Where is the diving industry heading

[D M I]

Hello

Any one have any ideas to were the diving industry is heading. I've seen quite a few dive shops go under in the last two years and the only ones that seem to still be surviving are those that have no over head/ rent to pay because they own there property entirely, which makes a big difference when you don't have to fork over $3000 every month for rent and utilities. I Personaly think it dead right across north America and who is to blame my guess the distributors and manufacturers for all the games they play. I've heard that Dive Teck is now the Scuba Pro distributor for Canada my question is "what for" who buys Scuba pro any ways at those prices.

Alaway cool

D M I

[pufferfish]

D M I once bubbled...
Hello

Any one have any ideas to were the diving industry is heading. I've seen quite a few dive shops go under in the last two years and the only ones that seem to still be surviving are those that have no over head/ rent to pay because they own there property entirely, which makes a big difference when you don't have to fork over $3000 every month for rent and utilities. I Personaly think it dead right across north America and who is to blame my guess the distributors and manufacturers for all the games they play. I've heard that Dive Teck is now the Scuba Pro distributor for Canada my question is "what for" who buys Scuba pro any ways at those prices.

Alaway cool

D M I

Good question DMI and I have wondered the same. As far as DiveTech becoming the SP distributor for Canada that wouldn't be so bad as I didn't think much of Nadel. Are you sure about this? I know Dan teaches the SP service tech courses but the whole shebang now?

Anyhow you are right about the change going on in the industry and it does seem to be right across the continent. Shops that are doing well are those who have embraced the Internet, those who own their property, or where the owners have a second job to support the shop. The other trick that several of the shops here in TO do is sell pool chemicals, water ski stuff, and a lot of non-diving stuff just to stay afloat. The problem with that is the employees often know very little about diving.

Another part of the problem is that I find so many of the shops just don't know how to treat customers and think they are doing me a favour by selling scuba gear. That kind of attitude is a recipe for failure.

A point Dan Orr at DAN mentioned to me (he confirmed this trend is very real) is that there is much more choice as far as what sports a kid can start these days. I know when I started at 18 years old the options were ski in the winter and dive in the summer. Now there is mountain biking, windsurfing, and a whole host of other sports that scuba is having to compete with. Is diving still 'cool' to the younger generation like it was in the days Cousteau shows or is it seen as something their parents would do,...I don't know. Cost might be a factor for getting the younger student into the sport. They take a cheaper dive course through a club at university, but then look at the price of gear and their student debt and walk away. Student debt loads are far higher today than twenty years ago. What percentage of OW students are still diving five years after their cert? Maybe twenty percent. Maybe the amount of leisure time is decreasing for all of us. I know it seems to be for me these days. When free time decreases one has to prioritize what they do with it. Maybe time with the kids or out doing other sports wins the day,..just a thought.

You know my LDS here in the GTA has actually doubled in size this year and seen business increase. Their prices are competitive with Leisure Pro when shipping and taxes are taken into account. Their SP prices are often less than Leisure Pro. They provide good service, know how to use the Internet, and have friendly people at the front desk (well most of them). I don't think they will disappear anytime soon.

So maybe in ten years we will have half the number of stores but those that remain are larger and stock more gear. I don't see this as necessarily bad just Darwinism at work and the business cycle cleaning house.

[MikeFerrara]

Not long ago about the only place to buy gear was at a dive shop. Now, you can find about everything on the net. The old model og giving away training at a loss to sell equipment just doesn't work any more. To sell equipment you need to reduce the markup so now the equipment sales won't support the shop and certainly not the training when dealing with a local market.

We recently closed our shop because we were in a situation where I was actually funding the training out of my own pocket, working for free and just barely paying the bills with equipment sales.

Training will need to become a profit center.

With the low (or nonexistant) margins in training classes must be short and tought by some one willing to work really cheap.

I for one, no longer desire to be associated with the recreational dive industry on any level. We're still teaching and selling a few things out of the house but we're breaking every rule in the book. Our classes cost more, take longer and the equipment we sell is generally cheaper. If I teach I'm going to put out students who are good diver and I'm going to make a reasonable profit doing it. I won't give it away to make the manufacturers rich.

I can't even imagine an industry more screwed up that the dive industry.

[Big-t-2538]

MikeFerrara once bubbled...
I can't even imagine an industry more screwed up that the dive industry. You don't work for the gov't do you mike?? :D..

but seriously....I applaud the fact you are training as an independent....maybe if you keep going to gilboa and teaching over by the plae with your students....someone will catch on....but I'm not going to hold my breath so to speak....

again....best wishes mike, and are you going to be at the quarry SAT?

[MikeFerrara]

Big-t-2538 once bubbled...
You don't work for the gov't do you mike?? :D..

but seriously....I applaud the fact you are training as an independent....maybe if you keep going to gilboa and teaching over by the plae with your students....someone will catch on....but I'm not going to hold my breath so to speak....

again....best wishes mike, and are you going to be at the quarry SAT?

I'm going to be there all weekend.

[pufferfish]

MikeFerrara once bubbled...


Snipped

Training will need to become a profit center.

With the low (or nonexistant) margins in training classes must be short and tought by some one willing to work really cheap.

I have seen several people mention that GUE is thinking of getting into the OW training game. I wonder if the 'raising of the bar' so to speak will translate into higher course costs for the higher quality. The problem will be that most students will not know the difference between curriculums and outcomes and will likely just flock to the lowest priced course but it will be interesting to see how it pans out if true.

[diverbrian]

I have submitted before and will continue to submit that the monetary cost of "raising the bar" won't be what causes students to go to another course.

It will be the cost in TIME. Time is an even more precious commodity to most of us than money. If you tell a student that I have a five day, ten session course over here and a two weekend course over on the other side for the same money, guess which one most students will take?

In fact time DOES cost me money. I had to burn five vacation days to take my initial OW course. Let's see.... vacation (8hrs x my hourly pay)......, that adds up to some major change.

I saw a sign in an auto shop once that said:


We do three kinds of work here:

Fast, Cheap, or Quality.... We can only give you two of the three, so you pick which two.

I am not agreeing or disagreeing with anyone here, just pointing out an extra fact to consider.

[D M I]

Hello

Wow all excellent answers to my question and we can see, that we all have different outlooks. I for one have been diving for 26 years now, I started as a technical sat diver working around the world in some of the worst conditions with some of the best and worst people in the of shore oil industry. I've palyed all the games in the diving industry with a wallet full of 47 plastic cards that I no longer feel they mean anything. The diving community has changed and I can't understand why all those big companies like USD etc can't see that sales are down across the board and they just don't do anything to support the people who made them what they are today. I loved the days when you ran to the TV to watch a Cousteau film and or SeaHunt and your spine tickled with excitement and you dreamed about getting out to dive. I'm seeing allot of cash grabbing these days as well terrible instructors who can't swim or dive teaching scuba and pumping out student like pop corn out of poping machine. I must say I DON"T LIKE PADI I find that this company has grone to large and now is expected to produce yearly cash margins and has and is pushing out instructors at an enormous rate to keep that financial figure in tact. I miss the old smelly dive shops with hard nosed divers and excitement, now a days you walk into a dive shop and you don't even get a hello but your expected to buy.I do all my shopping on line now because what ever is sold in shops I can always beat the price by almost 40%.

D M I

[pufferfish]

I agree DB that time is very important. When I did my OW in the 1980's it was ten weeks I think for three hours each time. This was with NAUI. I think it was a great course and I was well trained, but we did our open water dives in November in Lake Ontario holding on to a yellow line as the vis was zero. I had my mask kicked off by the guy in front of me as I couldn't see his Jet fins (we all had them then) but that was part of the training. My brother ten years later with ACUC did the same ten week course and same November OW dives in a snow storm. He is well trained and very comfortable in the water.

There is something to be said for repetition from week to week in learning skills and those weekend wonder courses just don't do it. There is lots of data from the emergency medicine and paramedic literature that shows skills need to be repeated many times over for the neural circuits and muscles to become familiar with them. What the weekend wonder course directors tell you is just unsubstantiated junk.

That being said I think in this world where we all have an element of attention deficit disorder the ten week course is too long. Maybe six weeks or five weeks two nights a week is the better way to go but you are right time is likley more important or as important than cost.

DMI I was like you in that I used to love to watch those Cousteau shows and he was a role model as kid we looked up to. There doesn' t seem to be a Cousteau these days just guys wanting to set depth records (yawn). I wonder who the younger kids look up to these days? Maybe someone like Lance Armstrong as I see a heck of a lot of young kids getting into cycling.

[MikeFerrara]

It's true that long classes turn students away just as fast as expensive classes. Every one is in a hurry. The problem is that I haven't found a way to teach some one how to dive if they can't commit the time and effort. If they won't pay me a reasonable fee, I don't want to teach them.

The agencies are turning out new instructors who are also new divers at an incredible rate. Most are happy to teach a weekend class for nickles and dimes. I don't even consider them my competition because we serve two different markets with two totally different products.

[Dan MacKay]

Hi all,

What I am going to express here is my personaly opinion only so do not turn up the torches too high.

I have not been diving as long as some of you but I do have a fair amount of experience as well as being in the unique position of being a GUE instructor, a recreational instructor, a store owner and a charter boat owner/operator. All full time. Mike has a notion what this is like.

On the training side have seen the under pinnings of the proposed GUE OW but am not at liberty to divulge details but it does not take a brain surgeon to figure out where we wish to go. I am personally very sceptical about the marketablility of the course due to it's proposed length and associated cost. It will have a very definite appeal to some folks who are used to a more comprehensive training model such as military folks, police officers and the typical class 'A' men and women.

For the most part the customer I see standing in front of me looking for an open water course is a very uninformed consumer. I can do an up sell in some cases but for the most part the typical dive consumer shops on price first and then time second as was pointed out in earlier posts. I as a store owner will always have to provide both courses. One to be competitive and one to teach properly.

As far as living off equipment sales, that myth has not been happening for quite some time. A couple of years ago I actually had instructors teaching out of my shop that we taking my students to one of my comptitors to buy equipment because they thought that the student had the 'right to have the least expensive gear as possible'. Note the operative word here being "had".

This attitude of getting the least expensive item anywhere is part of what is killing the market. For example I run a cut rate charter for local divers on Thursday and Saturday evening. They will get their air elsewhere to save a buck (I charge six $ a fill the competition charges $5). They buy their gear for the least expensive price possible. So in reality there is not as much money coming into the system. The numbers are about the same.

The equipment problem is largely due to the manufacturers and distributors plain and simple. And the only way I have found to wake them up a little is to start dropping equipment lines. On one hand I have a rep bagging at me to make my numbers and behind my back he is opening up the compitition up the road who is going to cut my throat. The only person who wins is the rep and the wholesaler. There are a few exceptions to this rule but in my limited experience they are extremely few and far between.

As for those who only shop via the internet, fine. I make more from servicing than I would off the initial purchase anyway. If equipment is not bought at my shop then I will not do warantee work for free either. You buy it at Walmart you bring it back to them for service and see how you fair out. Try buying your air via the internet.

In the long run the stores that are successful are the ones that foster the same type of atmosphere that Puffer and Mike both alluded to..the club type of atmoshpere that looks after its customers and provides interesting things to do. I remember when I first started almost every day we would hang out for a couple of hours at the shop and shoot the breeze. But at the end of almost every day we went diving. And that is what most folks forget about in this sport. It is all about diving. You get your customers excited about it and in the water frequently enough you will have pretty happy customers.

Safe dives,

Dan

[D M I]

Hi

Thanks for the information Dan. I have to to touch base on one topic thou. I haven't found one certified scuba equipment technician in Ontario. most are dive shop operators who have taken one day in services from the there distributors which doesn't in any way make them technicians. I spent several months in a US military education facility to become a certified US technician with papers. Those little certificates your distributors give you at the end of the day to hang on your dive shop wall are nothing more than attendance certificates. In the US now insurance companies are demanding that dive shop technicians be certified from only a hand full of proper educational facilities before they will insure your business, and You need to remember that even the distributor who sells you your gear at times doesn't know how a scuba regulator works, there is a lot a processes and history behind them. You may have been very happy with your past service work from your local dive shop and thats OK! so keep going there, but I would be really impressed if I saw a biological microscope in any dive shop in Ontario. Just my two cent s worth.

D M I

The sub guy

[Kevin R]

That is an interesting note. I am a licensed automotive technician (not a mechanic) and service dive gear as a part time job, primarily because I enjoy the work and it pays for my diving. I can only wonder how many reg techs would be left in Ontario or Canada for that matter if they had to do the same style training and apprenticeship I had to to become licensed in the automotive field. I take every course possible, usually offered by the manufacturers, and I often see instructors and DM's on them who think that this one course will make them a tech and then they can service thier own gear to save money. I have learned more from reading the manuals and actually servicing the equipment than any one mfr's course ever taught. While it is not rocket science, it does take quite a bit of effort to fully understand how a regulator really works and more importantly, how to properly diagnose a problem without simply throwing parts at it. I wonder how the store owners would react to SCUBA equipment repair being an actual trade requiring training in Canada?

Kevin

[crispos]

We teach scuba divers to be informed, independent, self-reliant, aware of all options, disciplined, and cautious before committing themselves. Probably the worst set of qualities you want from a retail customer. We are mavericks, hard to control, we hate to be "sold" on anything, easily.

If you are a business person, you want your customer to need you for information, be reliant for support, be dependent on your abilities, and willing to pay for the intangibles, even impetuous in shelling money out. I hate to say it, the good solid divers we bring out are very creative and industrious in finding the lowest cost solution to their requirements. Off-setting this is the loyalty you can create with sevice and committment. We are also an emotional, sentimental breed. An odd bunch, scuba divers.

[D M I]

That was an impressive retail quote.

D M I

[pufferfish]

D M I once bubbled...
Hi

Thanks for the information Dan. I have to to touch base on one topic thou. I haven't found one certified scuba equipment technician in Ontario. most are dive shop operators who have taken one day in services from the there distributors which doesn't in any way make them technicians. I spent several months in a US military education facility to become a certified US technician with papers. Those little certificates your distributors give you at the end of the day to hang on your dive shop wall are nothing more than attendance certificates. In the US now insurance companies are demanding that dive shop technicians be certified from only a hand full of proper educational facilities before they will insure your business, and You need to remember that even the distributor who sells you your gear at times doesn't know how a scuba regulator works, there is a lot a processes and history behind them. You may have been very happy with your past service work from your local dive shop and thats OK! so keep going there, but I would be really impressed if I saw a biological microscope in any dive shop in Ontario. Just my two cent s worth.

D M I
The sub guy

DMI I think you are right in that the insurance industry may start driving a lot of the industry changes in the future. This is not necessarily bad as it will 'raise the bar' in a lot of different areas. I think if the person working on your reg had to have some real qualifications (maybe the same as the guy in the hospital who works on the anesthetic machines for 'diving' to 1ATM absolute) we would all be better off. It seems as things stand now one guy teaches the next guy all he knows but there is no external body to see that the first guy knows what he is doing,...garbage in, garbage out.

That course you took sounds like a good one. Say the insurance carrier says we will only cover accidents involving equipment serviced by technicians with a two month course and certificate from the US military. People might say that you wouldn't be able to get your gear serviced efficiently in this type of model. What would happen is that a guy like yourself or say Kevin who are seriously interested in this stuff could open a scuba service depot for say all of Toronto or a large geographic region. I would send my gear to you knowing you are the expert in this area and that you keep up to date both in knowledge and through continuing education exams. I can FedEx my stuff to you, you fix it with the same expertise you do a car, and I get my gear back knowing it is going to work. As things stand now I take my regs out of Toronto to get serviced in fact to a place three hours away as most of the shops here don't have people who truly know how to service gear. It is actually quite worrisome when one does look 'under the hood' of many dive shops' service knowledge and quality of repairs. Is it really realistic anyways to expect the dive shop owner to be an expert in teaching scuba, servicing gear, running a fill station, and running a charter boat? That might be like asking a family doctor to be an expert in delivering babies, treating traumas, running a large office, and be an expert in marriage therapy. These people don't exist as the skill set and knowledge required in just too large these days.

Just as the insurance companies may stipulate the conditions under which gear may be serviced I could see them in the future stipulating the quality of analytical testing for fills. Lets just say for example they require like State of Florida currently does by law that quarterly testing be done by an accredited lab. Oh yah there will be lots of screaming about the $1000 per annum it will cost and having to buy air over the Internet as all the fill stations go out of business. That is a given but think bigger and better.

Well a smart guy like DMI or Kevin R who now has their equipment service depot booming will see a great opportunity. They will set up a high quality large fill station that will supply say all of the GTA with air that meets CSA Z180.1-00. Yup every fill station in the GTA will go out of business and these guys will be doing a few thousand fills a day but you know what they will be trained just like the guy that runs the water filtration system here and will stay current in air fill science. It gets even better. Instead of you having to go to the shop their trucks will bring your tanks right to your house if you want. Accredited air, hyperfilters, nice six inch intakes, no hot fills, no wet fills, and because the volume is so high all this for only ten bucks. In Panama and Cozumel the shops order up fills the day before and they arrive the next day at your doorstep. No mess no fuss. Of course for some of the mixed gas stuff there would be local fill stations run by a niche player.

So now we have nice high quality service/air depot where Kevin and DMI are making lots of money and customers are getting good high quality gear repairs and tank fills. Hmmm what happens to the old dive shop as all they have left is gear to sell and classes to teach. Well a lot of instructors seeing no need to affiliate with a shop might just head out on their own like Mike Ferrera, Doppler, and Crispos have done and start teaching diving at a slightly higher but competitive price, and offer a high quality OW course where divers actually learned about buoyancy and trim. Some instructors might even head back to the non-profit dive clubs to teach there. No more conflicts about where the student needs to buy gear as teaching and gear have become uncoupled. The shop is left only selling gear as they do in Europe. I suspect as gear no longer must cross subsidize underpriced training this gear price will come down much further (like in Europe). With this uncoupling of the gear-training cross subsidization independent instrutors get to make more money and teach proper courses (good for the dive consumer), and we get cheaper dive gear another bonus. The big losers in this shift will be the manufacturers and distributors who will be forced to accept lower profit margins and I guess also quite a few smaller dive shops who will go under as selling a low volume of gear will not be enough to live on. People keep citing the shops that have gone under in Metro, but have a look at some of those that remain. They have doubled their size this year while others close their doors,....I noticed a shop in Brockville has also expanded greatly. These are the shops that are responding to these winds of change and forces which are very real. I think we will have fewer shops but better ones in a decade.

If you look closely at the industry the cracks are really starting to show. Internet sales, independent instructors, course training almost being given away, and cottage industry fills, mixes, and repairs with huge variations in quality. Just like in the music industry though were the old guard is deperately trying to hold on to the status quo of selling CDs while kids share files on the Net and musicians extricate themselves from the clutches of the Sonys and Universal, I think in a decade instuctors will have extricated themselves from the clutches of the dive shops and less desirable training agencies and we the divers will have cheaper gear and better OW instruction, fills, and servicing. All I can say right now in my wildest dreams is bring on the changes 'baby', the sooner the better. :D

[D M I]

Yo!


Well said puffer fish.I know there is currently in the state of Florida scuba repair shops that only service equipment nothing else and they leave all the retail and chartering to the dive shops. I know that down in Florida dive shops save good money by sending there repair work out and it eliminates them from having to build a work station, buy tools and parts plus pay some one to do the work.


D M I

[Lurch]

As a scuba diver and business owner I can see both sides of the coin some what. I understand the current problems with insurance and overhead and trying to make a buck. I shop at the LDS and am willing to drive around and shop on price for equiptment. I don't order online because I know that I need the LDS for air fills, which I can't get online. But I have trouble understanding why I can look at Reg "A" at one shop and then go to another shop and there is a difference of 30-40%. I can understand 5%, but I have saved alot of moeny going to other shops. Don't get me wrong I have no trouble paying to get service done somewhere that I didn't but the equiptment because I would do the same. And if it is a problem that is warrenty related you can take it to any shop that is licenced in the gear for repairs. I just got sick of paying premium prices becase I was thought to be a loyal customer that wouldn't shop elsewhere.

As far as the training side goes, my personal opion is I don't care if the course is 500% more, if I can see the reason for it I will pay it. Training is not a out of the box item, but a scbapro reg is a scuba pro reg no matter where I buy it.

Just my two cents.

[jpcpat]

Just two cents from a new diver. I live in NYC and chose my LDS without knowing a good one from a bad one. I was very lucky. When I needed personal equip, they did the right thing by me, rather than their bottom line. I had three different instructors. One great, one so so and one who shouldn't be teaching. I did my OW, AOW and will take my rescue from the great one.

When I needed a BC, Comp and Reg, I checked out Leisure pro (which is not online to me, they are in my hometown), and went to my LDS Why? LeisurePro is a retailer, not a dive shop, and I trusted the owner of my LDS to give me the best advice!! They'll get my service business, too because I think they'll take care of me.

Other sales might not come from them and here's why: When I wanted a steel tank, my LDS didn't stock it and didn't really want to order it, so I bought it online. When I took it to my LDS, a VIP and fill took 4 days and 5 phone calls over a BS issue with the burst disk. Turns out the owner was just trying to cause trouble for the online dealer. I don't trust him to look out for me in the future.

Bottom line, when you look out for your customers, they know it and will come back, When you don't, they know that, too, and start to ask what the difference is.

[miketsp]

None of our LDSs would survive if they didn't stimulate the formation of social groups by running regular dive trips (nationally and internationally) and work on the social side by holding regular events, parties for the birthdays of the month and barbeques. Meetings for pizza after a dive trip so divers can exchange stories and photos.
Training, equipment sales & air fills barely pay the bills. The real money maker is tourism and to make it pay you have to somehow form a large group of friends that like to travel & dive together.
There's a certain point when you hit critical mass and people will go on a trip with that LDS for the social side rather than the technical competence.
IMHO most LDSs go through cycles, periods when they have a group of competent dive organisers and periods when they don't. The company of a friendly group of regular clients tends to make us more forgiving of occasional LDS deficiencies.
So for me the key issue is loyalty generation.

[Butch103]

" The big losers in this shift will be the manufacturers and distributors who will be forced to accept lower profit margins" and as we know when large corporations see this happening they shut the doors on the product(s)....What then? Is then the choice down to one or two manufacturers who would (or could) hold us hostage? I do not disagree that this could happen (as is in fact happening), however, do we really want to lose our LDS? For me it is a meeting place and a fun spot to be. We arrange trips together etc......Can this continue in a training facility?

[Elevatorguy2]

I think this industry is in serious trouble and there is no one to blame but the dive shop owners. Some of these dinosaurs need to get with the times and realize their current business practices are turning people off the sport. Recently in Canada possibly in the states there’s a commercial I can’t remember the product, with a guy playing tennis and another guy running behind him with his hand in the first guys back pocket where he would keep his wallet. The jingle is something about hand in your pocket. My first reaction to the commercial was it’s the tax man with their hand in our pocket. Honestly and not a word of a lie my next thought it’s a dive shop owner with their hand in the pocket. I honestly believe most dive shop owners take great advantage of new divers by selling them over priced top of the line new gear. It’s like fresh meat. The worst thing a new diver can do is tell the shop owner they are new to the sport or go into a shop without an experienced buddy to help them make buying decisions. Not every new diver needs a dry suit. Not every new diver needs a computer that does everything except deliver a pizza to the dive site. Not every new diver needs to enroll in advanced courses as soon as they complete their open water course. Making a quick buck off some unsuspecting new diver is not the way to grow your business. If you provide a well stocked store, that provides timely reasonably priced sales and service by knowledgeable friendly knowledgeable staff you can’t lose. Help your customers to grow at there own pace not yours. Diving is a sport you can participate over a lifetime, there’s no reason to load these people up with all the gear under the sun in the first year, unless you’re not in it for the long haul. If that’s the case go sell used cars. The better shops will thank you.

[Butch103]

The problem with any sales or commission related business you will always scumbags selling what is inappropriate for the customer/client. I am in the financial services industry (over 18 years) and see it day in and day out.

Perhaps only the better and honest shops will survive.

[Ron Brandt]

It's interesting to see a thread that started in 2003 be revived.
I used to "work" for free for a lds while he made all the money....I watch this guy rape a customer of over $350 for changing the o rings on his reg...not even a complete service.

I was "fired" from this guy because I finally got my own students.I have now started to resurect my scuba business and it's a real hurdel working with certain stocklists in this business.

I have a new concept and some people don't like it...creative marketing and low overhead retail space and get this...honesty.

I subscribe to the way I was taught...for love of the sport and and to sell the new student or new diver only what they need to do the dive...a bit like dir.

Soon...when you click on my links with my sig you will see a different concept and different type of store...to meet to-day's enrty level divers.

Ron