Golf Ball Diving

[robbcayman]

It's the kind of business where you want to employ people to work for you. You go drum up the business and contracts and have others go do the hard work and face the hazards. You make decent money and they get paid little for their efforts. After all, manual labor is fairly easy to come by.

The problem is you normally have to have some knowledge and train people about the business. Hence, you would have to have done it first. I think people see this as some kind of scoop and grab easy money thing. If it were that easy, contracts wouldn't be easy to come by.

On a side note, I have a friend who runs a pool cleaning and repair business. Since draining pools isn't always an option, he has asked if I could help him do some projects underwater via scuba. To me, working in a pool is a million times better than working in some scummy pond filled with a ton of hazards. Then again, this is a side thing, not a full-time gig.

 

[ballfrog]

It's the kind of business where you want to employ people to work for you. You go drum up the business and contracts and have others go do the hard work and face the hazards. You make decent money and they get paid little for their efforts. After all, manual labor is fairly easy to come by.

Wait. This is seriously your opinion? Once you form the employer/employee relationship, the government steps in and you are screwed. To satisfy OSHA, you'd have to provide the employees with equipment for commercial diving, provide a backup diver and a dive master/planner. Have you priced a Kirby Morgan hard hat or an environmental dry suit? How hard do you think that diver is going to work for minimum wage, which will end up costing you around $15 per hour depending on insurance and benefits? I'd expect he / she might find a few hundred balls a day while you have to pay salaries, Social Security, Work Comp and unemployment for three people per crew.

I work independent. I'm self-employed, I don't pay work comp or unemployment on myself although I do pay full social security. And I don't have some uncaring employee wasting time and destroying my equipment, I do that fine all by myself. I drum up most of my own contracts and that's hard enough, I let somebody else clean, sort and sell the balls, a half million balls a year is just too many to try to dump at a flea market. Some times I hire a strong back to haul and stack balls for me since I like to save mine for supporting my tank whilst I do the "hard" work, but most of the time I do it all and keep all the money. Six hours a day in the muck is usually enough for me.

If you think the manual labor is all that easy to come by, just scroll back and see how many people are just jumping at the chance to do it.