In this episode of The Dive Locker Podcast we chat with Chad Barbay about the importance of retail salesmanship as a dive professional.
Welcome To The Show!
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.
You know we hear so much about selling and the importance of selling, and we are surrounded by sales messages all over the place. Yet when it comes to the act of selling, many dive professionals shy away. Some are not interested, some are not “the salesperson type” and some are downright uncomfortable and nervous about selling.
But if you think about it as dive professionals that means we are paid to do our jobs and somehow we got to get paid! If you’re an independent instructor, you still need to sell yourself and your services to stay in business. And if you work for a dive center, well, you need to help that dive center stay in business by helping them sell courses, equipment, trips, travel, etc. You can’t have a diving business without some type of selling.
Chad Barbay
Today’s guest is a well-known industry icon and a long time colleague of mine Chad Barbay. Chad started diving in 1980 in the Great State of Louisiana. By the way he’s a huge LSU Tigers fan! I’m a huge Florida Gators fan, but we don’t let that get in the way of our friendship – except on gameday.
His first few years of diving was mainly off the Louisiana coast spearfishing under the drilling platforms in the Gulf of Mexico. In the process Chad worked his way to become a NAUI Instructor. In 1986 he moved to Florida and after a few years teaching diving he had the opportunity to become the Florida Representative for NAUI.
He spent the next 24 years working for NAUI as their representative and eventually North American Sales manager for 13 years. Along the way Chad also became the representative for many equipment manufacturers. In 2011 Huish Outdoors was formed and consumed some of the manufacturers he was representing, among them were Atomic Aquatics and BARE. Huish Outdoors went on to purchase many other companies including Zeagle, Stahlsac, Oceanic and Hollis, and became North American distributors for Suunto.
Over the last 27 years Chad has worked with many retail dive stores across the US and has strived to help stores become more successful. Thus the culmination and beginning of a product training website and the creation of Dive Store Make Over which he contracts with dive store retailers to turn their dive business into a profit center.
Items In This Episode
- E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to do About It by Michael Gerber
- Dive Store Makeover
- Dive Store Makeover Facebook Page
Episode Sponsor
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Thanks For Listening!
That’s it for today, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. 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 at scubaguru.com . There you can also click the microphone and leave us a comment. Thanks again. We’ll see you in the next episode. Safe diving and take good care of my friends.
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