Preparing for Water Taxi’s big plunge
After selling business to Kevin Plank, president poised for major growth
Mike McDaniel laid the plans to buy Baltimore Water Taxi during his second deployment to Iraq in 2009.
The Marine infantry officer was running a mortar platoon and helping train the Iraqi military during the day, then firing off business emails and phone calls from an internet cafe and a phone bunker at night.
“We’d get an air raid siren,” he said, “and we’d continue that conversation after that.”
McDaniel purchased the company in 2010 with his father, MedStar Health founding CEO John McDaniel.
Six years later, Harbor Boating Inc., which owns and operates the water taxi, is being bought by Under Armour founder Kevin Plank, and McDaniel is overseeing plans for a large expansion that will include new routes to Plank’s proposed $5.5 billion waterfront development in Port Covington.
Under the deal with Sagamore Ventures, Plank’s venture capital firm, McDaniel, 43, will remain at the helm of Harbor Boating.
After his first deployment in 2004, McDaniel was stationed in Hawaii. There, he started a small assistance boat-towing company — “kind of like AAA on the water” — which he owned for two years.
With his mother fighting cancer, McDaniel moved back to Maryland in 2007 and began looking for opportunities locally in the nautical industry. He met with Cameron Kane, whose husband, Ed, had founded the water taxi at the urging of Mayor William Donald Schaefer in the 1970s.
Cameron Kane ran the service for years after her husband’s death in 2003. By the time McDaniel approached her, she was ready to sell it.
After McDaniel’s mother died, he and his father bought the water taxi company for an undisclosed sum. They split the cost, and he became its managing partner, with his father in the role of investor.
“I invested everything I made on my deployment toward the company,” McDaniel said. “It was all or nothing for me.”
He’s excited for Baltimore to see the product of his and Plank’s vision for the water taxi.
“I think it’s really going to showcase how the water taxi can be integrated into the mass transit system,” he said.
Mike McDaniel
Title: Age: Hometown: Baltimore Residence: Fells Point Education: Sandy Spring Friends School, Montgomery County; Valley Forge Military Academy, Wayne, Pa.; Ohio State University, Columbus Family: Wife, Kate, and two English Labradors, Timber and Aggie Hobbies: Sailing, fishing, scuba diving, volunteering