Differentiation is not only a logo, an exclusive brand, or a lower price. It is the experience created by your store and staff.
by Lee Rand, Special Advisor, Avelo Labs, & Partner, Cottonwood Tech. Fund, NM
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SPEND ENOUGH TIME in a dive shop, and you quickly see that it is far more than a retail business. It is a classroom, a gathering place, a travel desk, an equipment service center, and often the front door to a lifelong relationship with the underwater world. The people running it are balancing inventory, instruction, insurance, compressors, seasonality, and life-support equipment, usually with a small team and very little room for error.
That complexity is what drew me in. I am a diver, an outdoors person, and a special advisor to Avelo Labs. I have also spent more than two decades in venture capital, which simply means helping fund and advise young companies that are trying to grow. The useful part of that experience is not the financial jargon. It is learning to ask a few clear questions before committing time, money, and energy to an idea.
Dive professionals already understand disciplined decision-making. Before a dive, we assess conditions, equipment, experience, and the plan. A business deserves the same care. At DEMA Show in New Orleans this November, I will work through three questions that can help a shop owner evaluate where to focus, what to build, and which opportunities truly fit. I am not coming to tell the dive industry how to run a dive business. I am coming to share a framework, listen to the people who live this work every day, and solve a realistic shop challenge together.
Question 1: Who would miss your shop if it disappeared?
It is tempting to say a dive shop is for everyone who dives. In practice, the strongest shops become especially meaningful to particular people. It may be new divers who need confidence after certification, experienced divers seeking performance training, women looking for community, families who want to explore together, or travelers who return because the shop knows how they like to dive.
In business language, this is sometimes called customer-market fit. In plain terms, it means knowing who values your shop enough to choose it again, recommend it, and feel the loss if it were gone. The evidence is not a slogan. It is repeat dives, deposits, waitlists, second purchases, referrals, and customers who drive past another shop to reach yours.
One number I would like more shops to know is the second-dive rate: how many students return to dive with you within 90 days of certification? Our industry often focuses on how many certifications we complete. The human question is what happens next. Did that new diver feel welcomed, supported, and excited enough to come back? That number can reveal more about the future of a shop than the certification count alone.
No diver descends without checking a pressure gauge. Yet businesses sometimes launch programs, order products, or sign leases without a clear gauge on demand. At the DEMA Show, we will use a simple five-question fit check before deciding where a fictional shop should spend its next dollar.
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Question 2: What makes the experience unmistakably yours?
Cline Group research counts 986 brick-and-mortar dive retailers in the United States. To a customer scrolling quickly on a phone, many may appear similar: the same categories of equipment, familiar certification agencies, travel photos, and service promises.
What cannot be copied easily is how a shop makes people feel and how it serves them. Differentiation is not only a logo, an exclusive brand, or a lower price. It is the experience created by your instructors, your values, your community, and the choices you make about where to be exceptional.
Picture a diver returning after years away from the water. One shop may simply sell a refresher. Another may be known for welcoming returning divers, rebuilding confidence without judgment, pairing them with the right instructor, and introducing them to a community that keeps them active. Both shops may offer similar products. Only one has built an experience that customers will describe to a friend.
A shop might become known for performance training, women’s diving, families, local conservation, a travel club, or a new gear category taught in its own way. When customers choose you for how you do something, not only for what you carry, matching an online price becomes less central to the conversation.
This is also a useful way to evaluate any new technology or category, including the system I advise. The question is not whether it is new or impressive. The question is whether it helps your team serve your customers in a way that is valuable, teachable, and true to your shop.
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Question 3: What kind of money supports the business you want?
Growth often requires capital, which is simply money used to build the business. A shop may need it for a renovation, a boat, a fleet of equipment, or a second location. The important question is not only how much money is available. It is what that money expects in return.
A bank or SBA loan generally expects regular payments and documentation, then leaves the owner in control. That may fit a buildout with proven demand. Landlord tenant-improvement funding can help pay for a space in exchange for a longer lease. Vendor or gear-financing programs can place equipment on the floor without using as much cash upfront. Outside equity means another person invests in exchange for ownership. It can support a company designed to grow beyond one location, but it also brings expectations for reporting, growth, and eventually, a return on the investment.
None of these choices are automatically right or wrong. The problem comes when the money and the owner’s goals do not match. A shop built around one owner’s ideal lifestyle needs a different funding strategy than a company seeking multiple locations.
Customers may also be part of the answer. Founding memberships, prepaid travel programs, or other community-supported offers can help fund an initiative while showing whether people truly want it. The best source of support may already be in the shop’s logbook, but the offer must be structured carefully and appropriately for the business.
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A Practical Helper, Not A Replacement For Judgment
Answering these questions takes time and data, two resources many shop owners do not have to spare. Used carefully, artificial intelligence can help with specific back-office work. It can calculate a second-dive rate from existing records, help draft personal re-engagement messages, organize customer feedback, or handle routine inquiries while the team is teaching or underwater.
The value is not in adopting AI for its own sake. It is in choosing one useful function, one tool, and one measurable outcome. The shop still decides who it serves, what it stands for, and how customers should be treated. Technology can help support that judgment and provide leverage.
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Come Solve It With Me
My DEMA Show session is built as a conversation rather than a lecture. Everyone in the room will take a board seat at Second Reef Scuba, a fictional shop built from realistic numbers and familiar pressures: a flat profit-and-loss statement, an aging customer base, a landlord’s expansion offer, a new dive system on the demo list, an interested buyer, and $150,000 to deploy.
You will vote on the owner’s options near the beginning. Then we will work through customer fit, differentiation, growth, capital, and AI tool use before voting again. I will bring the business framework. The room will bring the practical knowledge of divers, instructors, retailers, and operators. The value will come from putting those perspectives together.
From Startup to Storefront: Strategies for Building a Thriving Dive Business runs from noon to 12:45 pm in Room 291 at DEMA Show 2026 in New Orleans. Please check the show planner for the final day. Bring your numbers, your experience, and your skepticism. In diving and in business, the strongest plans improve when people are willing to question them.
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