February's Roundtable Conversation Recap

I am grateful to have an amazing group of dive stores that are willing to meet and share openly about what has worked for them and ask for help in areas they need it.

This month's roundtable conversation was packed full of great content. Thank you to the stores that attended. I hope you received a ton of value and will attend our next conversation.

Of the categories listed below or others not listed, please reply to this email and let me know where you as an owner and your store need the most help? For context, if you could pay $250, $500, or even $1000 per month and have anything done for you or your store, what would that activity be? Would it be marketing? Would it be a new website and CRM? Would you want help with business operations (phone calls, scheduling, etc)?

1. Cost analysis of the service department

It is common for owners and managers to do their own repairs early in the business. The service department can have good margins and is a great way to keep your customers coming in for services as they prepare for upcoming trips.

I personally have wrenched on more equipment than I can count and loved jamming out to music as I repaired equipment. As the store grew and I needed to focus on other aspects of my business, I shifted the repair department off of my plate and hired an employee to assume those duties.

The service department has great margins, but it's overall gross $ profit to your store is not large. This is a service to your customers because they trust you. If you mess up in the service department and someone's computer floods on their trip or their regulator leaks, the reputation and customer trust damage can be HUGE!

With that being said, the consensus from the group is that if you have a highly detail oriented employee (maybe a retired engineer), that you trust, then hire and keep it in house. (Please only allow your technicians to repair equipment they have certifications for.)

But, if you are bogged down and struggling to keep up with repairs and work on your business, then contract the service department out to a reputable repair facility.

Some of note are Malibu Scuba Repair in Southern California or Airtech in North Carolina. Just use a flat rate shipping box from USPS and sent the service you don't have time for away to a reputable service company. They will professionally handle your customer's equipment, save the old parts and include diagnostics reports.

2. Effective marketing for new students

For most dive stores, there are only a handful of competing dive stores in your surrounding area.

Your customers generally start their search for a dive shop online. They search for something like "scuba certification" or "dive store" in Google and get a screen similar to the photo below.

The trick with effective marketing for a dive store is to better capture the leads that you come to you. These people may start their search online, they may start by coming into the store, they may even start by calling or emailing the store.

Do you (and your employees) know what to say and do when a person does inquire about scuba classes? Do you know your conversation rate for people signing up based on whether they search your store online, call you, email you or come into your store?

The 1st place that I think every store could start is by improving their open water course web page. This all starts with a simple, 1 page landing page for open water classes. Use this page to make the open water certification process understandable and to collect contact information. Once you have contact information, you can add this lead to your CRM (if you don't have one or know what this is, I can help) and send them more information to help them make their scuba certification decisions.

3. How to retain existing clients and Open Water students

One common rule of thumb is that it costs five times as much to acquire a new customer as it does to retain an existing customer. I used to measure customer retention based on the number of continuing education certifications issued for every one open water certification issued. The goal was 4 (continuing educations certs) : 1 (open water cert).

Here is a laundry list of ways to engage your customers:

• Regular store communication (generally a weekly email newsletter)

• Group Dinners/Happy Hours

• Scuba Clubs

• Specialty of the Month promotions (to encourage more classes)

• Travel Nights (exotic travel is a great way to increase retention)

• Non-Diving activities (cycling, golf, movie nights, game nights, etc)

• Combined events with adjacent local businesses (such as a photo night with a local photographer or camera store)

• Professional Scuba Nights (to talk about Pro level courses)

• DEMO days in your pool (bring in the sales reps and the latest equipment)

• Gather at local events in your area

• Ask your best customers what they would like to do/what they are interested in outside of scuba diving

4. Renting pool space as a means of growing your store's market

My dive store did not have a pool onsite. We would partner with local fitness facilities, the city pools, high school pools, community pools, local college pools, country club pools and several others for access to swimming pools.

There was a moment of time when my store didn't have access to any pools. It's hard to have a successful dive shop without a pool. After that experience, I always had 2-3 pools available to us at any given time. Some pools cost more than others, some are shallower than others, and some are farther away from the shop than others.

One interesting fact is that the location of the pool ended up being a selling feature for some students. The pools would end up being a 45 minutes drive from the shop, but a 5 minute drive from our student's house.

It came up on the call that you can use a rented pool that is 30 minutes to 1 hour from your store and now you will actually attract a whole new market of customers. Perhaps this pool is in a completely different suburb or city. The shop that was actively looking into this has a pool onsite and is still interested in renting pool space to expand their potential customer pool. (pun totally intended)

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