Offer Value-Added Instruction

When selecting a restaurant, you tend to assume going in that, if a particular dining establishment meets health department regulations and has managed to keep its doors open more than a few weeks:

• There is little risk in your getting food poisoning.
• The food, if not great, at least won’t make you want to throw up.

Similarly, your store’s affiliation with a major training agency helps assure customers that:

• Your courses meet industry minimum standards.
• They most likely wont’ get killed or injured learning to dive.
• If they successfully complete your course, they will receive a certification that will be recognized world wide.

If this is all you settle for, your courses will be no better nor worse than those of your competitors. And, if this is what prospective students perceive, then the only logical reason they should choose your program over another is that yours costs less. This is not something you can afford.

To make your courses stand out, you must enhance their value. This can be a tricky proposition.

In the 1970s, a lot of us old-timers thought that the way to add value to our courses was to make them longer and include additional skills — you know, really valuable stuff like ditch-and-recoveries, bail-outs and timed swims.

The marketplace soon let us know what consumers thought of this sort of “value-added” instruction — and stores that clung tenaciously to the old way of doing things are, for the most part, long gone.

Adding value in today’s marketplace »

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