The event was a great success with the council providing a skip for all the rubbish collected and a local restaurant providing soup for the hungry participants. We also got the local Pepsi Co to provide some drinks for us. The event got lots of good free publicity as lots of people passing by came and looked at what we had found. The local newspaper even made a full-page article about the event with lots of pictures and participant interviews, very good for local diving.

During the day we ended up with the following stats:

• 114 Divers
• 14 Non-divers

Trash collected:

• 624 cans (beer & beverage)
• 142 glass bottles
• 12 wallets
• 26 sunglasses
• 12 specs
• 19 mobile phones
• 1 MC frame
• 9 bikes
• 1 hoover
• 1 microwave owen
• 1 stove
• 1 outboard motor
• lots of coins
• + lots of other rubbish

Everyone was happy with the event and where happy to come and collect rubbish from the bottom of the ocean in exchange for a free air fill and lunch. We were also fortunate to have been given a dive computer and a dive bag by one of the scuba wholesalers serving the area, as prices. However only one of the local scuba shops where interested in helping out with the event by providing a compressor and tent for registration, in case it would rain. I’m very surprised and sad that the dive shops are not interested in participating, if they have to contribute in some way. Many of the dive shops where interested, but only if it wouldn’t cost them anything and someone would do all the work for them. All dive centers where on site trying to make the event look like they had part in arranging the event and trying to ‘steal’ customers from the competition.

Over the years I’ve found it very strange that many dive operators all over the world are not interested in giving back to the community where they operate. They somehow think that they can utilize dive sites with no responsibility in keeping the sites and environment clean. I know that in marine parks the operators often have to pay a fee for usage, but usually it’s added on to the price as a levy. Running these events is just so good publicity if it’s handled correctly.

Our group of dive professionals arranges a couple of Project Aware events a year. Usually it’s in the form of a cleanup or kids event in a local school, sometimes just a fund-raiser. The magic of these events is that all divers in the area join forces for the good cause regardless of store affiliation. Even CMAS diver’s that often don’t want to mix with PADI divers turn up. Usually customers are very loyal to the store where they have started diving and rarely go to the other dive shops.

I’ll present to you 3 different experiences I’ve come across recently.

1. The first shop I visited is in NSW Australia, well known for its online store, but the actual shop is fairly small. I had visited the website the night before so I know what I wanted to buy. When I walked into the shop there were 3 members of staff and one customer. 1 staff was serving the customer while the other 2 where looking at some dive website in the small office, taking no notice of customers arriving. After almost 5 minutes of circling the 50m² store, the staff member was done serving the first customer and asked if he could help. I presented the list of gear I was looking for. About half of the stuff on my list was available and the rest would come in the next few days. I was visiting the store on a Thursday morning, travelling north, so I told them that I would come and pick up the rest the following Wednesday on my way back when it only would be a 40min detour. The Wednesday arrived and I came to pick up the dive gear and guess what, NO dive gear. When the sales guy looked into the order it turned out that the manager had placed the order with the supplier but hadn’t told them a deliver by date. As I was flying back to Qld the next day I cancelled the order. Two weeks later a guy called me from the dive shop and asked if I still wanted to gear.
2. The second shop is located in Scandinavia and is a well established dive shop. I’ve visited the shop a few times. As I knew that the shop was a retailer of a brand that had released an interesting new product I decided to go and check when the product would be available and get a quote. It was late autumn and fairly quiet in the shop when I visited with a friend. The shop had no customers, only the shop keeper behind the counter. We were greeted by a small ‘hi’ and the shop keeper continued working on the computer. After a minute of waiting I was ready to walk out, but asked anyway about the product. All I got as an answer was “F**k, can’t you see I’m busy. What do you want?”. I tried to be extra polite and excused me for asking and asked when the product would be available and what the price would be. The answer was “I don’t know, call the distributor. The price will be around 650€”. There was no need to consider where I would buy the product as I had seen it online for 640€ + freight.
3. The third shop was located in UK. It was a fairly large dive shop with lots of customers when I walked in. The shop staff where very busy but I was instantly greeted by a staff member who told me to have a cup of coffee and look around. I was told that one of the staff members would be with me in about 5 minutes. I did as I was told and 4 minutes later a staff member came and asked me if she could help. I explained what I was looking for and was take to one of their mannequins with the piece of equipment I was looking for. Needless to say that the mannequin had quite a few neat products and I ended up buying quite a lot more than I had planned.

What do we learn from these experiences?

1. Greet your customers when they arrive. If you’re busy let them know how long it will take before you can help them
   
2. Be enthusiastic about you work, especially when you’re not very busy.
   
3. Stay home or in the back if you’re having a bad day. You’re not at your best during these days.
   
4. Most customers want to by locally unless you give them a reason not to
   
5. Don’t promise the customer something you can’t keep. If you can’t keep a promise let the customer know, to avoid disappointment
   

Remember we are in the Experience business. Experience is not only the in water activity. If the customer gets a good experience they will come back for more.

If you’re interested to learn more about customer service, sales processes or store layout I’m happy to help you out wither you’re an already established business or just starting up a new business.

When the clients choose a basic experience they pay 1000 for the experience. Out of the 1000 100 goes back to the employee. To earn the 100 the employee has to drive 350km in own car, use 5 evenings and 2 full days of time to name a few. In addition the government takes 35 of the 100 as taxes and fees.

To get even on just the variable costs and get no salary or return on the 10.000 education investment , the employee needs at least 6 customers per experience. Company policies however limit maximum numbers of customers to 8 and give customers right to cancel at any time. According to the employees most of the time experiences include 4-5 customers, making the cost of working more than they earn, for majority of the time.

What do we learn from this?

1. Make sure you know your costs, before you commit to work
2. Make sure you get a fare share of the price
3. Make sure you sell add-ons and get paid for it

If you are interested in knowing more about maximizing the return for your dive business or your interested in improving you profitability as an instructor or dive shop just contact me at Mikael@divepro.fi I run regularly Power Pricing workshops. The workshops are also parts of my Instructor Development Courses.

Working towards a common goal is one of the most important cornerstones for being successful in a task. I’ve how ever seen many businesses that don’t realize that they need to put an effort into doing this. Especially customer intensive businesses, like retail businesses, require a common goal to be successful. All employees need to be aware of what the goal of the business is and how management what to achieve it.

One of the best examples of working for a common goal is Nokia, who fairly often arrange sessions for the personnel to be updated on the mission of the company and what the business objective is. In the more customer intensive ‘business’ a good and successful example is Pro Dive Cairns in Australia, where the company arranges meetings with the employees once a month to keep them up to date on what’s happening with the business, and have been very successful therefore.

How do you get a people to work for a common goal?

1. Keep your staff up to date on what the goal of the business is.
2. Keep your staff up to date on progress of achieving the goal.
3. Show the benefit to the employee of working towards the goal.

Working towards a common goal requires commitment and the only way to get commitment is by keeping the staff interested in working for a common goal, like the men and women of Finland did 70 years ago.

Have a very good independence day to all Finns and a very good week to everyone.

As always there where quite a few new things on the show floor. The products I found interesting where:

• New DPV/Camera developed by Dive X-tras & Backscatter where you can mount a video or DSLR to a X-scooter. Imagine how much fun you can have with that.
• The DiveCaddy, a light weight dive bag designed to fit your gear and be small enough to have as carry on luggage.
• Dive Quest @ EPCOT a dive in an aquarium with fish from all around the globe
• The scrubber for your rebreather that you don’t need to mix. Everything pre-packed from Molecular Products
• Navimate, the GPS for divers. No need to worry about finding your way back to the boat of finding the wreck.
• Radar detectable SMB from Custom Divers, no need to have lost divers
• New Scubapro gear travel BCD – GEO & Regulator A700 2^nd stage
• Wetpixel – the online community for all UW photographers pro’s and amateurs
• Scuba Board – the international forum for all divers

From the travel part of DEMA a few things that caught my eye where

• Florida Key’s Dive Center, celebrating their 25^th anniversary. Great shop located in Islamorada just in the beginning of the Key’s with access to all the best wrecks
• The always so nice Wakatobi and Pelagian Liveboard in North Sulavesi, Indonesia 5* resort in the middle of nowhere with fantastic diving on the doorstep *Can recommend*
• Mabul resort by Borneo Divers, the premium dive operator in the Sipadan *Can recommend*

Next year DEMA is back in Las Vegas, NV 17-20 November 2010. If you’re interested in joining me let me know.

The week started on Monday, as always, with pre-show conferences. This year the big announcer was PADI with the all new PADI Instructor Development Course. All of the content had been revised, so the new curriculum looks very different. The goal of the revision has been to make the content more ‘real life’ and make all the course materials usable after the program. PADI has actually done a very good program with totally revised materials. Stay tuned for more blogging on the new instructor program in the coming weeks.

On Tuesday we had another day of pre-DEMA conferences. The Believe! & Member Social events from PADI offered us again great speakers trying to get the spirit up and giving ideas for 2010 and for the coming 4 days of DEMA show.

Wednesday, the first day of DEMA was started with a PADI TecRec seminar on Rebreathers and recreational diving. PADI had lined up their Technical diving division specialist on Rebreather Tecnologies, Mark Caney. During the presentation Mark presented the thoughts PADI has about making a rebreather program in the future and what obstacles still need to be solved before rebreathers could become more mainstream. From between the lines we could see that a program would most likely be available in the next year or so.

The afternoon was spent visiting Tec gear manufacturer Halcyon in High Springs. Halcyon had recently released their new wing with an adjustable harness called the Infinity. The visit was very interesting with lots of insight to how the gear is all manufactured by hand and very strict quality controls, resulting in hardly any warranty claims. The visit gave me answers to many of the questions on how the gear is so expensive and how the new products come about. I was very convinced that a wing style BCD from Halcyon would be on my Xmas list.