and waterproof-cased
  • Headtorch + inspection mirror: bilges and engine rooms are dark
  • Borescope: £80 USB borescope changes what you can see inside tanks and through-hulls
  • Hammer: a 4oz hammer for sounding
  • Survey software: this is where most new surveyors over-spend or under-spend

On the software question: a Word template is free but costs you 6 hours per survey in formatting time. A bespoke survey app costs £80–£100/month and saves you 4–5 hours per report. Math is simple — at 8 surveys a month, the software pays back inside the first week of any given month. evalo is built for exactly this stage of the business.

Month 2–6: Where the first 20 surveys come from

New surveyors lose sleep over marketing. They don't need to. Your first 20 surveys come from four sources, in roughly this order:

1. Yacht brokers — They have buyers who need surveys. Walk the marina, introduce yourself to brokers, leave a card. 60% of your year-one work will come from this. 2. Marina noticeboards and Facebook groups — Free, surprisingly effective for local pre-purchase work. 3. Insurance brokers — They need surveys for new policies and renewals. Slower to build but high-quality repeat work. 4. Your own website with one good page per service — pre-purchase, insurance, valuation. Doesn't need to be fancy; it needs to come up when someone searches "marine surveyor [your town]".

What does NOT work in year one: paid Google Ads, social media content marketing, networking events that aren't marina-adjacent. Don't waste budget on those.

Month 6–12: Pricing for growth

Most new surveyors under-price for the first year, then realise they're working 60 hours a week for £30k. Don't.

A profitable solo marine surveyor in 2026 is doing 8–12 surveys a month at £700–£1,000 average fee. That's £67k–£144k of revenue with £10k–£15k of running costs. Single-person business, no employees.

You hit those numbers by:

  • Quoting per foot, not per hour
  • Keeping report turnaround under 48 hours so brokers come back
  • Charging mileage beyond 30 miles
  • Saying no to surveys outside your competence (don't survey commercial vessels if you

haven't trained for them)

The mistake that kills year-one businesses

The single biggest cause of year-one burnout: spending 6+ hours writing each report.

Maths: if you do 10 surveys a month at 6 hours of post-survey desk time each, that's 60 hours of unbilled work per month on top of the survey days themselves. You'll quit by month nine.

The fix isn't working harder. It's capturing observations in a structured way on the boat so the report writes itself. That single change — moving from a clipboard-and-Word workflow to a mobile capture flow — is the difference between a sustainable solo business and a burnout.

If you take one thing from this guide: budget for the software. The £99/month for evalo is the cheapest hour-back-per-survey you'll ever buy.

The first year, summarised

1. Get insured before you take a booking 2. Spend the £500 on a proper moisture meter 3. Walk the marina, meet the brokers 4. Charge per foot, not per hour 5. Don't write reports in Word

Do that and you'll end year one with 80+ surveys done, repeat business booked, and a sustainable solo practice. Skip any of them and you'll be looking for a salaried job again by Christmas.