Really......
Maybe you are a great instructor; maybe you really will teach me something that I could not learn diving with a club full of people, or read in a book. My experience and the majority of the divers I get to talk and dive with leads me to believe, you would be in the slim minority if you are.
I won't spend another wooden nickel on dive instruction; it has been and will remain into the future a complete waste of money. My experience is all PADI, and all they want is your money.
Have a pulse, and breathe, put a couple thousand dollars into the PADI coffers and you too can be an instructor. Never mind that you can’t teach, and have no real world experience to draw on. You pay your money, you get your cert.
The issue here is that someone is doing something that is making the industry less profitable for everyone that "teaches" scuba diving. There would be no complaint against these DM's who are teaching if they paid the price of admission into the club, and paid for insurance, thus increasing overhead to teach, and charged more $$$$$
Having a PADI or other organization certification that you can teach something does not mean that you are a TEACHER. It means you bought a franchise. You paid your money to the organization to get a certificate, that certificate then allows you to pay more money for insurance from the same organization... PADI exists to make Money; they are a privately owned profit generating corporation. It exists solely to make money.
State the real reason that these non franchise competitors are upsetting to you, be honest about it...
The real issue is that there is a continuing dilution of profit in an industry that you purchased a franchise in. Yes a franchise. The materials that you sell are provided by the company whose logo you display.
Dive training is a commodity, which has been and will be the goal of PADI. Just like McDonalds hamburgers are a
commodity. It is a least acceptable standard commodity just like McDonalds hamburgers.
Instead of whinging about how the other guy is undercutting your revenue stream, try working with a value model instead. What real value can you provide the clients. If you are all flying the same banner and teaching out of the same book, than the only product difference is in the price. That is again a commodity market. Commodity markets seek to drive prices lower and lower and lower and generate profit through quantity.
If you wish to compete in this market you have limited choices of action, You need to either increase sales quantity, which is hard in an industry that is seeing a decrease in the number of participants, or you differentiate your product. Outback Steak house servers hamburgers that are more expensive than McDonalds because it is not the least acceptable standard of a commodity.
Marketing in this market is going to be difficult, differentiation of value is going to be difficult; you are going to have to learn to be a sales person.
There are also enough of us out here that have been through the "correctly sanctioned training", and know that it is a poor value in any case, that are going to tell others to go with the cheapest product, get your card, and then come diving with people that WANT to share their knowledge, not make a fast buck.
People do learn to dive from a mentoring relationship, if they are going to remain divers. That comes from the community of divers, not the "professional" trainers. When profit is the motive the less time it takes to make the buck the better. When community is the motive, the goal is sharing of knowledge and experience. There are different social and status determiners between the two methods.
Before you ask…. Yeah I have a bone to chew with the industry...
The first class I took in the dive industry I paid over 3 times the going rate of the commodity classes in my area. I was a sucker when I signed up. The instructor claimed to be a marine biologist and said that we would see octopi and a whole list of other creatures on our last day of open water. That instructor did only the classroom work, and some pool work with us. She could not get enough students to do an open water secession. She took our money, high dollar, and never finished her end of the contract.
On top of that she was a very poor teacher. She hated it whenever anyone asked questions. And if you were not able to instantly grasp or perform a skill on the first try she punished students by sending them to the shallow end of the pool and having them do mask clears one after the other... $380.00 each for that class in 1996, my wife refused to talk about diving after that very expensive class for 4 years. I had purchased a bunch of gear at top dollar
through my local dive shop that the instructor worked with. I left feeling the whole thing was a scam, and that I had been had.
On the good side. There was an instructor, Larry Simanack, who I met through non diving related activities who stepped up and said; "You paid how much and didn't get certified?" He listened to what had happened, charged me $10.00 to cover pool rental, and took me through the pool sessions again, and then took me with his class to the open water. That man was great, and he could teach. If anyone knows him tell him I have thought about him diving all across the South Pacific! Larry Rocked!!!!!
The Nitrox class...... Please.... I knew more about gas blending from reading the oxyhackers book before the class than the instructors did about the subject. There were no dives, no blending in action. The entire teaching for the experiential learners in the group: we got to use and had recommend to us to buy, an oxygen sensor from the dive store the class was held in... I sat through this class that did not even cover the material in the Padi book, (which was so lacking in technical information as to make it a pamphlet for gear sales at your local PADI approved store).We then took the test as a group with the instructor reading out the correct answer to make sure that everyone passed. The real goal, paying $70+ each for a poorly written sales pamphlet, another $45.00 each a “new card” that only says we have Nitrox….
The problem is there is no way for the consumer to differentiate between instructors like Larry and the majority of them out there. Agency? Years of reported experience? Cost? None of them seem to be an indicator of their ability or even willingness to teach.
Stop complaining about being undercut in a capitalistic market and either switch to another market that you are more efficient at, or change your product offering to be more competitive in a value based market. Figure out a way that you could make someone confident in your ability to teach them something that will make diving MORE FUN. Learn to sell to your market, not complain about the competitions ability to undercut you in price.
Guy
His complaint has nothing to do with money. It has to do with safety. If you're unsafe and dead who cares if you paid $350 or $0 for the lack of training that killed you.
