1. Introduce yourself and briefly describe your background.
My name is Maslinda Abdul Talib. Before I started in the watersports industry, I worked in legal unit with Inland Revenue Board in Johor. Then in 2008 I resigned with no particular plan in mind. Watersports like teach swimming is the last thing I thought I would do but 7 years later, here I am promoting safety and healthy lifestyle through watersports with my business partner Zalwana Abd Manap and other dedicated team members.
2. Why did you decide to go into this business? How long has it been established?
At first I just share my swimming knowledge among friends and not for commercial. But after sometimes, since the demand was good and there are not many lady swim instructors in the market, I attended the official and formal courses just to get some credentials and add some knowledge. Since 2010, everything fell in place as planned.
Further history of our inception in the industry can be seen here
3. Can you describe your services (and products etc)?
We offer courses in swimming, scuba diving & freediving. We are well known to provide above average services and personalized method of teaching that is based on the client’s ability.
We are also the only Instructor Training Center for Swimming, Scuba diving & freediving under SSI certification agency in Asia, maybe even the world. So our range of services not only limited to people who wants to learn, but also we can cater to people who wants to make watersports as their future career or business.
4. Who are your clients / customers? Why do they select you over others?
Since most of our instructor and swimming teacher are ladies, we have a larger number of female customers over male. But since we have started to promote our business to both genders, the numbers of male clients have also increased.
We also now try to increase younger clients as now we are focusing on adults market. Most of them chose us because of the personalized service we offer, flexibility that we gave to our clients, and of course, the experience and our expertise to serve.
5. How has technology, such as computers and the Internet, impacted on how you serve or conduct business?
We started first, on online medium. From just a community to a business that offer full range of aquatic courses, from beginner to professionals.
65% of our clients found out about us thru online medium (faceboook, Instagram, linked in, google etc), 20% through long term engagement and the rest from offline marketing (flyers, words of mouth etc). In our point of view, the internet have played a very large role in how we do business and serve our customers today.
6. Do you plan to expand (range of offerings, service areas, geographical reach etc.)? If yes, how? If no, why not?
Since we started as a community, the main objective is always to spread awareness and help in creating bigger marketplace. For us, this is like baking a very large cake, so that more people can get the portion of the large cake. Even your portion is only one, if the cake is large, your 1 part will be enough.
However, we realized that we can never do this on our own. We do have plans to expand the services and reach out to more people by teaching other people to do the same or better than what we do now. Therefore, we are in active search to look out for venture capitalist or investor to work together to realize these plans.
One of our plans is to do a tour to develop potentials youth from swimming to becoming swim teachers. Once they have completed the whole process, they can offer their services to their own community. We hoped by end of 2015, we will be able to certify at least 20 new swim teachers in many areas outside the Klang Valley and open up their business there.
7. What are the biggest issues (serving your clients, running your business etc)?
The biggest problem sadly came within the industry itself. Because majority of people in the industry now (swimming & scuba diving) tend to compete on price instead of quality. Quite a number of centers cut down on the price of courses too low to get more clients. But at the same time they are actually killing the industry and make it unsustainable for others. With the rise of the cost of living especially in Klang valley, some of the prices offered by some of these “businesses” are totally out of mind; it’s too low even to cover the cost. When they can only get little profit, they will have the tendency to cut some corners in the teaching method or with low quality of instruction.
In the end, everybody will either need to stop their business operation or also join the price war by reducing the teaching quality. The results from this practice, the end products (swimmers and divers) are often not reliable and have the tendency towards unsafe practice and behavior.
For freediving, since we are the people who currently promoting freediving, we took very good care on safety practice. We highly encourage and promote “Safe Freediving through Education”. We carefully formulate our course price that can justify the effort, time and service offered but at the same time will not burn a hole in your pocket.
Since we started from bottom up (as community), we know this problem well as we do received complaints and enquiries. When we now have entered the industry as a business, our top down approach is to educate people on the importance of high quality teaching and price that is justified. After all, watersports are all about safety, and safety doesn’t come cheap.
The second problem that turns into opportunity is most people never thought a ladies duo are able to enter and spearhead a business in this industry. There is still some bias but at many times, this issue is not giving us much trouble to ourselves. Thankfully, we met more good people in this industry than the bad ones.
8. What do you wish you’d done differently?
Honestly, we are quite happy on how things work out even there are many things that we can do better. This is still a learning process for us and we are bunch of happy students.
9. What are you glad you did?
We are glad that we have started in the business as a community of enthusiasts rather than straight away as a business entity. With community approach, there are many things we learnt and shared with others. People felt closer to us because as community, we speak for the majority, and we voice out concerns of public. As community we also serve as a platform to get neutral opinions from others.
Even when we have entered the business, we will maintain this community approach and will be socially involved with the mass to see and listen to the community needs and serve them appropriately. We are like a gap filler in this industry.
10. Where do you see yourself and your business in a year’s time?
By 2017, we hoped that we can achieve our goal of creating a reliable swim and diving professionals. What we plan to do is not only to develop them to be skilful, but also we intend to embed business skills to them and help them create a sustainable business.
In 1 year time, I might not be in the water as much as I’d like to, but I hoped it can be replaced with quality time teaching other enthusiast making water sports as their way of living through viable business.
11. Words of wisdom
We are Malaysia’s Most Active Watersports Community, promoting zero to reliable in skills development and safe freediving through education.
12. Please give your contact details so that your target audience will know how to reach you.
Community Website : www.divher.com
Swim Community Page : www.fb.com/berenangitubest
Dive Community Page : www.fb.com/divher
Lady divers group : www.fb.com/groups/missdivers
Freedivers Group : www.fb.com/groups/freedivher
Business (Swimming) : www.bibswimming.com
Business (Diving) : www.bibdivher.com
Swim teacher Course : www.swimssi.asia
Email : info@bibswimming.com | info@bibdivher.com
Tel : 016-3900 131 (Mas) | 012-920 8994 (Wana)