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005 Why Attend The DEMA Show? Beverages at Your Dive Center

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Welcome to the Dive Locker Podcast, the podcast for dive professionals. Where we bring you the latest and diving industry resources that make you excellent at teaching techniques, risk management, and dive business.

I’m your host Tec Clark, and it is great to have you on our show today everyone. In today’s episode, we’re going to be going over a couple of features here. Number one, why attend the DEMA Show? Some of you go and some of you don’t. We’re going to be bringing you the reasons why you should be going and there’s going to be some cool things to learn. Second is offering beverages in your dive center. Should you do it? Can you do it? Why do it? So we’re going to get into that. But first I want to thank our first sponsor of this episode of the Dive Locker podcast, and that is the DEMA Show, the DEMA Show, 2019 taking place this November 13 through 16 in Orlando, Florida is the world’s only international trade-only event for dive, travel and action watersports professionals. Attending DEMA Show provides unrivaled opportunities for professional and personal growth. Make new connections that can elevate your business, meet face to face with peers from around the world, and learn new ways of thinking to help increase your success. Learn more and register at DEMAShow.com So here we go. Let’s do this.

Why Attend the DEMA Show?

Okay, so I remember back to when I became an instructor. At the end of my instructor training course, the trainer said to us all, “congratulations now that your instructors, this is your license to learn.” And I thought, “what are you kidding me? I just went through a huge course, grueling, and I’ve just hit the pinnacle. You know, I’m at the top. What do you mean this is my license to learn? I just learned a whole bunch.” Well, I didn’t get it until shortly thereafter. The license to learn is when we do become dive professionals, this is the start of gaining more wisdom, more knowledge, more experience in our field. We become more into our craft of education and teaching and professionalism and supervision. So that comes in time. But it is a really great point that says we never stop learning. You have to have a student’s heart and a student’s mentality to be a great leader and a be a great dive professional and a great instructor.

One of the things that I have found keeps me at the top of my prime and the top of my craft is annually attending the DEMA Show. So DEMA puts on an annual trade Show every year, and that trade Show is one of the kind – mecca for people to go to, to understand our industry, to dig in and go deeper in our industry. So the reasons to attend the DEMA Show are what I want to really explain today so that you get it. If you’ve never been before, this is going to be eye-opening for you to understand why this investment matters. And for those of you that have gone before, maybe you’ve done it in just a one day, in and out, maybe you only go into the Show floor and that’s it. Well, there’s so much more to the entire DEMA Show and to your development as a dive professional.

And that’s what we’re going to do today is go over my top 10 reasons why every dive professional should attend the DEMA Show. Now, it is coincidental, is it not, that this is the first episode that the DEMA Show is actually a sponsor of! Hey folks, the DEMA Show is a sponsor of this episode, but I’ve had this in the queue already from the beginning, from weeks and weeks ago that this episode was going to be now. Cause we’re about six weeks out right now from the DEMA Show, so I wanted to do this now and lo and behold, DEMA Show became a sponsor. So anyhow, this is pretty cool that those two gel together. So let’s get into this.

First of all, you’ve got to take a look at this team: Tom Ingram, Nicole Russell, June French, all the team over at DEMA get together with NTP National Trade Productions. This is an award winning trade Show productions company that works together to put on these epic events. And they do it in a really great manner that is in multiple locations and it has grown since the first trade Show. The first DEMA Show was in 1977. Today, the DEMA Show has grown to host over 600 exhibitors with just about 10,000 attendees at each Show. Now, the neat thing about these attendees is that they are all diving industry professionals only. It’s not open to the public or consumers. You have to be a dive pro to get into the DEMA Show. And we’re talking about these 600 exhibitors. They are everything from equipment manufacturers, travel destinations, apparel wholesalers, dive training agencies, and diving business service providers. So there is something for everyone at the DEMA Show.

And so you know, there’s a lot of you that, come hell or high water, you’re going every year. That’s me. I’m with you. And then there’s those of you that say, “no, it’s not worth it. It’s a drain on our finances and time, resources.” But I’m here to tell you folks that can’t be further from the truth. Your opportunities for growth and development in the diving industry multiply when you or your staff invest in going to the DEMA Show. It is truly professional development. Put aside professional development dollars, make this a budget and attend the DEMA Show. So here are my top 10 reasons to attend.

Number 10, Location. Get away. Really get away. If you’re like me, when I’m around my house, when I’m around business, all I’m thinking about are the things that need to be done. All my tasks, so doesn’t matter if I want to listen to a podcast or if I want to focus on a webinar or read a book or something. There’s always things in the back of my head that I got to do. However, when you get out of your city, you get out of your business and you go somewhere else and that place is a cool travel destination – that is something neat. You get to really disconnect and focus on why you’re there. Now of course you can touch base with your dive center and your crew back home and yeah, I do it too. But the deal is that you’re more focused because you are somewhere else and the locations are pretty darn cool.

So this year coming up in a few weeks, we’re going to be in Orlando. In 2020 we go back to new Orleans! So many of us loved the New Orleans thing and it got out of the rotation for a while. Now New Orleans is back in. That is a fun Show. Cool location. In 2021 we go to Vegas! Vegas, baby! And 2022 we’re back in Orlando. So there’s a great rotation of destinations to go to and Hey look, these locations are so tourist-rich that helps make your flights less expensive to get to. And there’s all kinds of ways to get great discounted flights and transportation, things like that.

Number nine, Resource Centers. Now two of the most popular and expertise intensive areas in diving are photography and technical diving. So the Show has created custom areas on the Show floor called resource centers. They have the Image Resource Center and the Technical Diving Resource Center. Now in these resource centers, they’re kind of little theater based areas and experts get up and talk about these areas one right after another in a schedule that goes all day long. And what’s really cool is that these resource centers are located in the midst of several exhibitor booths relating to that specialty area. So around the image resource center are tons of underwater photography and video vendors right there.

So it’s just awesome. Same with the technical diving resource center. All these technical companies and brands are all around that. It’s really cool. So it’s kind of like a hub on the Show floor that specializes in these two areas. So number nine is resource centers.

Number eight is Social Events and Award Parties. Now these are cool. Every night of the DEMA Show is filled with some kind of social event. Many of these are hosted by the major players in the industry. Some of them are open to everyone and some of them are open to just the kind of private clientele of that group or let’s say it’s a training agency. You might have to be an instructor or a professional with that agency. Now a lot of these places have cash bars, sometimes free bars, or free hors d’oeuvres and so forth. So if you want food, get there early!

Now some of the best socials that are out there are SSI, PADI, DAN, DeeperBlue, Wet Pixel, it goes on and on. There’s a lot of them. And then you’ve got the industry awards. Now the industry award socials are a little bit different. These are more formal. They usually come with full dinners. There’s a cost to them and these are some of the biggest award parties that are out there. We’re talking the Women Divers Hall of Fame, the Academy of Underwater Arts and Sciences, and of course the big one is the DEMA awards party. Now with the DEMA awards party, they’re going to be giving out the Wavemaker awards and the Reaching Out Awards. And this year, by the way, big shout out to my buddy Spencer Slate, Captain Slate. He was on League of Extraordinary Divers podcast, episode number two. He and I go way back.

So congrats. Slate for being a Reaching Out Award winner and also Zig and Joann Zighan. Now if you are part of the Northeast, you know, Beneath the Sea Dive Show, legendary dive Show in the Northeast, it’s fantastic. Zig has been doing this for decades and he is just an awesome. So those two guys are going to be celebrated at the DEMA awards party. So that’s a great one too. Um, all the social events and awards are just fantastic. So that’s part of the nightlife and that’s part of networking and it’s more casual than on the Show floor. So you get to do a lot more talking and get to know people in a really fun and engaging way.

Number seven is DEMA Sponsored Seminars. Now here is one of the cool things that I absolutely love. Not only is this huge Show floor with 600 plus vendors, right? But we also have seminars, tons and tons of seminars. And of those seminars, DEMA has what’s called sponsored seminars, DEMA sponsored seminars. There’s also exhibitor sponsored seminars, which you’re going to hear about next. But the DEMA sponsored seminars are a big deal because what DEMA does is that they vet out and go nationwide to people that do this speaking circuit in business, in social media, in marketing, and they bring them in to give you high caliber business lectures and presentations. They’re really cool. So some of the things that you’re going to see this year are going to be about social media, selling, social media advertising, winning at trip advisor, SEO (search engine optimization) best practices, Google analytics, hiring strategies, YouTube strategies; the list goes on and on and on. So the DEMA sponsored seminars are really cool, really rich, and they can help you out so much in your dive business.

And that leads us to number six, Exhibitors Sponsored Seminars. So you can imagine if there’s over 600 exhibitors, they get the opportunity to create and do one hour seminars on their own so they can put on educational presentations at different points throughout the Show. And it could be just one offs here and there to learn more about a vendor or a brand or something like that. But then there are exhibitors like PADI and NAUI and SSI and Divers Alert Network and they have ongoing seminars in multiple rooms over multiple days. And if you can’t make one seminar then just look at the calendar. They’re going to do the same seminar on another day at a different time and on another day at a different time. So you get the opportunity to pick and choose what it is that you want to go to and hear. These exhibitor sponsored seminars are fantastic and you can get lots on risk management, sales practices, standards changes and you can even get training and that’s a really cool thing – to repair courses and you know any kind of trainer level courses and all that. So really, really good stuff in the exhibitor sponsored seminars.

Number five is Booking Dive Travel. Now we all know that traveling to some of the best destinations in the world is the heart and soul of what we do as dive pros and get people into underwater exploration. Well since so many dives centers and independent instructors offer dive travel to their customers, there is no better time and place to gather as much info on diving destinations as the DEMA Show you see. They’ve got everybody there from liveaboard yachts and land-based dive centers.

Dive travel is represented so well at the DEMA Show and what’s really cool is that if you’re interested in going somewhere like the Florida Keys or The Bahamas or something like that, you will actually find a pavilion. It’s called a travel pavilion and the entire aisle is dedicated to that region and you can go there and just say, “I’m interested in The Bahamas” and you’ll go booth to booth to booth to booth to see all the different operators are down there and hey, at the same time, you’ll be serenaded by steel drums and maybe some rum punch. So booking dive travel is so cool because it’s all in one destination. They’re showing you videos of their places, you get to see what the hotel rooms look like, the dive boats. on and on and on. It is awesome for booking dive travel at the DEMA Show.

Number four is seeing the Latest Products and Technology. Our industry is always changing and the DEMA Show is the place to see what is new and what is coming out. So in fact, on the Show floor, DEMA even has a New Products Showcase. So instead of going to booth to booth to booth to find out what’s new, you can conveniently look in display cases to see all the new products that are launched at the Show. And then you get to see where they’re located. So for more information, you know where you can go. So this is a great way to see what is new and what is on the market. And then to go research it further.

Number three is connecting with Dive Training Agencies. Now we all know to be a dive pro, it means you need to be a part of a dive training agency and for that reason, the dive training agencies are there at the DEMA Show. What’s cool is that you can learn directly from them about standards, changes, new products, risk management, new initiatives, all of this. Because they’re there, they’re there to answer your questions. So if you’ve got a beef about something, bring it up to them, right? Then you can talk about it. You can find out the rationale of why things have changed or whatnot. If a new products coming out or a new book or a material or training product, you get to preview it right there and see what it’s about.

The other thing is that, you know, I’ve talked about this before, there’s so much about agency bashing that goes on, “Oh my agency’s better than yours and blah, blah, blah, and on and on and on,” well, you know what?  Why don’t you take some time and actually go to a booth of another training agency and see what they’ve got going on. It’s awesome to learn what are the strengths of other agencies and I mean it’s really a cool thing. So you can be more knowledgeable as a dive pro by spending some time in all of the agencies’ booths and seeing what they’ve got going on. I think that’s a really smart thing. And also the agencies have educational seminars just like I said in the reason number six, the exhibitor seminars. These educational seminars are fantastic and you will get to really dig in and learn more about your agency and what they have to offer by attending those educational seminars.

Number two, connecting with Equipment Manufacturers. Now let’s face it, we love the gear, right? It’s all about gear. So since we are an equipment intensive sport, the sales and distribution of dive gear to divers is a huge part of our diving business.  So this is a great way to see what’s new and improved and coming around in the industry with regards to equipment, everything is there. I mean everything; the soft goods, the hard goods, the advanced stuff, the technical items, it’s all there. There’s even boats there. I mean, it’s crazy how much equipment is at the Show and then there’s the little stuff. So let’s say you have a dive center and you want some accessories, you want some apparel, you want some jewelry. These vendors are going to be there and you get to talk with them about what are the price points, what are the contracts, what does it look like? And you can actually make purchases at the Show for your year or however you want to do that. So there’s so much to connecting with equipment manufacturers that it becomes one of those big things. That’s why it is number two on my list.

And that leads us to our number one reason to attend the DEMA Show. Drum roll, please is Networking. Now, I know you might be thinking, “wait a minute, some of those other things that are a whole lot more compelling than networking,” but hear me out. In my experience over decades of going to the Show, I can say that networking has been the number one tool that I come away with every year and it grows and grows and allows my business and professional networking and standing to grow and grow as well. So whether you are in seminars, at social events or you’re on the DEMA Show floor, you’re going to be networking with the absolute who’s who in the diving industry. And we’re talking from the executives of the largest players in the industry down to brand new dive pros.

They’re all there. And so the ability to network with people just helps you to learn from them. They face the same challenges that you face, the same threats, the same opportunities. They get to share what’s working and what’s not working. And you get to share what’s working and not working. And because of that you connect. And that’s where we see people embrace every time they get together and they see each other every year at the DEMA Show. Why? Because they had great times with somebody from a previous year or they learned and met somebody and then went on a dive trip with them. Two shops went together on the same liveaboard at the same week and now they’re like best buds. This happens. I mean, there’s countless stories like this.

So for that reason, I think that the ability to connect with other dive pros gives you an advantage to return home with new strategies that you cannot get anywhere else. That’s why for me, number one is networking. So there you go. Those are the top 10 reasons why to attend the DEMA Show. Look into this yourself, head over to DEMAShow.com and there you’ll see how you can register, how you can get into the hotel block and everything. That’s a part of the Show. So there you go my friends, I hope to see you there because I’m going to be there, and introduce yourself. Let’s get to know each other and just make it a great time because it always is.

Offering Beverages at Your Dive Center

 “Can I get you a drink?” When was the last time you heard that said, probably at your friend’s house or at a bar or at a restaurant, but not at a retail location. So what is with offering beverages at retail locations, for free? What about this and your dive center? Should this be done? Can it be done? What are the pros and cons? That’s what we’re going to talk about in this next segment. Now this came to me, a couple scenarios happened. First. Culinary Concepts is a outdoor grill and outdoor kitchen specialty store here in Pompano Beach, Florida, and the owner, Dean, when you go in your first time in there, he’s going to greet you, welcome you, and he’s going to say, “can I get you a beverage?” What he’s asking next is “would you like a beer? Would you like a soda? Would you like water?”

And from that point forward, whatever you elect, he’s going to remember in his contact management with you from this point forward. He’s going to remember that you like the beer, you like the Sprite or Pepsi or Coke or whatever it is? So what he does is he kind of establishes this, but think about this, that beverage and having beverages blends nicely with the outdoor grilling concept, right? So lots of men frequent that store and lots of grilling takes place and lots of beers consumed around grilling, right? So it’s kind of like this natural tie-in. Well here’s what happens when you say yes, you now have engaged in this new time and relationship to sit and sip a beer or a soda or whatever and talk and get to know a little bit more about the people and about the items that are in there and so forth.

And because of this, this is become a really neat thing that that store does and they offer it free. It’s not charged. And in our state this is legal. So there’s some really cool benefits that come here. There’s another scenario. This other scenario is this. My wife is a clinical psychologist and she just left an office space to open her own private practice with her own office space and in, so she invested in a Keurig coffee and tea maker and then put an assortment of coffees and teas in her waiting room with some wonderful relaxing music and some scented air diffusers. And so she made this environment very different than the other place she was at. Now what she’s observed is that her clients are coming in and they will sit and relax and really take the time to make themselves a coffee or a tea and just get in the moment to relax and get ready for the session.

They get to bring their coffee or tea into the session. And what she’s also discovered is that there are clients that are coming way early before her time and they are just sitting there to get their tea or their coffee and relax in a quiet room and just a great environment. And so all of a sudden this became a really unique feature to look at is the beverages that can be offered in, in that kind of setting. What does it do to people? What is it setting them up, how are they being treated and comforted? So I dug into this and found a whole bunch of things that I think are really compelling reasons why you should consider offering beverages in your dive center.

First of all, let’s get this straight. We’re not talking about, you need to be doing alcohol all over. If you do not think that alcohol and diving should mix in any way, shape or form, fine. There’s all kinds of beverages that you could do that are non-alcoholic; your coffees, your teas, your waters, your sodas, right? And that’s absolutely great. But on the other side of it is that, you know, our industry does have a lot of fun and you will see that there is social drinking that does take place on dive trips, obviously after the dives, right? Like any rule on a liveaboard, at the moment that you take your wine or open up your, your alcoholic beverage, you’re done diving for the day, right? So we don’t want the two to mix, but can it be a social thing on the, on the alcohol side, like beer or wine? Yes. So think about this. Let’s look at some of the things that take place when you offer beverages in your dive center.

First of all, there is increased time that is going to take place. When you offer a beverage, people are going to sip whatever beverage you give them. So sipping takes time and that time is time in your dive center. That time in your dive center allows them to be exposed more to your dive center and it also allows for more time to be exposed to the people in your dive center. So what do you think is going to take place? Well that’s number two, increased social interaction. There’s going to be more discussion. So more discussion happens than somebody just walking in and saying, “Hey, tell me about this. I want to try this on.” And then leaving. You can get a much more time intensive quality experience when somebody is sipping a beverage and you’re talking, this also is a social thing.

So think about this. When people put a cup in their hand or a bottle or a warm beverage – a tea or a coffee and they’re smelling that beverage and it’s got something that their hands can do, they just tend to relax a little bit more, open up a little bit more. They feel more present and more comfortable. That’s an awesome thing. And so whether that social time is all about diving or maybe it’s even non diving, doesn’t matter. You’re getting to know the person, which leads us to number three, increased bonding. Increased bonding means increased trust. When people look at you as warm, friendly, inviting, and generous, now you’re talking loyalty, now you’re talking comfort. People are going to be more apt to open up to you and want to do business with you because you’re getting to know them, they’re getting to know you. And because of that, there is a really, really great loyalty that can be built because of the comfort.

And again, I’m not talking that this needs to be, you know, alcohol fraternity party session. No, we’re talking that a beer, a wine, a, a coffee, a tea, a water – just something helps with people just opening up and staying longer and connecting. Now, here’s some things to think about. First of all, laws, when you’re talking about giving away free alcohol, let’s say. In many States, you do not need to possess a liquor license to do that. Now there are rules that go along with this. In other words, you can’t sell. You can’t advertise it. You have to be able to give it equally and indiscriminately. The list kind of goes on and on with that. Now there’s other States that say, “no, as soon as a person comes into your retail center, they’re doing business with you. And if you give them a free beverage or not, it doesn’t matter. You need to be controlled by a liquor license.” So you have to check first. If you do think that going the alcohol route, the beer or wine route is something that you would want to do, you must look into that, into the laws that a, that are with your state and with your County and city. So definitely do that first before you start investing in this beverage offering.

Now here’s a couple tips for you. First of all, you could just go out and get a Keurig or a kegerator – a little refrigerator with a keg in it for beer. You could just do that and make it happen. But actually here’s where it can get really cool. Partner with your local coffee roasters and breweries. So if you decide to go the coffee route, there are going to be in most medium to large size cities, coffee roasters that are local, independently owned shops, probably a coffee shop, and they are roasting their own coffee, producing their own beans and coffee blends and that kind of thing.

Get with them and tell them that you want to Showcase their product in your store. Now, what happens here is this great opportunity for cross promotion. They know you’re promoting them, they’re going to be apt to help you out with an event you’re doing or something like that. Prizes, giveaways or so there becomes a neat relationship when you do a partnership. So I recommend that for local coffee roasters. Look, everybody can get Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts in their Keurig, right? But why not go for something locally. So look into that. The other thing is the breweries, so local craft breweries are popping up all over the place, multiple ones in every town just about. And so you could do a rotation of different beers that the local breweries are doing. Again, the same thing applies their apt to promote you because you have promoted them.

And so it goes on and on. Hey look, if you are offering a trip to Hawaii and that’s your big, big destination that your dive center’s taking people to, you could be blending up some pina coladas, they could be virgin, they could be not virgin, whatever you wanted that to be. Just think about that and know what the rules and laws allow. But now that smell of coconut and pineapple in the air, and the opportunity to blend that up and then talk about the trip as their drinking that frozen beverage in your store that just leads to more contact time, which could in turn lead to more sales and whether that’s the trip, whether it’s equipment or whatnot. So think about this, offering beverages in your dive center. Lots of pros, barely any cons. The cons can be that you got some prices and some consumption and costs that go with that.

You’ve got the laws that you gotta know before doing so. You know, I do remember a dive center owner in California once saying that they did this and they had lounge chairs and couches and people literally spent hours in their store talking. It was kind of like the modern day dive equivalent to a barbershop and just people were hanging out talking. So, you know, he didn’t look at that terribly favorably, but they were good customers in the long run. Uh, but as he put it, he needed to get work done and he couldn’t talk to people all day long. So that could be one of the negatives behind it as well. But anyhow, Culinary Concepts is crushing it, uh, with the way that they do that and the way that they engage with their customers. Private practice, like my wife’s doing, you see this in, nail salons and in wedding shops. So this practice is getting a little bit more traction, so you should look into this for your own retail operations as well.

Thanks for Listening!

That will do it for today’s episode. Thanks for listening my friends and thanks also to the DEMA Show for being our sponsor of this episode. Remember to subscribe to this podcast on iTunes, Google Play or Stitcher. That way you’ll be notified of new episodes as soon as they go live and please leave a rating. Items talked about in this episode can be found on the show notes page over at scubaguru.com and there you can also leave topic recommendations for future episodes. Thanks again everyone. We’ll see you in the next episode. Safe diving and take good care, my friends.

Thanks to This Episode’s Sponsor

DEMA Show 2019

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004 Value Selling Part 2, Defendable Dive Briefings

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Welcome to the dive locker podcast, the podcast for dive professionals where we bring you the latest and diving industry resources that make you excellent at teaching techniques, risk management, and dive business. I am your host Tec Clark, and welcome to this week’s episode everyone.

Industry News

We’re going to start with some industry news here, Hurricane Dorian, that I’ve mentioned in the last few episodes, devastated The Bahamas. And that GoFundMe campaign, that relief fund is now over $35,000 in donations. Thank you all for the efforts that you’ve done there. And the reports that we’re getting are absolutely devastating from The Bahamas, but there is something that is amazing. Two things. Number one is the support that they are receiving from everywhere globally to build and rebuild and provide immediate support that has been tremendous to see and to witness the humanitarian side of us as a, as a people. And the second thing is to look at the country of The Bahamas when you look at their resilience and their strength to get through this and their faith and their hope.

Oh my goodness. It is truly something to, just touch the soul. It really is. So our thoughts and prayers still go out to all of those that are still suffering from the effects of Hurricane Dorian. Keep them in your thoughts and prayers as well. Also, on September 2nd, 2019, the liveaboard dive vessel Conception was engulfed in flames while anchored in California’s Channel Islands of the 39 passengers and crew onboard 34 lost their lives. This tragedy has been felt through the dive community and beyond the dive community. I’ve even had students and former students come up and want to talk about this and understand it.  It’s really a tragic, tragic event, but in the effort to help the families of the victims of that fire, there have been numerous organizations that have risen up and have started donation funds and campaigns to raise money for these victims and their families.

DAN has started a program. They’ve donated actually $10,000 to kick off theirs, and right now at the time of this recording, they have gathered over $177,000. And that is with partnering with many of the organizations in our industry that have come together for this one. Also, if you go to dema.org, you will see, in their press release on the Conception tragedy that they have numerous organizations listed, many relief funds. All that, you can read about and see who are the organizations that are, that are doing them and, and promoting them. So there’s many out there. And, I just want to just give the biggest condolences to everyone that has been touched by this because it’s not only those families folks, it is the countless numbers of you that have been diving with that boat and that company and in that area, even maybe with a different boat or those of us that love liveaboards and now we’re thinking differently. It’s just such a hard thing from this.

We know that many things will be looked at and there may even be changes to policies or procedures or whatever that is within maritime or, the diving industry or whatever that is. But, again, thoughts and prayers are out with all of the people that are affected by this, not only the victims and their families, but also everyone that’s just touched negatively by this. So it’s been a rough few weeks here for our industry I think with all of these disasters that are going on. So again, keep everyone in the thoughts and prayers. Now let’s get to this week’s episode.

This week we are going to be talking about value selling part two, competing with value. Remember value selling part one was last week. This is going to be part two. We’re also going to discuss a risk management procedure that might assist you in defendability for your dive briefings. So here we go. Let’s get this episode kicked off. Ready dive, dive, dive

Value Selling Part 2

Hey, today we are at value selling part two. Last week’s episode was value selling part one and a reminder value selling is to sell or compete against value that you offer versus selling or competing against price and pricing. And so some of the things that we went over last week that there’s a lot of instances in our industry where we’re seeing that discounting is going on. Now, discounting in consumer driven economies is not necessarily a bad thing, but when it comes to services like those that we offer in scuba education and training, that can be problematic because so many corners wind up getting cut to be able to make ends meet or to not lose as much money as possible when the services are being given. So this is the value selling part two and we are going to actually look at what it means to sell on value.

I love this quote from Oscar Wilde. “The fool knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.” Now here’s another quote that I love from billionaire businessman Warren Buffet. “Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.” So think about that. That’s pretty cool. Now, Brian Tracy, a sales guru says this, he says that the “value is the difference between the price you charge and the benefits the customer perceives they will get. So if the customer perceives they will get a lot of benefit for the price they pay, then their perception of value is very high.” So the good news is that you can control this by showing benefits and measuring on value. The individual will change their purchase decision making process based on the value that you offer. And the good news is you get to control the value that you offer in all the services that you do.

So let’s illustrate this using a different business model, a full service lawn company. So let’s say that you have a full service lawn company and you are in the market and you’re in the neighborhood and you’re advertising your services and whatnot. Well what happens when a new person gets a pickup truck and a lawn mower and comes in and wants to break into that market, they are going to undercut the competition. And so what happens now? There is a knee jerk reaction to which other lawn service folks are going to then lower their price to start a price war where everyone is competing with each other on prices. Well, you are going to be the savvy business person. You are the one that’s going to have the full service lawn company that stays above that price war. You’re not going to engage with that pull down of pricing that’s only going to hurt.

It hurts your margin and hurts your income; you’re living, your livelihood. No Way. Instead we’re going to go the opposite direction and don’t turn in that whole competitive market on competing at price. You’re going to compete at value. So here’s how we do it. We’re going to look at the six steps of value selling. Here we go. Number one is identify the customer’s problems. Picture an infomercial, remember the late night infomercial, right? And so you’ve got people that are showing all the things that are negative that you have to deal with and it’s always shot in black and white. Have you ever noticed that? And so people are sitting there and, “oh, it’s so hard to deal with, washing dishes and blah, blah, blah.” And there’s a frazzled housewife and it’s black and white and oh, she just looks disheveled and everything. Well, that’s the kind of stuff here.

We’re going to look at that in what we’re talking about in this full service lawn company. You want to be saying stuff like, “Hey, are you tired of having a bad looking lawn? Are you sick of mowing your lawn on the weekends and not spending time with your family? Are Your sprinklers a problem? Do you hate weeds?” Whatever that is. These are all called pain points. And these pain points are effective at identifying what problems the customers have and that you can solve them. So number one is identify the customer’s problems.

Number two is illustrate the better outcomes. So this is where you get the opportunity to identify every one of your customer’s pain points. So now with your help by being with your full service lawn company, they’ll have more time with their family. They won’t have to do their own lawn mower repair and maintenance, nor will they have to go out and buy oil and gas. They don’t have to go to the store and buy pipes and sprinkler heads. Okay. So now you’ve identified where you come along and help make their life easier and more enjoyable by eliminating their pain points. That’s number two, illustrating the better outcomes of doing business with you.

Number three is clear, compelling, and memorable differentiation. Differentiation is how do you differentiate yourself from your competitors? You see, it would be things like this, “we’re a full service lawn company and here’s what makes us different. So you may work from home and you might need quiet in order to make conference calls, or you might have little kids that take naps throughout the day. Well, we will only run our equipment when it’s convenient for you. For that reason, we have a special handy-dandy scheduling app that allows you to schedule our lawn service. Oh, and after we do your lawn, we check the sprinkler system every time to make sure we haven’t knocked off any sprinkler heads and if we have, we repair them on the spot.”

“Also, if we ever notice weeds or see brown spots, we immediately mix the right amount of product to put on your lawn and take care of it right then.” All right, you see what you’ve just done. You’ve now positioned yourself as a business that cares about its customers and that becomes a very clear and compelling differentiation from the competitors. No other competitor cares about. If you’re at home on conference calls and no other competitor has this app, that is differentiation. That’s number three, clear, compelling and memorable differentiation.

Number four is proof of value. Now you want to support your claims by sharing your scope of success. That means what have you done? That means point to the great things that you’ve done. So you’ve done award-winning houses in the neighborhood, maybe you serve the church down the street and do their lawn. Maybe you do the local country club and the country club is gorgeous and everybody goes, “Whoa, if they do the country club, wow!” Right? And then what do people say on Yelp? We want them to look at Yelp and say, “hey look, there is no better lawn service company and here’s why people are saying that we are so good.” See, you want to show that you have talent and that other people trust you. This is social proof. So that is important to show the value that you offer. That’s number four. Proof of value.

Number five is cost of inaction. Now, this is a reminder of the pain points of what happens when people don’t use your company, but it’s done in a little bit of a different way. “If you don’t use us, then you’re gonna miss out on football games. You’re going to miss out on time with the family. You’re going to have to continually do lawnmower repair. Now think of this one too. If you decide to do all of the services that we offer, but with different companies, you could have a sprinkler company, a weed control company, a lawn mowing company. That’s three different companies, three different schedules, three different bills. We do it all in one.” You see the cost of inaction stimulates fear of missing out, so we want to put that in there. Number five is the cost of inaction.

And then number six is the return on investment. This is when you get to show financial return in the investment of doing business with you. Now, let the people roll through the numbers. “Have you ever had your sprinklers knocked off by a lawn service and wasted a ton of money because the water just ran and ran and ran or that you have to call people out and fix it.” Okay. There’s cost in that. What about, “what could you be doing with your spare time on weekends while we’re handling your lawn needs? How much would you save in equipment in maintenance, in oil and gas?” Right?

When you start to add all these factors up of the savings of time and hassle and energy and actual raw dollars, now that return on investment starts to have a price associated with it, so when your monthly price is, let’s say $50 or even $100 more than your lawn service competition, the customer isn’t shocked. The customer thinks, “if I go with you, I get fewer hassles, I get more free time. I have a great looking lawn. I’m the envy of the neighborhood and I don’t have to pay for all these other charges. Oh yeah, this is worth it thing.” Dang, you have just done value selling! Those are the six points ending in the in that number six, their return on investment.

So let’s apply this to your dive business. How does this work and what does it look like using these six steps of value selling? Let’s take a look at that. First thing you want to do is identify your customers problems. “Are you frustrated with not knowing where to get certified because of all the different options out there? Is your equipment old and in need of repair? Has it been a while since you’ve been diving and think your skills may be rusty? Do you want to travel? Do you want to see underwater images and wish you could be there?” You see these are the pain points that people are going through and if you can identify those problems you have now hooked them into your story. How are you engaging with them? You’ve just peaked their interest. “Yes, I have always wanted to be certified. Yes, my equipment is old and in need of repair. Yes. It’s been awhile since I’ve been diving and I might need a refresher.” You’ve just stimulated discussion.

Next, illustrate the better outcomes with your help. So it is all about that. “We will turn you into a confident, well-trained diver, not just a certified diver, but a confident, well trained diver. You’ll enjoy satisfaction of diving worldwide. You’ll get to increase your bottom time because of better air consumption. You have skills that your buddies are envious of. You get to enjoy pain free diving with your ears because you know how to equalize. Lose your anxieties and be excited to go on every trip with our refresher course that will help you with that.” You see, these are the promises that need to be made so that the customer decides to come with you. They are better outcomes with your help.

Number three, we’re going to position ourselves against the competition through that clear, compelling and memorable differentiation. Now here’s something to know. You are going to need to know your competition to succeed in this area and I mean really know your competition. Yes. If you have dive centers, dive shops, dive businesses in your neighborhood, in your area, in your, your market, you really need to know what they’re offering. Don’t be shy to understand fully every detail of what they’re doing and how they’re doing it from anything: pool time, classroom time, sales, equipment offerings, repair. You need to know them well so that you can differentiate. So you want to say things like, “we are your full service diving professionals.” When you throw that term out there, they start to go, “well, if they’re full service, are others not full service?” You start to get some questions there. You see, “we offer custom schedules that accommodate your busy lifestyle. We are all inclusive. We have no hidden costs. So you’ll have no pressure decisions to make.” It’s simple to do business with us, right?

“We focus on areas that abbreviated training leaves divers lacking.” Oops, did I just say that? Aha. Because I get so many questions of people with different agencies that say, “how do I compete with the dive shop down the street that’s doing an abbreviated course for 99 bucks?” Well, this is where you compete on that. Remember we’ve got to take that whole thing of the c-card being the commodity and we need to change that into the value offering of what they get. So here’s where we’re going to say that. “Yeah, that abbreviated training can leave divers lacking. We will get you to be a comfortable and skilled diver. You will be comfortable and confident underwater. We will get to know you and your strengths and weaknesses and we will develop you so that you have total comfort and mastery of all skills as a diver.” Now, there will be people that that resonates with. There will be people that say, yeah, I get that. Especially if it’s refresher training. And they went, “yeah, I really never learned that very well.” This is important. You need to have clear, compelling and memorable differentiation from your competition.

Number four is your proof of value. Remember, proof of value is also known as social proof. They want real examples of how your promises work out. So you’re saying things like, “hey, these are some of the best divers that have taken our classes. They’ve gone on to be professionals. In fact, we have tons of dive professionals that come to us to get their professional training. We have a customer who’s an accountant and he relieves his stress by diving with us. We have a homeschooling parent that took our class with our kids to teach them an underwater science curriculum. We had a customer that took our refresher course and told us that he learned more in our refresher course than in his beginning class at another dive center.” Don’t mention the dive center by the way.

“Many dive pros come to us for their training. We certified the mayor,” Yada Yada, Yada. You get what I’m saying? So getting these type of testimonials also from other customers is great and if you can do it on sites like Yelp, give your customers some type of reward. If they go to Yelp and say, “Hey, this is what I experienced,” not for a great review, just a review in general, just say, hey, “we want everyone to go to Yelp. We are transparent and open and accountable. We want you to tell everyone about your experience because we’re that confident with our own service offerings.”

Number five is the cost of inaction. All right. What happens if they don’t use your dive center or don’t take your classes? Well, you can point out here “someone else may not give you the same quality time honing your skills under water. This can lead you to feeling anxious or uncomfortable when diving. Plus you may need to watch out for additional fees. Abbreviated training won’t adequately prepare you for diving and is leading reason why divers drop out.

You don’t want to be faced with those issues after such an important investment.” Yes. Use that term. Remind customers that investing in diving is truly an investment in themselves and their recreation, which can also relate to their wellbeing and their happiness. So if people have already gone out on board and gotten their equipment, remind them of that investment, they’ve taken their open water diver course, remind them of that investment or they want to go travel the world, remind them of the investment in taking proper training and getting the proper equipment. You see it’s all about that investment piece and point them to why it is important in making that purchase decision, which again is number six, the return on investment.

So see how this seamlessly ties in together with the cost of inaction and our return on investment with our course? “We have convenient scheduling, we have no hidden fees, we have plenty of time spent training you to be safe, confident, happy, make the right investment in you, make the right investment in your safety, make the right investment in your comfort and enjoy a lifetime of scuba diving adventures.” You see, this is that closing and this is where the person does not care about price. In this moment, you have just done six steps to show them why you have a greater value in your offering than other businesses. And here it is. It’s time for the price, okay, and now the sticker shock isn’t there because they see that you are a far greater value than the other businesses. That is how we sell on value instead of price.

And I’m telling you folks, this is the truth. When you talk to dive professionals that say, I am the highest priced dive center in town and we are doing just fine. It’s because they’ve got this right. They have got value selling down and they’re able to articulate it and they’re able to sell their customers on that value and their customers love them and are loyal and are dedicated. Do you see a customer that doesn’t do value? “The fool knows the price of everything, but the value of nothing.” When people don’t engage in your discussion, in what you can add to their lives, in the value of them doing business with you, they will only compare you on price. Make this a priority, make value selling a priority and get together with your team, your management, your staff, every employee, and go over this in detail. Know your competition, study your competition and find the areas that you can out value them. Not undercut them. Out value them.

Defendable Dive Briefings

Okay, so now let’s turn our attention to risk management. You know, my family goes to North Carolina every year and we love to go whitewater rafting. Well, when we go whitewater rafting, we go out with a company called Nantahala Outdoor Center, and it doesn’t matter what river we’re on, what level we’re on. The service and risk management principles and protocols that they do are just outstanding. Now being in the business that we’re in, you know, whenever I go to an outdoor recreation or a high risk type of activity, I’m paying attention to the risk management side of things. I mean, I’m really paying attention to it and so these guys have been doing it right for a long, long time and that’s why we continue to return to them because they’re so good and they do such a great job. Well, one of the things that I honed in on that really stuck out to me was in their briefings, they do something that is very unique.

Here’s what they do when it’s time for their briefing, they show a video and then after the video, the guide, the main trip guide, gets up and gives a detailed safety briefing. But here’s what they do. They hand a piece of paper to someone in the audience. That piece of paper has a checklist on it. The checklist contains the big major areas that they are going to cover in that briefing. And what they do is they ask the person to check off the list as they say the different things that are on it. And so what happens is they do their briefing, the person is checking off the items that are discussed, and then at the end they collect that, the individual signs it and they sign it and then they attach it to their trip roster for that day. And that gets hard filed. And that’s it.

Well, there’s a kind of a science to this and I thought it’s brilliant on the legal defendability side. Here’s what I mean. In my many years as a forensic dive accident investigator, I remember going to do interviews with individuals and even depositions with individuals where they would be questioned on what did they say during their briefing. And now if you can think about this, maybe you have this or maybe you’ve seen it on different boats or whatnot. Some of the dive briefings can be said in one’s sleep, right? It’s just the same thing. You’ve said it so many times, it’s just a hundred percent memorized and you think that there’s no way that you could miss something because it’s what you do. It’s what you say. It’s what you always say. Here’s the problem under an investigation and an interview or a deposition, you’d be amazed how many dive professionals start to blank out on that memorized narrative that they say for their briefing.

And when one can’t articulate that, that becomes an issue whether or not it was really said and whether or not other people heard it and so forth. So when you look at this from a defendability point of view, the way that Nantahala Outdoor Center is doing this with having this very accountable level of transparency for making sure that that guide, no matter how many years that guide has been working there, no matter how well they’ve memorized that speech, they’re still ensuring that those top items were covered and that that audience heard that those top items were covered. And then that was accounted for by the sheet of paper with the checkoff boxes and the person name. And they sign it and it gets attached to the rosters. I think this is a wonderful, wonderful defendability tool.

It’s something for you to think about whether you decide to go into this type of an action for your own briefings on your, on your dives or on dive boats, whether or not you do this, it’s at least worth a thought to sit there and think about are you really saying what you need to say? And would everybody agree if everyone needed to be interviewed, would they all agree to all the things that you said? And then if you’re under stress, would you be able to say the briefing that you always say if it’s not one that doesn’t change much in that kind of thing, or if it changes, do people know the change of that day? So this is where having that kind of accountability checklist to go along with briefings can be a really, really cool risk management tool. And I give a ton of credit to Nantahala Outdoor Center doing this and for putting that in place.

Well, that does it for today’s episode my friends. Thanks for listening, and all of the items discussed in this episode will be available on the show notes page over at scubaguru.com including links to the fundraisers I mentioned, as well as my article, The Value of Value Selling at Dive Center Business. Remember to subscribe to this podcast on iTunes. That way you’ll be notified of new episodes as soon as they go live. You can also listen to this podcast on Google Play and Stitcher, and please leave a rating. Thanks again. We’ll see you in the next episode. Safe diving and take good care of my friends.

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003 Value Selling Part 1, The Reporter Icebreaker

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Welcome to The Dive Locker podcast, the podcast for dive professionals where we bring you the latest in diving industry resources that make you excellent at teaching techniques, risk management and dive business.

I’m your host Tec Clark and thank you everybody for being here on another episode of The Dive Locker. Hey, you might remember in episode two I mentioned that, we’ve got hurricane Dorian bearing down on The Bahamas. Well at the time of this episode, it is still there. It is still bearing down on them. And I also mentioned in the last episode that we are going to hear about the relief efforts that are going to be needed for our friends in The Bahamas and, as this is starting to unfold and the news of the devastation that’s coming out is, is just catastrophic. So you’re going to hear about different relief efforts and we’ll see and keep our ears posted for what ones are coming out that are industry specific.

But there is one I mentioned last time and that is going to be the GoFundMe campaign that was launched for Cristina’s Zenato. Now, many of you know Cristina. She was on the League of Extraordinary Divers, but she has been really all over the place. She’s had so many documentaries, about her and her just beautiful relationship with the sharks that she has embraced over her many years at UNEXSO. She’s such a good caring soul. And now, Cathryn Castle Garcia and Gui Garcia have created this GoFundMe account to support and help them out. And so I think this is just fantastic. I’m looking at it right now. It is Cristina Zenato Grand Bahama 9119. And Cristina by the way, is spelled without an “h”. It’s C R I S T I N A Folks, there’s already been over $7,000 raised at the time of this recording.

So that is awesome that you all stepped up and, and came to the challenge for this. This is so cool. Great to see that. And so our thoughts and prayers are with Cristina and everyone else down there.  I can’t wait to hear from Stuart Cove and see how he fared down there as well, and all of the operators. So look for more news on that coming up here in the future.

Well today we’ve got a really cool episode. We are going to get into a little bit of the business side of diving and that is going to be an area that I’m quite passionate about. We’re going to talk about value selling, value selling, what it is and how we can sell on value rather than price. This is going to be a two part series because of the complexity and the content that we deal with. So we’ve got that and we’re also going to do an icebreaker that I think you will really enjoy, that you can put into your classroom environments. And it’s really a great one for communications as well as being an icebreaker. So there you go. Let’s get into it. Let’s have a great episode of The Dive Locker. Ready? Dive, dive, dive!

Value Selling Part 1

For our first dive business segment, we’re going to be talking about value selling. Now this is an area near and dear to my heart. I have spoken on this at the DEMA Show. I’ve spoken on this at ICUE, which is the International Conference on Underwater Education with NAUI. And I’ve done an article on this at Dive Center Business magazine. So this is something I’m very passionate about and what we’re going do is we’re going break this into two parts. Value selling part one will be in this episode of The Dive Locker and value selling part two will be in episode four of The Dive Locker, the next episode. So be on the lookout for that. We’re going to break it down into the two areas of competing with “price” and then competing with “value”. So this episode we’re going to talk about the competing with price part of selling.

Okay. Don’t you love a good deal? I do. I mean who doesn’t? Right? Has this ever happened to you? You go to the grocery store and you’re going to get some food or something like that, and all of a sudden you pass by coffee and you see that there is a buy one get one free offer going on with the coffee. Now, this might not be a brand that you normally use and you might not even need coffee, but you’re saying to yourself, “wow, this is a really good deal, and I know I will need coffee in the future if I get one free, what can I do with that extra seven bucks? Hey, maybe I can get that cool ice cream. I’ve been wanting to try.” Well, does that sound familiar? And then you wind up getting that and you wind up kind of having that tension of the fear of missing out on.

If you don’t get that, you know, what have you lost? You know, this is such great value, right? And so you wind up walking away getting coffee, which wasn’t on your list, and you get ice cream, which wasn’t on your list, right? So all of a sudden we have seen consumerism played out in a wonderful and magical way. And that is done by the company. So the coffee company wants to launch their product, they want to get out the new brand or the new flavor or whatever it is of the coffee. So they throw what’s called a loss leader in there. They throw a free one. So now they’re not making the same margins on those per unit sales. But what they are getting is a greater share of market. So now more people get to try the product and as they try it, then they tell their friends, they like it, and they get more later on.

And so the buy one get one uses the one product as the loss leader. And in return they gain customers. So loss leader strategies work well with goods because it’s easy to calculate those per unit costs and you can kind of accommodate for this and so forth. But the deal is this, can you do loss leaders strategies to services, especially our services in the diving industry – scuba certification courses. This is an issue, and our industry really needs to take attention to this because what we’re doing is in using some strategies that are out there like this, we are taking professional training and we’re reducing it down to bargain basement discount prices that doesn’t work. And here’s the reason why. If we want to attract customers and we use strategies of discounting and we based those strategies on price, what is the cost? Now the cost in this case is that you actually deplete the quality experience for the student getting training and you produce a poor student!

Now what do I mean by this and how can discounting affect training that much? So here’s how this works. We often hear about competing with the dive center down the street and so if they offer a $199 open water diver course, well the other person’s going to offer a $99 course. Or they’re offering a $99 course, so we’re going to offer a two for one GroupOn. Now, the problem with this is that the dive centers in this case are competing on price rather than on value. Price comparison is not sustainable. There will always be someone, some company somewhere who will underprice you, especially from individuals who want to break into the business and they are willing to undercut the competition in order to gain customers. Sound familiar like the coffee example, right? But the deal is that if you react to those competitors by discounting your products and services, you’re likely to run yourself out of the business and be out of business in two to four years.

That’s just the painful truth about trying to compete on price. Now, why do we see this happening so much in our industry? You know, many people point to that, well, dive center owners and managers don’t have business backgrounds, which is true in a lot of cases, but that’s not necessarily what’s going on. What’s going on is it’s the opposite side. We are all consumers and we deal with consumerism and so we have to understand that there are consumer driven strategies that erode business models. Now they might work for big box retailers, but do they work for dive centers? Not really. Here’s some things to take into consideration on consumerism. So first of all, we love things cheap and quick, right? So what we do now is we go shopping on Amazon and Alibaba and other Internet retailers and we’re looking for the cheapest and quickest way to get things right?

And so that’s part of us, but yet we want to have businesses that are sustainable and we don’t want these customers to go to the Internet and, and you know, get their goods elsewhere. We want them to come into our dive centers. Well, wait a minute, it’s the same thing. You are a consumer too. And we have to understand that this is part of consumerism to get things cheap and quick. Then we’re also seeing that c-cards, the certification card is being turned into a commodity. So a commodity is any economic good that can be bought and sold. But you’re probably thinking, isn’t scuba certification a service? Well, you might be thinking that, but think about this. The consumer looks at the c-card as the means to the end to go diving. So they know if they want to be a diver, they need the c-card.

You see? So it’s about being a diver. It’s about getting to dive, which means I need to hold this seat guard to do it. That turns the c-card into a commodity, a product, just like anything else. So what the consumer’s going to do is look at that c-card as, “how can I get it as cheap and quick as possible?” This is natural. It’s not the consumers’ fault to think this way. We’re just inclined to do so. So when we have prospective students that are looking for cheap and quick, don’t dismiss them as being flighty or aloof or noncommittal. They’re just being consumers. And then we’re also seeing loss lead discounting. The loss leader, like I talked about in the coffee example, right? But here’s the deal. What we’re seeing with loss leading is that dive centers are using training to be the loss leader to get people in so that then greater purchases can be made down the line for continuing education, for equipment sales, and for dive travel.

All of these things to get the consumer in the door is the loss leader of offering a discounted course. So now if that loss lead discounting comes in and that course is sold for $99 or a two for one type of a GroupOn thing, what’s being lost? Well, this is where the slippery slope happens. It’s not as simple as a product is sold and now I have a per unit sale is down a little bit like in the coffee example. Now to be able to keep afloat for a service that has such fixed costs and variable costs like a scuba certification course does, that becomes an issue. What we’re seeing is the training is suffering from these consumer driven strategies. They erode the dive center business model, and they erode the quality of training that can be offered. Here’s how that is happening.

Okay, so let’s say that you’re competing by price to the dive center down the street and you start to do your pricing strategies. You start to do the discounting and get that bargain basement price just to get people in the door. Now what’s going to happen is that in a loss leader, which has the sacrifice kinda to it, if you just sacrificed everything at the high quality level, then the expenses of that loss lead would crush your business. So what happens is to balance out the loss leader, dive centers are pulling back on the services offered just so they can kind of survive that initial loss leader experience, that initial discounted training experience. Here’s how that happens.

First of all, we start to look at those, like I said before, fixed costs and variable costs, right? And those things are going to include, first, let’s look at pool time. So pool time renting pools. Now this can be done by the hour or by the student, but it’s costly. And so what we’re seeing is that some people are shaving the pool time by a day or two or hours just to save money. So now the student experience underwater isn’t there anymore. So what happens is they are now discounting that pool experience. They’re pulling back on it. So by pulling back on the amount of hours spent in the pool, there’s the savings of the pool rental, but there’s also the savings on the instructor’s hourly rate as well. If an instructor is paid by the hour, and then think about this, if the dive center pays their instructor per student, well then what’s the motivation for the instructor to offer longer pool time? You see, so these two things really hurt the student experience when you start to pull back the pool time. Now what about classroom time? Well, usually there’s not rentals that are going along with the classroom.

Those are usually done in the dive center, so you don’t have to pay for the rental, but what do you have to pay for? It’s the instructor. So the more time that an instructor is spending in front of the students, the more expense there is to pay that instructor.

So what we’re seeing is many dive centers moving more towards the e-learning. Now don’t get me wrong, e-learning is awesome. It’s a great tool for diver training. It really is. But here’s what we’re seeing. Some dive centers are keeping their instructors completely out of the classroom. They’re just having them do e-learning. And then they’re saying, “all right, well let’s meet and do our paperwork and review our knowledge reviews on the pool deck.” So they don’t even come to the store. They’re just going to the pool deck. Now think about this, how many distractions are there on a pool deck?  So that’s not a good time to bond. It’s not a good time to get to know people and it’s not a good time to start going over paperwork and the first knowledge reviews and such. It just isn’t. So by missing out on that classroom time to save money and go more on that e-learning, it actually winds up hurting that instructor student relationship. That’s an important piece of developing divers.

And then we also look at the expertise area that changes. Now what do I mean by that? Well, think about this. Who is teaching the majority of courses and what are the majority of courses that are being taught? So in most dive centers, open water diver is kind of the prime catchall. It gets most people in the door. Well who are the people that are going to be teaching that? Is this going to be the tenured veteran instructor that’s moved into technical diving and things like that? No, it’s usually going to be the brand new instructors cutting their teeth. These are also the people that have the lowest pay rates. They’re being paid the least. Why? Because they’re the least experienced. So there’s a lot of dive centers that say, “yeah, we’re going to go ahead and use our least paid instructors to teach our loss leaders scuba class, open water diver.” So you don’t want to really go down that road too much because saving the buck and you know, even not giving divemasters to assist that new instructor just to save a buck. That can deteriorate that training experience too.

And then finally, location. What we’re seeing a lot is instead of places going out and renting a really nice pool at an aquatics complex that has a really nice dive, well you know, something 12 feet, 16 feet, 18 feet deep, that type of thing. We’re seeing dive centers say, “Hey, we got to save money on this loss leader. We’re going to go to other locations so we don’t have to pay for a pool at all.” And we’re seeing that dive centers will go to hotels or apartment complexes in an effort to cut costs. Now hear me out. If you’re in a resort and you are at a dive resort and the only pool is the pool at the resort, I get that. Don’t worry about that. That’s not what we’re talking about. I’m talking about the person that could literally do deep water training, but they are purposefully saying, “no, we’re going to go into a free shallow pool to save money on the course to get people into the course because we’re going to loss lead price it, discount price it.” Wait a minute. So that is really a tricky situation because now if you’re in that six foot deep apartment complex pool, where is the training for equalization really happening? Where is the training for neutral buoyancy really happening? Where are we feeling the wetsuit compress because of depth? You know, it’s different things like that that we kind of miss out on when we go down that road.

And another area that we’re seeing here in South Florida, we have dozens of charter dive boats all around us, and boat diving is typical for these parts. But we will have dive centers that save on the training and not take their students out on a dive boat and they’ll do all of their training off the beach. Now the beach is free and just pay for some parking, right? But the deal is, is that now you’re only going to probably a max depth of about 20 feet. So now you’re open water diver never gets to experience much deeper than 20 feet and they never get to go on a dive boat!

Now again, I’m talking about South Florida. There’s many of you that are landlocked and that’s okay. You and the lake are your only options. But I’m talking about purposefully saying, “you know you live here in South Florida but we’re not going to actually take you out on a dive boat because of keeping the course costs down.” So are we then, by doing that deep discounting in scuba training, are we actually hurting the diver and their experience to be a good well-trained diver? I think so. And I’m not the only one folks, maybe you agree. There’s many of you listening to this that are in the same mindset and opinion. I hear it from charter boat dive captains everywhere, crew everywhere, other dive professionals that go out and look and observe. This is a buzz. We are all sitting here saying the same things. There are students that do not know how to set up their gear and I mean new newly certified divers that do not know how to equalize that do not have good buoyancy.

And so where is this coming from? When me and my colleagues take a look at where this is coming from. There is one common denominator that we’re always seeing. It is the suppressed training courses, the courses that are reduced down to as cheap and quick as they can possibly be. And that is where we are seeing that competing on price is actually hurting our industry. It’s hurting our students. And if our student comes out, ill prepared, ill equipped, they’re not comfortable, they’re not confident, they’re banging into the reef and then they’re being yelled at for banging into the reef. They can’t get underwater and they’re holding up their buddies because they’re not good at equalization. How long you think they’re going to persist in this activity? They’re not. They quit. And in a place like here in South Florida, when you get on Craig’s List or OfferUp or anything that’s offering equipment, you’d be amazed to see the amount of titles that say “gear used one time”,  “gear use two times” and now it’s for sale.

Wait a minute, there’s something broken here folks! And I point to this area of discounted training of discounted services, and I think that it’s really a serious problem that we need to look at in the industry. So now I have just really illustrated why competing with price has some challenges. Next episode is going to be the answer to this. Why do we not want to compete on price but on value? What will it be that we can offer a value that makes a student come to your dive center and choose you over the competition, but you might even be higher priced. Wait a minute, how can that be? I’m going to explain that to you next week, so we’re going to get into that. Be on the lookout for that next episode.

“The Reporter” Icebreaker

Here’s a cool strategy for an icebreaker. If you don’t know what it is, is basically that type of activity that you do at the beginning of a group meeting or gathering or class or wherever it is that you want to break the ice, get people to know each other and learn who the other people are in the meeting or the classroom or whatever. So icebreakers are a really good thing to do for our scuba classes at all levels. They’re great to do for meetings, anything that you want to introduce people to each other and get that out of the way in a fun and dynamic way. It really adds to the fun of our scuba courses at adds to a stimulating environment and a way to get to know buddies quicker. Now this icebreaker is called The Reporter and this one is ideal for divemaster and instructor training.

This was introduced to me at Pro Dive by Kelly Levendorf, my good buddy and I love this one. So I’m giving him props for this. And it was fantastic, we did it all the time at Pro Dive. And so here’s what this is about. The Reporter is where you’re going to have your class sitting around. And what they have to do is buddy up into teams of two and with their teams of two, they are going to take turns interviewing the other person, just asking them questions about themselves, their history, what their diving was like whatever it is that you want to give them to kind of “report” on and give each person three to five minutes to learn about the other one, where they’re from, what they like, what they don’t like, what their diving background is.

All these different things they’re to report to the other person. Now, once both people have interviewed the other person, now it’s time to go around the room and instead of introducing yourself and telling people about yourself, the other buddy is the one introducing you. So have the “reporter” stand up and say, “hey everybody, I’d like you to meet So-and-so. This person is from Chicago originally and became a diver at the age of 15 back home and blah, blah blah,” and on and on and on. Right? And so you then see that there is more attention given to the person that is doing the reporting. Everyone’s listening and the person speaking is really into talking about the other candidate, right? So they’re not shy and embarrassed and they don’t want to talk about themselves and they’re looking down. They’re actually very engaged in telling what the other person told them.

Now, here’s another great piece about this, is that not only do you command the room, you have more attention and people will lean in and listen more, but here’s what’s great for you, the trainer. You get to see and measure the communications skills of every person in the room before the class has even started. You are now assessing who you need to work with more for their communication skills, what’s their body language, what’s their crutch words? All of these things all of a sudden come out and it’s early on and you get to see how good they are or how rusty they are. So this is, I think, one of the coolest icebreakers. That’s why I wanted to share it with you. Again, props to my buddy, Kelly Levendorf who’s now at Rainbow Reef and he just gets all the credit for this one and, all the days that we were doing it at Pro Dive as well. I’m sure he’s doing it down there too now. So, thanks Kelly and definitely look at using this in your next leadership courses. You’ll love it.

Hey, thanks for listening my friends. Remember to subscribe to this podcast on iTunes. That way you’ll be notified of new episodes as soon as they go live and please leave a rating. Also, you can leave me comments and feedback. Go to ScubaGuru.com find The Dive Locker podcast and you’ll see the microphones on that page. Just click the icon on the microphone and send us a message. Also, remember that every episode is going to have its own dedicated show notes page. So for this episode number three, you’ll have a dedicated page that will have links to everything we discussed in this episode, including the link to the article, The Value of Value Selling, which I wrote for Dive Center Business. I’ll provide the link for the Dive Center Business online so that you can read that article.

So there you go. Thanks again everybody. We will see you in the next episode. Safe diving and take good care, my friends.

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002 In-Service Training, The Jacket Drill

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The Dive Locker Podcast with Tec Clark

Welcome to The Dive Locker podcast, the podcast for dive professionals where we bring you the latest in diving industry resources that make you excellent at teaching techniques, risk management and dive business, I’m your host Tec Clark and thank you so much for being a part of episode number two.

It’s great to have you here folks. At the time of this recording, it is Labor Day weekend of 2019 and we have hurricane Dorian baring down on The Bahamas right now as we speak. This is a massive category five hurricane and we don’t know the damage yet of what this, this storm is causing, but we know it’s bad and so we just lift up all of our thoughts and prayers to everybody in The Bahamas and especially our diving industry colleagues. Boy, the diving industry could be absolutely hit hard from a storm of this category, the reefs, the dive centers, the dive boats, the resorts, the infrastructure to get in and out. So our dive center operations down there, I have a feeling are going to need our support. A couple of our diving industry notables down there that you may know, Stuart Cove, who was actually on the League of Extraordinary Divers podcast, episode six, and also Cristina Zenato, from the League of Extraordinary Divers podcast, episode 19.

They’re both being impacted by this. And so with that, we really, really need to understand what they’re going through and what needs they might have when the storm leaves. Our good friends, Cathryn Castle Garcia and Captain Gui Garcia with C2G2 Productions have already launched a GoFundMe campaign for Cristina Zenato. Now they did a video segment with her, they’re very close and so they felt the need to reach out right now, even while this hurricane is bearing down and come up with a GoFundMe account for Cristina Zenato Grand Bahama and I will put the link to that GoFundMe in the Show notes page for this episode. I have a feeling that there is going to need some disaster relief for our dive businesses down there. So we’ll keep you updated on how this goes. Our next episodes we’ll hear what the outcomes of the storms are from The Bahamas. So again, everybody please keep The Bahamas in your thoughts and prayers.

In-Service Training

Okay everyone. So today in episode two of the dive locker, we’re going to go over a risk management strategy that is absolutely overlooked in the diving industry and one that can completely change the dynamics of your emergency action plans. It’s called in-service training. The second thing we’re gonna go over today is the jacket drill. If you want good clear communication teaching for your divemaster and instructor candidates, people that are going through training to become a dive professional, they need to have a great clear communications, right? The jacket drill is part of that. And I’ll share that with you too today. And also today we’re going to hit some of the industry’s latest news for you. So here we go. Let’s dive in.

Let’s take a look at in-service training; what is it and how can it be effective for you as a dive professional? Well, in-service training is basically a term that you see and hear used a lot within health and safety professions such as lifeguarding, law enforcement, EMS (emergency medical services). And what it is is it’s to keep those perishable skills, those hands on health and safety skills fresh. Now the other unique thing about it is that it’s not done in classrooms. So we don’t just sit and do our normal CPR on a mannequin and a classroom in a sterile environment like we’ve learned before. In-service training is meant to be in service during your normal operations. And so for that, an in-service training will take place in the field. That means in our situation, in the diving industry, that we would take our emergency training and we would bring it into the environment.

So instead of pushing on a CPR mannequin in a classroom with a little pad under your knees and things like that, in air condition, nope, we’re going to go on the boat. We’re going to be in rocking and rolling seas. You’re going to have your wetsuit on. You’re going to be pouring with a wetness from the water coming out of your wetsuit and sweat or whatever the case is. And trying to do your CPR on a moving boat with chaos and everything that goes with that, that is more accurate and realistic. And so what we see within service training is that it’s done mostly for the workers, mostly for people to get and keep their skills going at the workplace. Now you can also have people coming in outside of the workplace to help with this in-service training in areas like being bystanders or being multiple victims or being a spouse or a loved one of a victim or patient.

And that person is a little chaotic, you know? So you can make all kinds of scenarios. But the biggest thing about in service training is that it is all about realism. So we want in-service training to be as realistic as absolutely possible. So how do we make this as realistic as possible? We’ll think about this in an actual emergency. What would you have at your disposal to use? Where would the things be, et cetera? So we want everything to be as natural and normal as possible for our preparation. And then we want the scenarios to dictate the rest. So here’s a few things that can make realism happen in your in-service trainings. First of all, cell phones. You can use a cell phone to be pre-programmed into a number that is used for another person that is on the other end of that cell phone.

That could be a 911 operator or an EMS operator. So this operator then plays the role using a script to then ask the appropriate questions. This is a great way to do this because what happens is, is that an individual winds up realizing that they have to walk around with a phone attached to their head while they are transporting an O2 unit or setting up a O2 unit or an AED or whatnot. And all of a sudden it becomes very realistic. How many times have you seen a Rescue class or a simulated emergency, somebody that puts their hand up to their head, makes that little a symbol with the fingers, like they’re on a phone and then they say, “oh yeah, I just called EMS”. No, it doesn’t work that way. We want an individual to see what it’s like to try to carry things or do things with their hands or write stuff down or whatever it is with a cell phone attached to their head. That’s where it gets real.

Now what we also can do is use dummy cell phones. My favorite is once a cell phone got put into the laundry and it got totally damaged. So I used that as a prop cell phone. And in that case, that’s great for if you’re wet and you’re out on the boat or whatnot, you’re not worried about an actual cell phone getting ruined because of all the wet coming off of your body or, or a wetsuit or whatnot. So in that case, we put the 911 operator next to the person making the call, and that 911 operator just has a script on a clipboard and goes through it and follows the person around that has the phone, to their ear. So that’s one way to make it be realistic. Another thing is bystanders.

So if you can have individuals that are part of the scenario, part of the scene, they could be other divers, they could be people on the dive boat, they could be people on the shore, they could be people on the side of the pool or other swimmers at the pool. But what happens is, is that these bystanders become part of the process. So if the lifeguards start pulling people out of the pool, now they can come in and add to the drama of the scenario. This can happen on the boat, this can happen on the lake, wherever as well, right? You can have other divers come up and those other divers are part of a class or they are the buddy of a diver and they can be varying in their level of drama. Is it a spouse, a loved one? Is it a fraternity or sorority brother or sister, best friend, right?

The list goes on and on and you can make all kinds of things up. And we even have scenarios where we’ll have individuals come along and say, “hi, I’m a nurse. Can I help?” And see if your staff actually uses those people. And so bystanders are a good little curve ball to throw in. And then victims. So you need to have people, we don’t want to do everything with mannequins. So using victims and having them be as dead weight limp as possible because that is very different than people that are rigid. So adding that true limp, dead weight to it really helps make it more realistic. Now move them to the point of an exit point or whatever. But yeah, don’t actually start doing the process of CPR on an actual person. Even simulating that doesn’t do well. Swap out that person for a mannequin at that point so that you can do all of the true compressions and make it work at that point.

One of the things that I absolutely love is old wetsuits. So we bring in old wetsuits into our in-service training to make it more realistic. What we do with the wetsuits is we put them on the CPR mannequin. That way when it is time to put the AED pads on, they’ve got to cut away the wetsuit. So we teach the process of how to cut away a wetsuit and we use it with old damaged wetsuits that that have come in and we just hang on to them for this specific purpose. And that way you understand the importance of having sheers along with the AED. 

And training units. You want to have units that can be used for this. Now I am a big, big proponent of having actual oxygen flowing. I am not one that puts air in the oxygen units for these kinds of uh, scenarios and training. No. People need to be comfortable with the actual gas and have a true respect for the actual gas that’s being used. They will handle it differently if it is not actual oxygen, so we keep training units on hand that are real, they’re live, they’re totally functional, but if they get wet sandy and slightly banged up, then it’s not such an issue.

And then also we have the timing of this. Now here is what I love. Once you start getting into that role of CPR and so forth, it goes on kind of a cruise control right? Until EMS arrives in a real scenario. Well think about this. What you can do is you can look at what your county or city has for an average EMS response time. Now here in Broward County, it’s between 8 and 12 minutes. Now what we do is as soon as the call for help, the phone call has been completed to 911 in our scenarios, then we will do an 8 to 10 minute or 12 minute buffer to wait till we actually cancel the training we are, or end scenario. We want them to feel what it would be like to truly wait. Now let’s say you’re on the dive boat and you’ve got to wait for the coast guard or whatever, those kinds of services, it could be much longer. So to cycle through your staff and have them swap out roles and continuously circulate to wait until quote unquote EMS arrives. That’s really awesome. You can also add your public safety, your EMS, you can add realistic arrivals of those people too so that they know where to go and how to access people and so forth. So this is key is having this realism in place for in-service trainings.

Now here’s what’s going to happen. You need to structure this in a few ways. First you have to have yourselves evaluators, one or two or more that are the top dog professionals in this area of health and safety training at your dive center. And they are the ones that are evaluating, and they are the ones kind of calling the shots. They tell the bystandards when and what to do early on. They’re the ones calling out that the victim has no pulse or is not breathing, et Cetera. 

Then you’ve got the opportunity to write down all of the things that you’re observing. What could have been done better, what are the wrong things, what are the good things and put all that together because that goes into a debriefing. The debriefing is a critical element of all in-service training. It brings together a person’s own self reflection of what they’ve learned during this time and what they think they did right, what they think they did wrong, and then the evaluators come in and also comment on what they did right and what they did wrong.

The debriefing is huge in this. Now, here’s the big, big piece evaluators. The debriefing cannot be about all the negative and “you did that so bad that this person is going to die”, et cetera. Although that might be a fact. You may be able to mention something to that effect, but in-service trainings are supposed to be an environment that if people get it wrong, okay, guess what? You’ve learned a lesson and you’re going to go have pizza and beer after your in-service training because it wasn’t real. The deal is is that if those same mistakes happened in the real world, in the real scenario, people aren’t going for beer and pizza afterwards. In fact, it’s a very, very dark side that takes place. So what we’re looking at here is an ability to let people make mistakes. If this is their time to learn, this is their time to learn. Don’t be too overly critical about mistakes. They are part of a learning process. So embrace it and endeavor to do better.

Now, here’s the secret sauce of doing better. You ready for this? You have to do your scenarios twice. I’ll say it again. You have to do your scenarios twice. So whatever scenario you did with whatever team you did, they have to do it a second time. The reason being is is that you need to convince that learning has taken place. It’s all about readiness. So remember when we have a true diving incident, the majority of the time that things go wrong is that people are taken off guard. They’re taken by surprise. They didn’t know where to exit the water. They didn’t know how to get the victim to a spot where EMS would pick them up, whatever. They weren’t prepared for the phone call, whatever the case is, this will flesh that all out.

And when you do it a second time, then there is no surprises that come from the second time. They gain their confidence, they watch the time. And by the way, I always time things like how long it takes somebody to get a victim out of the water and then onto oxygen or CPR or the first breaths put in them, whatever it is you’re measuring. Keep a running list on a clock, a time clock so that you can say, hey look, in scenario number one, you started CPR three minutes after removing the victim from the water. In scenario number two, you started CPR one minute and 20 seconds after removing the victim from the water. And that makes people feel good because they got efficiencies and effectiveness. So that is a huge thing. Folks, do it twice. And we round-robin our staff, so we have team A, team B, Team C, team D and we have them all rotating through their different roles as bystanders, as victims, and as the dive team that would be the workers in the scenario doing their emergency work.

And so when we rotate them all through, they all get the opportunity to do it. So yeah. Is this going to take time away from your other operations at your dive center? Is this going to cost money to have all your employees on the clock? Yes, but it is absolutely well, well worth it. Here’s the reason why. You all think you have emergency action plans, EAPs all set locked down and nailed. But guess what? Once you literally do these things, you realize the flaws and I’m guaranteeing you there will be many. The other thing is what about working with others? You see if you’re on that dive boat, have you done emergency training with the crew? Now I’m not talking that you took your rescue diver course out on a dive boat and you did some rescue diving and they kind of played along. I’m talking truly interacting with the crew on the boat, making it a dialogue with the captain and the captain saying, “yes, I have just called US Coast Guard” and that kind of stuff.

You can do it at your pools, you can do it at your lakes, quarries, any place that you’re diving. You know, one of my favorite stories on this is with a YMCA. We had an individual come in and propose to a YMCA that they could do scuba training at the y and the y said, “okay”. And so they did scuba training and what happened was I challenged them that have they ever worked with the lifeguards to do scenarios to do actual rescues in case they needed it for their classes. They said they hadn’t. So they embarked on this process and it was a completely eye opening experience because the emergency action plans that the lifeguards had in place were ridiculously off from the emergency action plan of the dive crew. The two stumbled all over everything. They couldn’t figure out the oxygen units, they couldn’t work together on the removal of the victims from the water. We do it one way, they do it with backboards on and on and on, and where is EMS to come? And Oh my goodness, it was an absolute amazing amount of learning that took place and they were so grateful that they did it. And guess what? One month later they needed to use the emergency services because a diver had an injury that required an EMS response. And because of that, it went smoothly. If it didn’t, it would have been absolutely disastrous for everyone involved.

So there you go, my friends. That’s in-service training in a nutshell. Now, if you want to see more about this and learn more about this, I have an article that I wrote for Alert Diver magazine. It is at Alert Diver Online. You can go to www.alertdiver.com/emergencysimulations. The name of the article is Emergency Simulations for Dive Professionals and it goes into detail more detail about what I’ve just said here.

So look that up. I will put this link in the Show notes page so you can easily access it and uh, and get to it. So there you go. That is in-service training in a nutshell. If you have any tips, suggestions, techniques that you want to share about in service training, you can go to our website and you can click on the link on the microphone and talk about any tips that you have for in-service training. I know tons of you are doing some cool things and by the way, can you bring this into your rescue classes? You bet you can. A lot of these things work for rescue diver courses as well.

The Jacket Drill

So we all know that communication is one of the key skills that one needs to have to be a dive professional. And we start training that at the divemaster level, right? And then Assistant Instructor and Instructor. We don’t stop training for communication. Communication is key for doing dive briefings, for commanding dive situations like rescues, for teaching in the classroom. All of these different areas that we use. Clear communication skills are super important. But what are we doing to actually enhance it? A lot of times we hand them the slates and say “here, go for it”. And we give them critiques and all. But there’s another way that you can bring some cool training into your classroom for clear communications. It’s called the Jacket Drill and it’s one of my favorite drills to do for extra good, clear communication training. And here’s what it is.

You get two people, one has a jacket, get the jacket, it can be any kind of jacket, a cool scuba patch jacket, which would be awesome. I think those need to come back, by the way. I know they’re so tacky and if you disagree with that, but I don’t know, I think they need to come back. They’re pretty cool. So, uh, anyhow, I digress. The jacket. So what you want to do is have two people and one jacket and you look at the jacket. Both people look at it and give it a little study and understand it. But then they go back to back. Now the trainer can take the jacket and the trainer can do what they want with it. They could button it up, they could unbutton it, they could button one button, they could pull one sleeve out, they could turn it inside out, they could do whatever they want to the jacket.

And then the two people, one is the instructor and one is the student. The trainer hands the jacket to the student. Now the student can’t speak, the student is silent the whole time and the instructor must blindly, well his or her back is to, the student must try to get the jacket on to the student and buttoned up and perfectly ready to go. So as it starts, the student is holding the jacket and the instructor starts giving clear communications hopefully of what to do, how to hold the jacket, where to hold the jacket, what to do with the jacket, which arm goes where on and on and on. The student is to just listen and do exactly what the instructor says to do. So what winds up happening is the instructor goes through all of these, these instructions to the point where the instructor feels confident that it is on right and it’s all buttoned up, ready to go.

At that point then the instructor can turn around and see how accurate or not those directions were. And so here’s what winds up happening. Usually it’s messed up because when the instructor says, put your right arm through the hole of the sleeve of the right arm, well guess what? There’s two holes. And so the student can put their arm through the bottom hole of the jacket where the hand normally comes out, right? Not inside where the armpit is. And then they’re wearing this jacket completely disheveled  and wrong. It is really cool. And what you want to do is give them the opportunity to do it again. So after everybody does it one time, go back and do it again so that that way they get to try being more clear and that usually Shows success might not be 100% but at a definitely be better than the first time. So that is the jacket drill, my friends. It is awesome for good clear communication training for your dive professionals. Use it next time and hey, if you want put it in a staff meeting, it’s another great thing to do during a staff meetings and that way your whole staff gets better at communications as well. Enjoy

Industry News

In diving industry news, we have the open registration for the DEMA Show. DEMA Show 2019 we’ll be in Orlando, Florida at the Orange County Convention Center November 13th through 16th. Now if you have not been to a DEMA Show, you have got to go. If you are a dive professional, this is the top trade Show for all of us. Now why is that? Because there’s going to be over 600 booths from anything of equipment manufacturers, travel destinations, apparel service providers, training agencies, you name it, they are there and you are going to be alongside about 10,000 of your industry colleagues, other dive professionals that are going there to learn more about the industry, the latest and greatest and the latest and greatest in new equipment. And then of course all of the agencies and specialty areas in our sport. It’s all there. It’s on showcase on that DEMA Show floor, but then there’s also this whole piece of educational professional development sessions.

We’re talking over 250 different seminars that go on, that talk about everything from industry trends and economic topics and business strategies, technical training, all kinds of training actually. And so you get all of this from the different agencies, manufacturers, exhibitors, and then DEMA themselves also puts on a lot of the education and resources. So it’s just fantastic. This is the world’s only international trade, only event for diving and action watersports and travel pro’s. So you just got to be a part of it. It is absolutely fantastic. I’ll be there, connect with me. Uh, you can connect with me on the DEMA app. There’s even a Show app that helps you navigate, helps you with your scheduling and you know what to see when it’s, it’s awesome. So we can connect on there and I’d love to meet many of you in person. So again, that is open and I’m putting it in here now for industry news because basically you’ve got a month until the Show price goes up for your registration.

So get it in, get it in early. And the other thing that you want to do to register early for this is that there are the room blocks that go along with the DEMA Show at the host hotels. Those usually go quickly because after an entire day, walking that Show floor, it’s awesome to just literally walk across the street and go to the host hotels. So look up that at the DEMAShow.com. So www.DEMAShow.com and look into registering for that.

Okay, so there you have it. Episode two is in the books. Thanks everybody for being a part of this. I hope that you’re getting value from this episode. You’ll see that other episodes will be more business heavy, like the next one we’ve got coming up. And then there’ll be some that are risk management heavy, or teaching heavy. So each episode will be different in its content, but in all of them, hopefully you will pull value and resources that can actually help you grow as a diving professional. So thanks again everybody. It’s great to have you here. We’ll see you in the next episode of the dive locker podcast. Take care and safe diving my friends.

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001 Introduction to The Dive Locker Podcast

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The Dive Locker Podcast with Tec Clark

Welcome to The Dive Locker podcast, the podcast for dive professionals where we bring you the latest in diving industry resources that make you excellent at teaching techniques, risk management and dive business.

I’m your host Tec Clark and welcome to the very first episode of The Dive Locker podcast. I am so excited to be here and I’m so excited that you are here. Welcome. You know it was put on my heart to create a podcast that was dedicated to dive professionals, divemasters, assistant instructors, instructors, instructor trainers, course directors, faculty. It can be also for dive center owners and managers and operators of dive boats and vessels. Look, if you’re in the diving industry as a leader or a professional, this podcast is for you. Now, what is it that makes this special and why is it relevant to you? It’s because we are going to go over news and information that is for you. Now I’m not talking press releases. There will be some press releases because there are some things that are really good to know in our industry, but not every press release is going to make it onto this podcast.

Why? Because frankly, there are some things that just really don’t need to be expressed to you as a dive professional. It’s need to know, and so if you don’t need to know it, it’s not going to be on here. What we want to do is focus on things that are going to make you better at what you do, and so in this pursuit of excellence, we are going to bring on all kinds of news information and cutting edge topics. We’re going to talk about what is the latest and greatest, but look back at history. What were things that we learned from the past. We’re going to get into even controversial topics at times, things that can be debated and argued and hey look, we’re going to go over that balancing act of the good and the bad of things as well. We’re going to talk to guests and have them come from different agencies, organizations, manufacturers, different businesses.

We’re going to have experts on. They’re giving you their best practices because that is how we are all going to flourish in many, many different areas of what we do in this profession, in this industry, is to hear the best practices and to learn that from the people that are doing it well. And Hey, we may even bring in people from outside the diving industry. If maybe you had expertise in business and it’s a recreational pursuit or whatnot. Hey, we can learn, right? So here’s another thing that’s going to be a unique about this podcast. It’s going to be agency neutral. Now we get really worked up in our industry about our training agencies, right? And we’ve got all this affiliation to one agency or another, or maybe you’ve got a couple under your belt or so forth. The deal is if you’re basing your view on another agency because of, let’s say the dive shop down the road, and the dive shop owner that you don’t particularly care for, or the way that they’re doing things, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s an agency issue, right?

So what we want to do here is we want to bring agencies to the table so that you’ll hear from training directors, from different agencies that will say, “Hey, here’s what we got going on new”. And you can make your opinions and judgments and get information right from the agency’s mouth. And so that is a really great thing to do. We need to avoid some of the rumor mill that goes on in our industry, right? And you know what I’m talking about? So to hear it in this podcast, from the best of the best in our industry and of the agencies and organizations and manufacturers driving the industry is going to be a really key component of this podcast. So what is the episode’s format’s going to be like, well, what we’re going to do is give this to you every week. So every week you’re going to get a 30 minute episode, approximately 30 minutes so that it is timely and it is bite size and to the point, so you’re on your two mile walk or run or whatever.

You can listen to a 30 minute segment on your two mile walk or at the gym or in your car commute to work or wherever it is that you listen to podcasts. So again, every week we’re going to be launching and it will be 30 minute episodes. We’re going to have different segments. And those segments are going to be all kinds of topics within our industry that relate to you as a dive pro. We’re going to talk about training, we’re going to talk about teaching, we’re going to talk about risk management, and of course the business of diving. We’ll bring in travel. We’re in everything that really does matter to you. And those segments are going to be such a vital part of this. And guess what? Some of those things we’re going to wind up hearing from you. And I’m going to tell you about that in a moment, what that means for you to be involved in these.

But there will be segments that come from you that you have suggested to us and so forth. So I’ll, I’ll talk about that later. And then finally, you’ll also hear from sponsors. You know, it costs money to put on a podcast. And to do that we need sponsors. So you will hear from sponsors that we have occasionally and episodes and that is a really appreciated thing to keep us live and going strong for years to come.

So let’s talk about why this show. Well, I absolutely love our industry. I’ve made it a career. I’ve been a pro for 30 years. The thing is that as an industry we are competing with other outdoor recreations and as the consumer gets to be a little bit more finicky about all the different things that they can do and with health being at an all time high and the abilities of people, they are exploring more options than ever for outdoor recreation, we need to be competitive in that market.

Underwater exploration is awesome, but we need to make it better. And how we do that is located in the way that we teach, the way that we conduct ourselves in business practices, the way that we handle risk. All of these things are going to be so important to how we flourish as an industry. And that starts with the frontline people. So what do I mean by frontline? Well, that’s going to be you, the dive pro, our retailers, our dive operators. And here’s something to think about. According to DEMA, recreational scuba diving and snorkeling contribute about $11 billion to the US Gross Domestic Product. Now that’s a big industry, but our frontline forces, those retailers and dive operators I have been talking about, you professionals rarely have any business training whatsoever. And so you hear that our sport comes from one that is kind of a grassroots and organically built industry where you have people that are so passionate about sharing the underwater world with others that they become a pro.

And they do that in a supervisory capacity like divemasters or an instructional capacity like instructors. And then what they rise up into saying, “hey, let’s look at doing this full time”. And so that might be as a full time independent instructor or hang a shingle and get a dive shop or a dive boat or a shop with a boat, a dive center. And so when we start to look at how these businesses grow, our frontline folks are the ones that are putting this all out there to the consumer. And as my friend Darcy Kieran says, having a dive center is like having six businesses in one. And if you think about it, it’s very true because we have to be able to serve the needs of diving and we have to do that in so many facets. And so how do we do that? Well is going to be one of the keys to the show.

We’re also going to talk about the risk management side of our industry. Now let’s think about this. Our professional liability insurance is rising every year. The cost of teaching and supervising scuba impacts all of us. Now, why is this? Well, frankly it’s because there are claims and these claims are getting paid out and these payouts are affecting the bottom line of the insurance companies that we do our business with. And so as claims arise, the cost of our professional liability policies is rising. So what does that mean folks? It’s simple. It means tightening up on risk management principles and techniques that will make diving safe and will make training safe and dive supervision safe. Most dive professionals think they are doing good at risk management principles, but obviously there are issues. So what we want to do is uncover some of the best practices of risk management so that we not only can be better ourselves, but if we see things that are just going a little wonky out there with other people, hey look, we need to bring that up.

If we don’t police ourselves, then someone will, or teaching scuba in this industry is just going to be cost prohibitive. Again, we can do better and we will through strategies in this podcast and also we can be better at our teaching techniques. A new diver thinks their instructor hung the moon, but how many times have we seen that a new diver that can’t equalize or they have no neutral buoyancy whatsoever or they are 10 pounds over-weighted come on, we can do better than this! You see, we need to share the best practices that make students great products of our services (teaching). So how we can do it better is going to be a big part of this podcast. Not only is it in the pool, it’s in the open water, it’s on the dive boat and it’s in the dive shop, on the show floor. These are the many things that are going to be a part of this podcast.

So who am I the one that’s leading this as your host? Well, many of you know me from the diving industry. Many of you know me from the League of Extraordinary Divers Podcast and for those that I don’t know, I’m pleased to meet you. Tec is my nickname. Thomas E. Clark, Tec has nothing to do with technical diving or technology or anything like that. It’s just my nickname. And I began diving here in Lauderdale by the Sea at the age of 12. Then I went on to get my PADI open water and advanced open water certifications and promptly went to the University of Florida. And in my sophomore year I had to drop a golf class. There was a table, a drop-add table. And there were some instructors there and they said, “hey, are you to diver?

I said, “yes, I am”. They said, “what level of diver are you?” I said, “I’m an advanced diver”, and they said, “all right, well we’ve got a course that’s called assistant instructor. It’s your next level up. Why don’t you take it and it’s two credit hours.” So sure enough, I joined up, took the class and I joined the University of Florida Academic Diving Program and that semester I learned all there was about academic diving and being an assistant instructor. Loved it and promptly went onto my instructor training course. I became a NAUI instructor, a YMCA instructor, a CMAS instructor, and a PADI instructor all at the University of Florida Academic Diving Program. And that was 1988, a long time ago. And so I was able to teach in auditoriums. I spoke at YMCA conventions, NAUI events, I began writing for Currents – that’s the YMCA’s publication and Sources.  NAUI’s publication.  And that really got me to a point where we started to realize as young men and women at the University of Florida that we were doing some special things and we really were passionate about teaching.

Well, my mom got cancer and I decided to move back home to be with her. When I was back home in Fort Lauderdale, I joined up with a local dive shop called Orbit Marine Sports in Pompano Beach. I was divemastering and I was instructing and working the dive shop, but there was more that I wanted. I was giving up cave diving, I couldn’t cave dive anymore. So I was kinda missing my adrenaline and cool stuff to do. So I joined up with the Broward Sheriff’s Office Dive Rescue Team as a volunteer. And so with that I was able to experience the challenging side of public safety diving, but it was also absolutely fascinating, especially for a 21 year old kid.

And so I did that for a couple of years and my mom got good. She was all better with her cancer and I got an invite from the University of Florida to come back and be the managing director of the Academic Diving Program. So I did that and finished my time there while I graduated spent many years at the University of Florida Academic Diving Program and then I received an internship to the YMCA Scuba Program and I moved to Atlanta and went to the headquarters of YMCA Scuba. And there I was able to be an intern, then roll into a consultant, then roll into the assistant director, then roll into the national director all within a two year period. And that was a rich time being with the YMCA allowed me to go to dive centers all over the country, even internationally and teach and learn from others and visit dive centers as well as YMCAs and colleges and universities and their different dive programs.

I was also able to be a part of the RSTC the Recreational Scuba Training Council. That is the organization that’s a secretary of ANSI. You’ve heard of ANSI before, American National Standards Institute. That’s, you know, you see an ANSI sticker on a bike helmet, right? That’s because there are standards in these type of recreational pursuits. And so the RSTC is who creates the minimum standards in our diving industry. So I was able to serve alongside of SSI, PADI, IDEA, and PDIC. It was a fantastic, fantastic way to see the industry from kind of one of the highest levels of gathering together and creating industry standards. At that same time, I got into freediving. Now I always had been a freediver. But at this time it was really neat because we were with CMAS not only at University of Florida, but also YMCA. The YMCA Scuba program was a sanctioning body for CMAS here in the United States.

And with that, CMAS was also doing records for freediving. So I became a freediving judge with CMAS. And my passion just exploded as I was being a judge for record competitions for people like Tanya Streeter and Mehgan Heaney-Grier and Alejandro Ravello and really great upcoming freedivers at the time that were setting national and world records. Well that led to creating the US  Freediving Team. So Mehgan Heaney-Grier and I in 1996 created the first United States Freediving Team and it was great to see that team flourish, especially the women getting a Gold at the Pacific Cup of freediving in the early 2000’s. I also had a passion for safety and so teaming up with Divers Alert Network and becoming a trainer with them was really important to the mission of dive safety and educating others and higher level areas of rescue and risk management and first aid and treatment.

Well that passion rolled into me moving back down to South Florida and becoming a forensic dive accident investigator once my time was done with the YMCA. This was a unique area to be a part of. Yes, this is the CSI of the underwater world. So forensic dive accident investigators work with the insurance companies and attorneys with the insurance companies to process claims and to investigate those claims and to see what can be done and should be done with the dive professionals in the payouts and the claims and potential litigation that goes with that. A really interesting, sometimes very dark side of our sport. Then I was able to join up with Pro Dive, one of the legendary instructor training institutions in the United States and I was able to be a part of a couple of different ownerships of Pro Dive and really look at that company as it grew into a new era.

At that same time, I also was able to launch a ministry in diving. Reef Ministries is a ministry that lookes at the underwater world as the handiwork of God. And so growing up I really had not much of a faith, but getting older and having a wife and kids and just looking at the blessings and the beauty of the underwater world. All of that together just really touched me. And yes, I had a conversion experience and just really resonated with my life as a Christian became something really, really big and important to me. So my faith rose and I decided to turn the gifts that God had given me and diving and kind of help others with that. So I was able to take out church groups and homeschoolers and really explore the underwater world as the handiwork of God. And that was with Reef Ministries and reefministries.com is still going well today.

And then I was able to join up with Nova Southeastern University. Now I took a small gig with them to teach some lessons on the side and all of a sudden the President of the University, Dr. George Hanbury, needed a refresher. So I gave him a refresher and at in his early seventies Dr. Hanbury, I put him through the paces and at the end of our refresher he said, “I learned more in my refresher with you than I learned in my beginning courses. What is that about?” I said, “it’s academic diving and that’s what I did for 10 years at the University of Florida Academic Diving Program. And by the way, Nova Southeastern University with their brilliant oceanographic center should also have an academic diving program too. He said, “write me a proposal.” And seven months later we launched the Nova Southeastern University Academic Diving Program. And that’s what I also do to this day.

Now I don’t say all of this to toot my own horn, what I’m doing to kind of give you my background is to share with you the great experience that I have in this industry has many different legs to it. And seeing the industry from that view allowed me to see what was going on in many corners of the industry, not only the challenges that we constantly hear about, but also the best practices. And so what I want to do is bring the connections and experiences that I’ve made over a 30 year career in this industry and bring this to you in a podcast that highlights the best practices in our industry and that will make all of us better. That will rise the tide which rises all ships. And so that is one of the big, big, big things about this podcast is how we can do best practices.

So I’m going to invite many people that I’ve had the blessing and honor of working with through the years and being in, in different organizations with, and being on different committees with, and they are also going to be a part of this show. So that’s what this is all about. Best Practices. And by being an active listener yourself, you are part of The Dive Locker Nation. You will be a better dive pro. You’ll be better at teaching techniques, better at risk management and better at dive business. Now remember what I said earlier about how you can be involved? Well, this is where you can simply go to www.scubaguru.com and at scubaguru.com you will find the section for The Dive Locker podcast. When you get onto that page for the dive locker podcast, you’re going to see a microphone icon. Those microphones will be different topics. They could be things that are just about a tip or a technique on a certain area.

It could be on what you want to hear for future episodes. It could be about encouragement for the show or what we could do to improve. Just click on the microphones and start talking. You might be on the podcast! Again, that’s over at www.scubaguru.com The Dive Locker is what you’re looking for. So again, my friends, this is the inaugural episode. I am so excited that you’re here. I’m so excited that we’re launching. There’s more great things to come. This is just the preface of what it is and what the show is about. Next episodes, you’re going to hear all kinds of things that we’ve got lined up for you to be better as a dive pro. So again, I thank you for being here. I thank you for being a part of The Dive Locker Nation and I look forward to serving you every week. So thank you everybody and we’ll see you next time. Take good care and safe diving my friends.

Hi Tec, it’s Stephen Frink. I enjoyed the podcast we worked on together for your League of Extraordinary Divers project and now very much looking forward to The Dive Locker. Good luck.

Hi, this is Dan Orr of Dan Orr Consulting and I just wanted to say best of luck to Tec Clark and his new podcast, The Dive Locker. I have no doubt that it’ll be both enjoyable and extremely informative.

Tec, it’s Mermaid Linden from Mermaids in Motion. I just want to congratulate you on the new ScubaGuru podcast. I’m very much looking forward to listening to it and I think it’s going to be “mermific”. Cheers.

This is Grant Graves of Soggy Science and Pod Aquatics. I want to wish Tec an amazing and successful run with The Dive Locker. Good luck buddy.

Hey TC. It’s Kell from Rainbow Reef. Having been shoved into a lot of lockers as a school boy I’m a little nervous about the new podcast, but I know you’re going to kick butt! Break a leg brother.

Hey there. This is Michael Feld from Oceanblue Dive in New York City, wishing Tec Clark the best of luck with his new podcast.

Hey Tec, Ryan over at Born of Water and Spirit Apparel. I just wanted to say congratulations and good luck on the new podcast and I’m looking forward to listening to the new series.

Hey Tec, this Jack Snively at NAUI headquarters in Tampa, Florida. I was really excited when I heard about your new podcast for dive professionals. I have no doubt that you’re going to touch many lives for the better. Thanks buddy. Good luck.

Hey this is Rachel Cushman, your current Scuba Queen USA and ADSO at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Long Beach. I can’t wait for this new podcast and to listen in on what’s new in The Dive Locker. Good luck!

Aloha. This is Keller Laros, the Manta Man of Kona, Hawaii, and I want to wish Tec Clark great luck with his new podcast, The Dive Locker. Be sure to check it out.

Thanks for Listening!

Thank you for joining me again. Do you want to leave a comment or suggestion for this podcast? Simply record yourself below!

If you enjoyed this episode, please share it using the social media buttons you see at the bottom of the post.

Also, please leave an honest review for The Dive Locker podcast on iTunes. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated! And, don’t forget to subscribe to the show on iTunes , Google Play Music , or Stitcher to get automatic updates.

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Welcome Dive Professionals

Welcome to ScubaGuru.com!  The ScubaGuru brand is dedicated to giving dive professionals tools and techniques to be GREAT LEADERS – leaders in the classroom, leaders underwater, and leaders in their diving businesses.  With unique leadership skill-sets, the dive professional can create:

  • Better divers
  • Loyal customers
  • A thriving dive center
  • A flourishing dive industry

See what we mean by Go Beyond the Standard and enjoy the rewards of being truly great at what you do!

Sincerely,

Tec Clark

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