When we first met Gerry at the DEMA show in 2011, we had gotten our feet wet for a few years in the SCUBA industry, but not so much with the charter end of the business. It wasn’t until a few months after putting EncomPos in his stores that we realized we still had a lot to learn from this industry. Now, six years later, Jupiter Dive Center is running stronger than ever and EncomPos is all the better for it.
We’ll admit that first year was rough going at times. Lewis had spent the better part of the previous year working with Gary Mace to build the sync between EncomPos Retail and Scubaocity and Jupiter Dive Center was going to be the first store using it.
With his store being one of the busiest dive charter outfitters on the east coast of Florida, he had more charters and reservations than we had ever imagined. Gerry’s favorite thing to say during those times was “If it can be broken, we’ll be the ones to break it.” Did we mention that Gerry’s one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet?
Up to this point in developing the software, we had been feeling pretty good about what we had to offer SCUBA. It’s actually one of the most demanding industries to program for due to the complexity of the data being tracked, with rentals, class, trip and charter signups, deposits, work orders, service tracking.
The features needed for this industry goes on and on, and for years it seemed as though every new dive shop did the same things but in a completely different way than the others. But we had finally gotten to a point where the software was really becoming a useful tool for our dive shops.
It took the better part of another year to make our dive charter system and sync to Scubaocity the seamless tool it is today. We’ve improved our group reservation interface and expanded the options feature to provide the speed and efficiency needed when checking in a store full of customers.
And for those busy summer days, the staff at Jupiter Dive can view their calendar in a format that shows them the details they need to get their customers checked in and back in the water.
We’ve picked up quite a few more dive shops that specialize in dive charters since then and continue to learn more each year. The daily phone calls from Adam, Gerry’s manager are a thing of the past and when we do get to see or hear from Gerry we’re more likely to hear him say “I love you guys!”
And while we miss hearing Gerry say his old line, we really like his new one much more.
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