Gladiators In the Arena
 by Gene Muchanski, Editor
The Dive Industry Professional

Being a Dive Industry Professional can be as rewarding a career as any.  It’s all about doing what you love to do and being the best that you can be.  Whether you decide to do this full-time or part-time is your choice.  You can work for a company that hires you for your skill set or you could go the entrepreneurial route and work for yourself.  It’s all about deciding what you want to do, exploring the options that are available to you, preparing for the role you want to play, and making the effort to secure the position you want to fill.   Once you begin your career in your chosen profession, it’s up to you to learn, grow, and succeed from there.  If I make it sound too simple, please excuse me, it’s not!

There are many career options for people who want to make a living as a scuba diving professional.  Colleges and Universities hire scuba instructors to teach classes on campus.  Universities that have diving programs usually hire a Diving Safety Officer.  Aquariums that employ divers usually do the same.  Dive stores around the world hire scuba instructors as employees or private contractors.  Dive Resorts and Liveaboard hire Divemasters, Instructors, and Crew to staff their vessels.  As an employee, your professional development responsibility is to keep your scuba instructor certifications and competency level current.  You could live the dream and get a paycheck too.

When a scuba instructor decides to go into business for themselves, their whole perspective and priority changes.  As a small business owner, a Dive Industry Professional has to balance their knowledge, skill set, and tools of the trade as a Scuba Instructor and Business Owner.  As a scuba instructor you still have to keep your diving professional development credentials current, and maintain your certification, agency affiliation, and insurance requirements.  As a business owner you have to promote your instructional service in order to fill your classes.  You will need to keep track of your income and expenses, as required by local, state, and federal law.   The more time you spend teaching classes, the less time you will have for pre-class promotion and post-class government compliance.  If you teach diving part-time and have another full-time job, your available time for business matters will be significantly less.

The most common mistake made in the diving industry is focusing too much time on the diving part of your life at the expense of the business side.  If you have a full-time job and you spend every moment of your free time teaching diving classes, going on dives, and attending professional development classes (about diving), your business will fail and may even lead to legal problems.  If you are able to successfully complete all of your job related, diving related, and business-related responsibilities, that is commendable.  If not, then something has to give.

Having too much on your plate is bad enough for scuba instructors who have a full-time job and run their own part-time diving business, but the same thing goes for those of us who run full-time diving businesses.  Operating a dive store as an owner-operator often turns into an 80 hour per week addiction.  That’s when you get so busy that you feel like the Gladiator in the Arena.  You are so busy doing what you do, that you can’t focus on the big picture, and things start falling through the cracks.  If only you could back away for a moment to get the Emperor’s view of the arena?  Pilots call it the view from 30,000 feet.  Either way, it is difficult to work on your business when you are up to your eyeballs in the day-to-day tasks of doing what your business does.  That’s why Michael Gerber, in his book The E-Myth, said that one person needs to work in the business and another person needs to work on the business.  But the purpose of this editorial is not to remind you of problems you are probably already familiar with, but to offer suggestions on how to overcome some of these challenges.

The idea for this editorial came to me today when I was online in a social media group, reading about the problems some members were having about a lack of market demand for their products and services.  They stated, quite correctly, that their vendor of choice was not developing market readiness or consumer desire for their services.  There was no question that the products and services of this vendor were excellent, but their follow-up support for this group was lacking.  What no one mentioned was that if the vendor’s products were superior to the competition, but they provided limited or no brand marketing support for their clients, why were the instructors still doing business with them?

I’ve learned that unsolicited advice is rarely appreciated, but as a paid Marketing Advisor, I believe there is a deeper root cause to this problem.  First of all, if a company produces a superior product but limited marketing support, maybe their focus and core competency is product related, and not marketing related.  If they offer limited marketing support, maybe it’s because not all of their clients need, want, or value marketing support.  Or at least they don’t think they do.   That leaves their other customers, the Gladiators in the Arena, out in the cold with no support.   It could also mean be that the vendor just doesn’t know how to market successfully, or they have the wrong employees or corporate managers.  Maybe they even have the wrong Corporate Culture!  A good marketing assessment may be in order to get to the bottom of this serious channel conflict.

As a life-long Marketing Professional, I firmly believe that buyers and sellers are strategic partners within the supply chain.  It is to the vendor’s advantage to stimulate demand for their products in the marketplace.  It’s called Brand Marketing or Brand Management.  After all, it’s not the end user who is their customer, it’s the instructor who gets certified through their agency, pays dues, and registers their student through them.  Increased brand marketing is usually accompanied by increased demand for your products and services.   When your best customers are so busy using your products and services that they don’t have time to market their own business, it behooves a vendor to stimulate demand for them.  After all, they are in fact, building a market for your product and your company.

There is another aspect to the Gladiators in the Arena concept that is so misunderstood in the diving industry.  Our Industry Gladiators in the Arena are the Industry’s Rainmakers.  They are the instructors, Retailers, and Sales Reps.  They perform in the training, sales, and travel arenas every day.  They make the sales and bring in the revenue.  They have always reminded me of combat soldiers fighting on the front lines.  If their vendors expect them to continue to fight, or teach, or sell for them, then they have to supply them with ammo and air support.   In the business world, this translates to marketing support and brand management.  If you want to grow your business, you need to take care of your Gladiators and Rainmakers. 

The other mistake made too often in business, and not just the diving industry, is taking your best Gladiators and turning them into Sales Managers, or worse, General Managers.  Great salespeople sell.  Great teachers teach.  The golden rule of management is never take your better salespeople away from doing what they do best.  It’s better to wait until they have come to the point in their career when they are ready to transition from the active lifestyle of sales and continue their career as a leader, mentor, and manager.

Running a business is a team sport.  It is part science and part art.  It takes education, knowledge, and experience.  It also takes a significant amount of time, money, and manpower.  For many of us, a business is like a puzzle, with many interlocking pieces representing numerous business components, performed by people with different talents and abilities, all inter-connected to achieve a common purpose.  A business is a compilation of numerous systems and sub-systems created and performed by people from different generations at different stages in their careers, to create products and services for a consuming public that is equally as diverse as they are.  When we think about Gladiators in the Arena, we think of people engaged in their work, dealing with their narrow perspective of the moment, only supported by their current knowledge, education, and experience.    Our role as managers is to help these Gladiators use their talents and abilities to achieve great things for themselves and our companies.

This is an exciting time to become part of the Global Diving Business Network.  For more information, contact Gene Muchanski, Executive Director of the Dive Industry Association, 2294 Botanica Circle, West Melbourne, FL 32904.  Phone: 321-914-3778.  Email: gene@diveindustry.net  Web: www.diveindustry.net

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