Act III:The Resort

DEMA stands for Diving, Equipment, and Marketing Association. Their annual trade show is, if not THE biggest, one of the biggest scuba diving trade shows in the world. They rotate the location between Las Vegas, New Orleans, and Orlando. This year, it was in New Orleans. It always takes place during the week before the week of Thanksgiving.

This trade show is not open to the public; it is for diving professionals. This is where the manufactures show off the newest, latest, greatest diving equipment. And it is not just for the manufactures. Tourism boards, resorts, liveaboards, travel agents, wholesalers, dive shops all participate. In short, anyone/everyone that is involved in diving and dive marketing goes to DEMA.

Beyond, the scuba equipment manufactures and retailers like ScubaPro, Cressi, and Mare, attending are companies like GoPro, Garmin, compressor manufactures, photography companies—anyone who has a product that a scuba diver might want or need.  They are all showing off their shiny, cool gadgets (if you like cool gadgets, leave your credit card at home). All the big scuba certification organizations are there—PADI, SSI, CMAS, BSAC, SDI, NAUI, RAID, TDI.

There are (seemingly) acres of floor space taken up by tourism boards and gaggles of resorts from just about every island in the Caribbean, the Philippines, South Pacific, Far East, Mideast (some say the best diving in the world is in Egypt—huh). They are there to capture as much of the dive-shop travel market as possible.

Every city in the country has a dive shop with most cities having multiple dive shops. If a person wants to learn to scuba dive, he/she often will go their local dive shop. Dive shops make their money several ways. First, is teaching diving. They will offer dive lessons for everyone from the novice to the experienced diver who wants to get advanced certifications. Secondly, shops make money selling dive equipment. Diving involves a lot of equipment from simple to complex. Or, said another way, from the not-so-cheap to the really not-so-cheap.

The third way dive shops make money is organizing dive trips. The smaller dive shops might do three or four dive trips a year while the bigger shops will have a multitude of trips on their schedule. Many of the dive shop owners that come to DEMA use the show to shop for new and/or interesting resorts that they think would interest their clients enough to sign up for a dive trip. And, waiting for them like vultures ready to pounce, are the marketing representatives of resorts from literally around the world.

Enter the Smith family.

Smith #1. Nicholas (23). Nick can’t decide if he wants to scuba dive or not.

Smith #2. Elizabeth (25). She just got certified before going to DEMA.

Smith #3. Laurie. My wife has taken two half-day discover scuba courses 28 years apart.

Smith #4. Me. Before buying the resort I hadn’t been diving in oh….about 25 years.

(Smith #5. Maria didn’t go—she’s in college and has little interest in scuba diving.)

The Smiths stormed into New Orleans ready to conquer DEMA. And with that vast accumulation of experience, what could possibly go wrong?

We had closed on the resort at the end of August and it wasn’t until then that I could get access to the old website. So, I had about two months to completely redesign the website, create an accounting and banking system to be able to do business (i.e. take credit cards), and put together some marketing tools.  I had no knowledge or experience in doing any of it.

On the island we were dealing with figuring out what we had and didn’t have, dealing with the staff (and them dealing with us), working on boats, meeting venders and setting up accounts. We were trying to learn some of the ins and outs of Guanaja island life. Man, there was a lot to do and it was during this period that, overwhelmed, I quit writing this blog.

Even though we didn’t know what we were doing, there were certain things we knew we had to get done and get right.  We had to go into DEMA with a good website in place. We had to have accounting in place.  And we needed marketing tools and a strategy.  Let me tell you—it was a mad scramble.

The new website went live a couple weeks before DEMA. The bulk of the accounting stuff got done the next week and the week leading up to the trade show we concentrated on putting together the items we needed for our 100 square feet of (very expensive) DEMA real estate.

The show started on Tuesday November 14. Laurie, Nicholas, and I stuffed all our booth furniture and signs and ourselves into Laurie’s Ford Explorer and left Kansas City for New Orleans. Elizabeth was flying in from Guanaja the next day. We got our booth set up on Monday and we were ready to rock-n-roll for the Tuesday morning start. Everything had gotten done except our strategy. It was rather half-baked—but it had to be since we didn’t know what we were doing.

We had decided to offer a drawing for a free one-week stay for 2. We figured it would be a good way to get people into the booth and a great way to collect business cards and take names for future contact. Laurie also brought a lot of candy and a basket, and we had some giveaways like sticker, patches, can coolies.

Based on what we’d heard, we had a a goal of getting 2 or 3—and if we were lucky 4 groups signed up with a deposit. And we hoped to collect a lot of contacts.

This is the point where the brilliance of my wife started to come through.  She didn’t just bring candy, she brought candy! No suckers, jawbreakers or mints. She brought real candy. Snicker bars, M&Ms, Reese’s–the real stuff. No one can pass by a basket of that chocolate without stopping.  And that momentary pause is all we needed.

“Ah…excuse me,” we’d say, “but you can’t have that unless you can tell me where Guanaja is.”

“Huh? …..What?” Followed by a quick glance up and then a real look at the banner on the back of the booth. “….I don’t know…so where is Gua….how do you pronounce it?”

We would get an occasional person who did know where Guanaja is but it didn’t matter because either way we were now engaged in a conversation. The candy had served its purpose and it was now up to us.

We killed it!

We booked 9 large groups—8 of them with money down. To our knowledge, our competitors along our little strip collectively signed up 0. I don’t think any resort there did much better than us, including the resorts with marketing teams and big fancy, high-end booths or the resorts located in sexy places like Fiji or Indonesia.

Once we had them engaged, we just had an authentic conversation. We told them about our little place, we talked about the fantastic diving, and we answered their questions and addressed their concerns. We didn’t try to hide anything or make them think we were something we aren’t. We put close to a quarter of a million dollars of business on the books!

We were the “little engine that could.”

Don’t ever underestimate the power of a basket of candy and a good pickup line!