Like many Americans, this year has been very tough for my family. Last year I lost my job as a business manager at Motorola. I became a stay at home dad for our two daughters. This year, my wife lost her job as a career coach at Deloitte and Touche. As of this writing, neither of us have found a steady job yet. I’ve been teaching college classes part time for some extra cash. As Christmas approaches, we have had to make hard decisions as to what kind of gifts we will get the girls. As a parent, you want to give your kids everything, but many times that just isn’t possible. As I’ve thought about Christmas for my kids, I’ve thought about other people who are in a similar, or worse, situation than me and how this affects their diving Christmas season. [Read more...]
The Economy and the Scuba Industry: Loss-Leaders are Killing the Scuba Industry
“We don’t make any money on our open water classes. We hope that the open water students will buy equipment from us once they are certified.” I first heard this type of statement was during my PADI IDC when we were discussing course pricing. As a business person, this didn’t make much sense to me, but I could understand the rationale that a business uses a product or service to drive sales of other products or services. That was six years ago. I’ve had plenty of time to think about this and the more I ponder it, the more I have realized that this mentality is slowly killing the scuba diving industry. [Read more...]
The Economy and the Scuba Industry: Tips to Improve Your Scuba Business
Duane Johnson - Technical Diving Instructor
The Economy and the Scuba Industry: The MAP Argument
In a previous post about the scuba industry and the economy I mentioned a concept called MAP. After that article posted, I received many comments, both public and private arguing for MAP. So I thought I would briefly touch on a couple of the biggest comments and my opinions. [Read more...]
