I decided to join this thread after learning of the closing of a shop I have used for years.
Fill Express was a South Florida mainstay for many years. It had some ownership changes over the years as it struggled. I knew the most recent owners, and I liked them a lot. I liked everyone who worked there, in fact. The service when I used them was excellent. I did a lot of my technical training through them, and I was quite satisfied with it. I have some thoughts on why they are no longer in operation, thoughts that might be helpful to others.
In the last couple of years, I used them while visiting from Colorado because of my sense of loyalty as a satisfied customer. I almost felt it was a moral obligation to do so. That was, however, just about the only reason I used them, and I used competing shops a whole lot instead. If a satisfied customer shifts shops, there has to be a reason.
One big reason was the limited scope of their business. In the past, they were essentially what the name suggests--a place to get tanks filled. They were certainly that. They had a 15 tank cascade EACH for nitrox 32, 36, and 40. Their prices for fills were great. They had banked 21/35. You could get any kind of trimix fill you wanted. They did sell some gear, but that was about it for other services. One day during a long decompression stop, my dive buddy wrote on his wrist slate "I just bought Fill Express." When I later asked him what his plans were, he said he wanted to turn it into a full service shop. That didn't happen. The name was officially changed to GoDive Florida, but the sign out front still said Fill Express. More gear was offered for sale, but not much more, and the space for showing such gear was simply inadequate for it. If you went upstairs, the office area was about the same as the gear showroom area, and the classroom was bigger. Yet, they did not do all that much instruction. The instruction they did do was mostly technical. They did not have either a pool or rental gear to offer to OW students.
A few years ago some relatives came to Florida to get their OW certification from me while I was there. Last year some friends came to Florida to get their AOW from me. I was thus acting as an independent instructor, and there are a lot of independent instructors in the area. I could not use their shop because they could not offer me the full range of services I needed for instruction. Other shops could offer me discounted rates on gear rental and boat fees. If I went the whole package with a competitor, including gas fills, I saved
a lot of money. I imagine a lot of other instructors must have felt the same way, meaning they were shut out of a sizable portion of the scuba market.
Because they did not have their own boat, as a customer you had to deal with two different operators. You would drop off your tanks for a fill the day before your dive. If they were not busy, you could wait for them to fill it then. If not, you had to come back later when they were filled. Then you would take them to the boat the next day. Each time you are lugging tanks in and out of the shop and in and out of the dive boat, and if you are diving with something like double steel 108s, that is a real issue. If you were diving several days in a row, you had to do a cross town shuttle run several times a day, a major inconvenience. In contrast, there was a lot of convenience in going with a full service operation. I could drop off my tanks the day before a dive and then show up the next morning to find them full and ready to go and taken onto the boat for me. If I was diving the next day, I didn't have to touch them--I would just tell them what mix I wanted in them next. Over several days of diving, that would amount to hours of driving time saved as well as not enduring the strain of all that tank lugging.
When my friend bought the shop a few years ago, I think he had the right idea in expanding the services he offered, but for whatever reason, he was unable to achieve that expanded vision. He therefore could not meet the needs of his customers as well as some of his competition. In that case, you are eventually going to lose even your most loyal customers, no matter how well you treat them. If they have no choice but to go to a competitor to get a service you don't offer, then at some point that competitor is going to start looking pretty good.