Yes Greg, We sure have! Officially our Club opened last May at the Lake Pleasant Adventure Day so we have celebrated our first Anniversary. From a group of instructors with an idea for a club to making business Alliances with 3 key local dive shops and our 2 online retail alliances. We have grown strong. We’ve also been busy taking our members out to see the best of semi local diving in our area. We run at cost caravan trips to Lake Mohave and Rocky Point Mexico for 3 day weekends. Late June will be the clubs first major travel adventure as we will be flying to Cozumel Mexico for a week of diving.
But back to our Local alliances which include The Phoenix areas only PADI CDC All Wet Scuba. The only local dive shop in the Bullhead City/Laughlin area Dive Shack USA, who’s home waters are Lake Mohave which is some of Arizona’s finest freshwater diving. The third local shop is the only shop/Op located at Arizona’s closest salt water diving in Rocky Point (Puerto Penasco) Mexico. It is Aquatic Adventures and feature their own dive boat with regular trips to Bird Island to play with the Sea Lions. All these shops offer our members special preferred customer pricing not available to the general public.
If you recall you and I had discussed this club while we were still organizing and one worry was how the local shops would react to a club that was not aligned with a brick & mortar only retail environment and accepting of the reality of the online retailers. We have found those shops that face the sales realities of today also accept our club. Instead of treating us like competition welcoming us as preferred customers and business partners. All they ask is to give them opportunity to strike sales deals with our members which we surely can recommend considering the pricing they are offering us. They realize as a club that many of the services that they offer we also offer our members and the club can discount those service below what they can offer. Such as Fills,Tank, Reg & BCD maintenance and Training this is part of the strength of our club. We can also work with them to cross market trips that we each offer.
So it seems even the local shops have 2 viewpoints those that have revised their business plan to adjust to competition online seem to accept us while those shops that are using dated business plans are very protective of the business they have and see us to a threat to their piece of a limited pie. We expect those are the ones that will have the most problems maintaining their profit margin and eventually fail. Because our club works on a low overhead we will be able to survive long term and assist the shops that take care of us.