Selling Albury against coastal Queensland as a place to train off-shore divers sounds ridiculous. But Des Walters does it - and has clients from as far away as Singapore and Ireland.
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Entrepreneur: Des Walters, Managing Director
Company: Descend Underwater Training Centre
Business type: Commercial diver training and commercial diving contracting
Founded: 1979
Employees:
Turnover: Under $2M
Head office: Albury, New South Wales
Contact details: +61 2 6041 1405
The Descend Underwater Training Story
Des Walters’ company, Descend Underwater Training Centre, has only a handful of competitors, but none are near his base at Albury on the NSW-Victorian border. The competition is far away - in Tasmania, Western Australia and far North Queensland - but Walters likes to know what they are doing.
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Key learning points:
- Understand your competition - Monitor what your competitors are doing, especially what they are doing better than you are.
- Uniqueness - Understand what you do better than your competitors.
- Client focussed - Market your business based on your clients’ needs.
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Walters says: “One of my main competitors is in Townsville - a nice warm place, good clear water, on the Barrier Reef, a lovely place for a holiday.” Walters says he discovered that his competitor was marketing against him: why would you go to Albury? It’s bloody cold down there and the water is so filthy you can’t see anything. You had better come up here. “And so people were saying: ‘Why would we go to Albury? There can’t be anything good in Albury. If [Descend’s centre] was any good [it] would be somewhere else’,” says Walters.
The criticism set Walters thinking. Was warm, tropical water the best way to train a diver who is going to work in the North Sea? Or on the Melbourne docks? Or from oil rigs in Bass Strait? The conditions in which commercial divers operate are generally tough - cold, deep water, which is often rough and has low visibility. Walters realised that if anyone had ideal training conditions, he did.
He says: “No, we do not have warm, clear tropical water. Ours is deep, dark, cold, scary, dirty water and subject to silting - and isn’t that the perfect way to train a commercial diver? I needed to think about what it was that we offered that made our divers better because I am convinced that our divers are better. We are the only dive school in Australia that advertises: ‘Come and dive with us - we’ve got deep, dark and dirty conditions’.”
Walters says that having his training centre in Albury-Wodonga has other advantages for both him and his students. He can quickly reach either the Hume Weir or Dartmouth Dam, which both have 50-meter deep waters. His competitors on the coast must travel up to 70 miles offshore to find similar depths.
In a disused gravel pit ten minutes from Albury, Walters has created Australia’s only dedicated commercial divers’ training area. The pit simulates real-life diving conditions and offers a variety of training tasks.
Albury’s other advantage is its location on the Hume highway. Walters can compete for business in the Melbourne, Canberra and Sydney markets. For students coming from Melbourne or Sydney, Albury-Wodonga has comparatively cheap accommodation at walking distance from the training centre - a time and cost-saving that is hard to match in the high-priced capital cities.
Descend’s internet exposure now brings the company students from further afield, including Western Australia and Queensland, and overseas from New Zealand, Singapore, the United Kingdom and Ireland.
Walters says: “If you enjoy [your work] and are enthusiastic about it, the business will grow itself. You don’t have to do a helluva lot else.”