EDITORIAL – MAY 2022

The Power of Now
by Gene Muchanski, Editor
The Dive Industry Professional

Welcome to the May 2022 Editorial of The Dive Industry Professional.  There is no time like the present.  Yesterday is already gone.  You can’t get it back.  Tomorrow hasn’t happened yet and the best thing you can do is plan for it.  Today is where it’s at.  Lived right today, it will make a good yesterday memory, tomorrow.  So, to make good yesterdays, we need to plan our tomorrows and engage in our todays.  Are you engaged?  I wrote about that last month.

I believe in power of now.  I didn’t always.  As an Industry Planner, my job was to plan for successful tomorrows by strategically planning a company’s course of action based on their historical core competencies and their track record history.  It was always up to the sales force or the operational staff to take my plans and achieve the company’s planned outcomes.  It didn’t always work out that way.  Sometimes, the plans got put into a nice binder and sat on the shelf for the rest of the year.  Sometimes the plans were studied, and then changed to meet the needs of the sales force or operations, which did not always work as originally planned.  Some got off to a good start and then lost steam and the will to continue with an organized, step-by-step plan.  I would be lying if I said that no one ever just took our plans and tossed them.  Why do you think that would happen?  Mostly because it wasn’t their plan.  It was about their company’s successful tomorrows, and they were living in the today.  Living in the now.

Today, I’ve had a change of heart, based on over forty years of experience in the recreational diving industry.  I’ve changed my definition of marketing and now consider my profession as the progressive movement of goods and services from conception to consumption.  That means I start with a marketing audit to figure out where the company is at the beginning of a project.  I meet with the decision makers, and we document where the company wants to be.  It’s their company, it should be their decision.  Then we figure out what needs to be done to achieve our outcomes to complete the mission at hand.  Then we assign tasks and responsibilities, and we launch.  All the way through the mission, our team is following up on the company progress.  Are they following the plan?  Are they making progress?  Do we need to tweak the plan?  Just like a good dive guide, I stay with the team until the mission is complete.

In this pandemic era (that’s what they are calling it now), dive companies cannot afford to be in the market and not be engaged.  Dive companies are leaner and hungrier.  The organizational structure and integrity of companies and the market has changed.  A Business Audit is a MUST for serious companies.  A Marketing Audit is the smartest, most cost-effective thing you can do to analyze the current total market size and your market share of it.  It’s a smart thing to review your core competencies and capabilities.  Needles to say, without a strong vision, purpose, mission and focus you are likely to be less competitive.  But even if you are 100% ready to roll, it will do you no good at all if you are not engaged, now.  It’s good to remember that “He who hesitates, is lost.”    Don’t get me wrong.  I don’t have anything against people who can’t make a decision or procrastinate about doing the things that needs to be done to succeed in today’s market.  It’s just that it is a frustrating experience for me as I watch a potentially successful company, with a good program, product, or service, spin their wheels and go nowhere.  My best advice is, Please call me when you are ready to engage.

For more information on moving your company forward, contact Gene Muchanski, Executive Director, Dive Industry Association, Inc., at gene@diveindustry.net or call me at 321-914-3778.

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