How it all happened OR What is Dive Cooperative

I don’t really know how it all happened. Last year, when Michael was visiting me in Cozumel, he was saying, “Listen, you practically live here now, why not open a dive shop? Of course, you don’t want to compete with Aldora or anybody else on the island, but why don’t you just focus on our compatriots and open Cozumel up for Russian divers from Russia. There is none on the island and that mistake has to be corrected pronto!” I was saying “yeah, yeah, sure”, but I wasn’t serious about it, not at all. Then he started bringing it up in conversations (and with Michael every conversation ends up to be about diving, you just cannot avoid it), engaging me more and more into believing that we can lure the rich Russians in with the right sort of marketing (for example, displaying total arrogance is a great sales technique with the Russian richies nowadays, believe it or not). I didn’t even notice when exactly the tables turned and all of a sudden it was me who was firing suggestions at him, “Aha, we could do exploratory expeditions and if they discover any new cool dive site, they will have the privilege of naming it” or “We should promote it as an authentic, rough experience. No luxury hotels, on the contrary, something very basic. I think it has more appeal for them”… Michael even came up with the name – Divers of FortuneJ.

Still, it was all just talk until… Sherief broke his legs in a motorbike accident. Sherief always has a myriad of business ideas. His brain is constantly busy with evaluating money-making opportunities. However, due to his severe ADD, so common in our day and age, he finds himself totally unable to focus on anything for a long time and as a consequence so far all his great ideas have been just that, great ideas. Well, I have long ago accepted the fact that I can produce 0 brilliant “start-up” ideas. What I do very well, however, is expand on the brilliant ideas of others and produce a zillion of little “operating” ideas (no less brilliant, I have to modestly report) to drive the original idea home. I am also very good at focusing on a task at hand for as long as it takes to implement it. So in that sense Sherief and I are a perfect match. We talked a lot with Sherief about his dream of opening a dive academy on the island and his quest to propel recreational diving to new levels. And suddenly it became clear that we should combine Michael’s original idea with all Sherief’s original ideas. When we first said it aloud, it resonated well in all of us, it just made sense. And we decided to go for it.

As a result of this amalgamation, Dive Cooperative is not your regular dive shop. Of course, we offer the usual diving options, but also we aim at becoming an accredited dive academy and strive to revolutionize recreational diving by fusing it with elements of tech diving philosophy and technique. We are also explorers, determined to find new interesting dive sites on Cozumel, and we invite our clients to join us for these exploration expeditions. And last but not least, we recognize and honor the necessity of giving back to the community. Hence our ambition - building a community outreach program to promote greater inclusion of low income and underprivileged local children into the sport of scuba diving, as well as to increase general participation and interest in scuba diving, cultural awareness, marine environment and conservation. We plan funding this program through grants and membership contributions.

Our goals are ambitious, but I think that in time we can reach them all. And all because of the coolest competitive edge we have – all of us. Our personalities, cultural experiences, professional career paths and set of skills are so different and almost all-encompassing that it’ll be easy for us to tackle anything that comes up in the process of creating and operating a business. Time will tell how good we are. I am excited to find out.