Thank You, BDI

[NothingClever]

Just wanted to say thanks to the Business of Diving Institute for the surveys.

While many of us grumble about the disparate quality of dive training, these surveys put into quantifiable and dispassionate terms some key indications of the health of certain providers in the dive industry.

Were I with an affected company in a leadership position, no doubt I’d be reaching out to solicit your support to help me improve my team. Unfortunately, I have a feeling some teams bury their heads in the sand and double down on pursuing new divers at the expense of long term profits.

Were I with the competition of the affected company, I’d be eating up the free analytics and incorporating measures in my business to guard against the same fate. In my previous career, we called this getting “free chicken”, meaning you didn’t have to kill the chicken, pluck its feathers, slaughter it or cook it….just sit down and enjoy the “free chicken”.

Anyways, the surveys are useful and help to correlate empirical observations to trends underpinned by statistics.

 

[NothingClever]

I thought this response from one survey particpant was particularly interesting:

• Go to a training model more like fitness programs and yoga studios: pay a monthly fee to work with an instructor to build your skills. Start in the pool and, when ready, move on to open water. People would still need to show proof of skill mastery to earn a certification and dive without an instructor, but following this model creates an indefinite revenue stream and keeps people invested.

 

[Pressurehead]

From the above:

It’s the instructor that matters!​

One piece of advice dive instructors often give to people thinking about learning to dive is to carefully pick the instructor more than the dive center. It is unfortunately not easy to do for somebody who has never been diving before and knows nothing about anything!

Are dive instructors simply promoting their own agenda?

Well, a majority of scuba divers agree with them!

• 69.2% of scuba divers say the service quality they receive depends more on the person they are interacting with (e.g., the dive instructor) than the dive center.

 

[NothingClever]

@Pressurehead - another great sub-topic from the BDI survey results. What I haven’t wrapped my brain around is how to get in front of the marketing machine to help prospective divers select, from an informed position, their instructor.

We may have approximated the contents of a “Guide to Selecting Your SCUBA Instructor” here in SB but I haven’t come across it yet.

Again, how would we get that out to people before they’re fooled with glib marketing?

@Darcy Kieran does a good job idenitfying that an outside force has an opportunity to re-cock the industry (my phrase, not his).

 

[L13]

I thought this response from one survey particpant was particularly interesting:

• Go to a training model more like fitness programs and yoga studios: pay a monthly fee to work with an instructor to build your skills. Start in the pool and, when ready, move on to open water. People would still need to show proof of skill mastery to earn a certification and dive without an instructor, but following this model creates an indefinite revenue stream and keeps people invested.

I love this idea!

 

[Darcy Kieran]

I thought this response from one survey particpant was particularly interesting:

• Go to a training model more like fitness programs and yoga studios: pay a monthly fee to work with an instructor to build your skills. Start in the pool and, when ready, move on to open water. People would still need to show proof of skill mastery to earn a certification and dive without an instructor, but following this model creates an indefinite revenue stream and keeps people invested.

Yes! I like it too!

Another way would be to offer coaching sessions.

When my kids learned to ski, we paid per hour or per session; I'm not sure. They had fun on the little hill until they were ready to go up the chairlift. We don't know how much we spent nor how many sessions it took. We just know they had fun, and in the end, they were ready. They even got a certificate for having succeeded in level 1 or 2 or... Who cares?

In the diving industry, we are too focused on selling courses and not enough on "scuba diving until you are ready to be an autonomous diver." Dive training agencies depend on course material & c-cards being sold, and they imposed their business model on the rest of us. We should focus on time spent with people underwater.