Scuba diving is clearly an experience. It’s not a product, you can’t hold it in your hand. It’s not a service, you don’t have clean carpets or freshly mowed lawn when it’s done.

The thing about scuba diving is that’s done in the middle of the ocean, and nobody lives in the middle of the ocean. The thing about scuba diving is that you have to get there.

Sometimes you have to drive 8 hours from the city to the beach, sometimes you have to fly to another country. And no matter how you get there, once you’re on the beach, you have to get out into the middle of the ocean somehow.

An average dive is 50minutes long, but “Scuba Diving” – that takes waaaaaaay longer.

So when does the scuba diving start?

Does it start when the top of your head dips below the surface of the ocean?
Does it start on the beach when you kit up?
Does it start when you check into the lodge?
Does it start when you leave your house for the dive trip?
Does it start when you make your booking?
Does it start when you start thinking about whether you should go scuba diving?

And when does the scuba diving end? When your head breaches the surface of the water 50minutes later, or is there a bunch of stuff that happens after that…

Given that your 50min scuba dive takes days out of your life, it’s very short sighted for anyone involved in the scuba dive business to think of scuba diving as 50minutes under the ocean.

The hours that a customer spends either side of the actual dive are probably 10x the time spent on the dive.

If those 10x hours are terrible, it almost doesn’t matter how good the dive is, that customer is going to hate you.

And if those 10x hours are a delight, it almost doesn’t matter if the reef is super quiet, that customer will have had a good dive trip. The “dive” is the smallest part of a dive trip.

Let’s think about the skipper – the guy who stands behind the steering wheel of the dive boat – what’s his job?

Some skippers think their job is to steer the boat. To get you from A to B. They’re wrong of course.

The boat ride is merely how they get their job done, but their job is to create a great experience. On almost all dives I’ve been on, the boat ride there and back is longer than the dive. If the skipper is a grouch then everyone on the boat wishes they were doing something else. If the skipper is a delight, then everyone wants to sign up again to dive the next day. When the skipper understands that he’s in the experience economy and not in the boat driving business, everything is better.

The same goes for the dive master, the lodge receptionist, the booking agent and the rest of the crew. Your job isn’t to take a booking, or send an email, or talk about the reef – it’s to play a part in a show. The diving show. Hopefully it’s orchestrated, and hopefully everybody knows their part. But most of all, hopefully everybody understands that it’s a performance and they have a part to play.

It’s the same with your business. You’re not in a car service business, or a law business, or a medical business. You’re in show business. You’re creating an experience within a genre.

If you’re selling legal advice, we expect great legal advice – great legal advice is the table stake for you; you don’t get to play the game without it. But it’s not enough to win the game. Great legal advice is merely the vehicle you use to deliver a great experience, and a great experience is what makes people remember you, what makes people come back, it’s what makes people tell their friends.

You might sell your legal advice in 15, 30, or 60min increments, but the customer experience is probably 10x the time that you spend dispensing the advice. The advice that you think you sell is probably the smallest portion. It’s really important, and it needs to be good, and so does the other 10x.

We host Murder Mystery events. An event is 2hrs long. The planning can be days, weeks or months. The emails, the invoices, the phone calls – the stuff that happens before and after is 10x the duration of the show. The stuff that happens before and after really matters. The stuff that happens before and after the show is part of the show.

The experience around your offering is what sets you apart, and it’s what makes you win, or lose.

So if you’re the one steering the boat, what do you think your job is?