DIVE LOCAL – A Community Effort
Regional Problems and Challenges
By Gene Muchanski, Executive Director,
Dive Industry Foundation

CHAPTER 9 – Regional Problems and Challenges

Every Local Diving Community has their own unique strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.  The people who know them best are the Local Dive Industry Professionals.  They deal with their industry on a local basis, day in and day out.  It’s not up to a know-it-all company, association, or organization to tell them what their problems are.  Nor is it their place to offer potential solutions to their problems based on their own limited knowledge of the industry sectors they are dealing with.

Dive Industry Planners and Business Consultants have learned a lot about the recreational diving industry in the past fifty years.  We have learned that the global diving community can be broken down into National, Regional, and Local Diving Communities.  Each community has its own unique strengths and weaknesses.  Each community has its own demographic makeup of different types of diving businesses.  Each community has its own geographical and environmental plusses and minuses.  Therefore, it seems logical that each local diving community has its own challenges and opportunities.

The DIVE LOCAL Group has taken a new approach to helping Local Diving Communities grow and prosper.  First of all, with the help of the Dive Industry Foundation, a non-profit, 501(c)(3) organization, we conduct surveys of various dive industry stakeholder groups to determine what is important to them in running their own businesses.  We ask all the groups we work with what their five biggest challenges are in doing business as a diving or diving related company.  We believe that different stakeholder groups have different agendas and different ways of doing business.  It is important for us to know what is working for them right now, and what isn’t.

The second thing we do, as described in other articles we have written, is that we ask the Local Diving Community Dive Professionals what is working for them and what their major obstacles and roadblocks to success are.  Sometimes, the problems become so clear, it’s a wonder that no one has seen it before.  When it comes to buyer–seller relations, it could be as simple as a lack of communication or more seriously, a conflict of company agendas.  We usually discover these differences when we conduct Regional Summit Meetings to discuss Local Diving Community challenges and opportunities.

The third thing our Foundation is publicly addressing is behaviors that are bottle-necks in our own industry.  Call them political, call them predatory business practices, call them short-sighted ways of doing business, but let’s talk about them so that we can put a stop to ways of doing business that slows growth and limits industry productiveness.  These negative business practices that we have in the diving industry may or may not be unique to our own industry, but they are negative business practices that we have self-imposed on our industry.

The last thing we are starting to do, which hasn’t been done enough, is bring in outside-the-industry experts on problems and challenges that are caused by circumstances beyond the industry’s control.  In the past four years our industry has been dealing with environmental challenges, economic uncertainty, transportation challenges, increased political regulation, and pandemic restrictions and mandates.  And yet, our industry has done little or nothing to address these issues or deal with them in a constructive manner.

Let’s now discuss a few of our industry problems, challenges, setbacks, and roadblocks that our industry is dealing with.  Our next article, Chapter 10, will cover potential solutions to these problems, that were suggested at our last three Regional Summit Meetings.  But for now, let’s look at some of the diving industry’s problems, challenges, setbacks, bottlenecks, and roadblocks.

Having worked in the diving industry for over fifty years now, serving in different stakeholder groups, I feel very qualified to speak on problems in our industry that have caused bottlenecks to growth for Dive Industry Professionals.  I have seen way too much channel friction, caused by conflicting agendas of the various stakeholder groups.  It is obvious that dive equipment companies, certification agencies, travel resort destinations, dive operators, retail stores, independent scuba instructors, university scuba instructors, and dive clubs all have different reasons for being in the dive business, different business models to operate under, and different political and business agendas, but that is no reason to not get along with all the various stakeholder groups, and try to understand their problems from their perspective.

A second major concern of mine is the lack of promotion that suppliers of equipment, training, and travel give their customers, the industry’s resellers.  When the recreational diving industry first went mainstream, dive equipment manufacturers, training agencies and travel businesses published directories of their customers (the wholesalers) so that the consuming public would know where to buy dive equipment, training, and travel products.  They got out of the practice because I think they were afraid of losing their customers to their competition. While that may be true to some extent, a company only loses their customers if they don’t create loyalty by building good business relationships.  It doesn’t make sense for a buyer to pay to do business with a supplier, only to have their business kept secret so that the supplier doesn’t lose them as a customer.  Think about that for a second.  With today’s internet, it seems that every supplier has some type of Dealer Locator.  Some are good – many are not.  Some have full contact information, but many have selected contact fields missing, like zip code or email address.  Maybe there should be an industry standard?

In the past surveys we conducted, we asked Retail Dive Store Professionals and Manufacturing Sales Reps to share with us their five most important needs.   The Sales Reps were mainly concerned about marketing communications, professional benefits such as health insurance, auto and travel related discounts, retirement, and better Rep benefits from their employers.  All of these needs could be dealt with in a collective bargaining meeting if the Sales Reps ever decided to work together as a group instead of individually.  The Retailers, on the other hand, identified their major problems as lack of students, customers, sales, and store traffic.  Many comments were about the lack of industry support from manufacturers and training agencies, a proliferation of independent instructors, and the increase in internet sales.  There were a number of comments about the lack of industry press releases and national advertising campaigns.  There were a few comments about the lack of sales training but none about the lack of advertising and marketing business tools.

When we conducted problem solving sessions at our Regional Summit Meetings, the focus on current industry problems, roadblocks and setbacks was very encouraging.  Our groups discussed the aging population of divers and potential divers and yet millennials in the groups said they were not given respect or encouraged to take an active role in their local diving communities.  Although there was conversation about the lack of modern marketing in the industry, our groups said the industry was resistant to using marketing experts and that instructors were more interested in taking more diving courses but not marketing training.  In our summery review sessions, we talked about the decline of dive clubs and the lack of people taking leadership roles in diving shows and events.  The topic of diver dropout is still high on everyone’s list of problems.  An interesting note on the price of diving classes.  Instructors were commenting that the price of diving classes has not kept pace with the times and yet there was much discussion about the high prices of diving classes.  Which is it?

In summary, I believe the industry needs to conduct focus groups on the problems, challenges, bottlenecks, and roadblocks to the diving industry’s advancement and growth.  Our suggestion is to break it down into these groups & methods:

1. Individual Stakeholder Surveys.
2. Non-Industry Business Consultant Studies (Environmental, Business, Economic).
3. Diving Industry Opinion Leaders & Influencers Perspective.
4. Regional Summit Meeting Group Discussions.
5. DIVE LOCAL Volunteers to work on Actionable Items to improve industry.

For more information contact Gene Muchanski, Executive Director, Dive Industry Foundation, 2294 Botanica Circle, West Melbourne, FL.  Phone 321-914-3778. Email: gene@diveindustry.org  web: www.diveindustry.net

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