How One Cairns Operator Built a 20-Year Talent Pipeline From Scratch
Peppi Iovanella owns three tourism businesses – Down Under Cruise and Dive, Billy Tea Safaris and The Adventure Company. But it’s the marine arm of the operation that holds one of the most consistent recruitment track records in Far North Queensland tourism. For twenty years, around 30 people have joined Down Under Cruise and Dive each year with zero background in the marine industry. Most of them stay for a decade or more. Several have gone on to run the business.
It’s a simple formula that most operators talk about but few actually commit to: hire for attitude, train for skill, and invest properly in both.
Three Brands, One Philosophy
Since 1989, Iovanella’s operation has grown to around 60 staff across three distinct businesses — reef cruising and diving, outback safari touring, and adventure travel — plus the reservations, bus driving and brochure distribution functions that keep it all running. It’s a genuinely varied workforce, spanning generations: skippers in their 50s and beyond, dive masters and instructors in their 30s and 40s, and a front-of-house team of 20-somethings handling the customer-facing roles.
What holds that mix together isn’t a shared résumé. It’s a shared standard.
Hiring the Person, Not the CV
Ask Iovanella what he looks for in a new recruit, and industry experience barely rates a mention. Work ethic and attitude come first — every time. It means the applicant pool is wide open to people who’ve never set foot on a dive boat or worked in tourism, which is exactly the point.
But “hire for attitude” isn’t a slogan here — it’s a process. New candidates go through a one-day trial, working alongside the existing team on the job itself. Crucially, it isn’t management who makes the final call. It’s the staff. They’re the ones who decide whether the newcomer pulls their weight, shows initiative, works well with others, and — just as importantly — whether they’d actually enjoy having them around for the next ten years.
That last part matters more than it sounds. A team member who fits well strengthens the whole crew. One who doesn’t can quietly undermine it. Getting selection right at the very start is, in Iovanella’s view, the single biggest factor separating businesses that retain staff from those stuck in a permanent hiring cycle.
Building Skills From the Ground Up
Once someone’s in, the real investment begins. All training is developed and delivered in-house — nothing off-the-shelf — covering everything from reservations and driving through to boat operations. Depending on the role, onboarding takes anywhere from one to four weeks. For the roles that matter most — dive masters, skippers, all-round boat crew — the company commits to a six-month training pathway, taking someone with no prior skills and building them into a fully capable operator.
The price tag for training up top-tier roles runs to $10,000–$20,000 per person. That’s a serious number for any small-to-medium tourism business to carry, and it’s a number Iovanella is upfront about. It’s not framed as a cost to be minimised — it’s treated as the price of a workforce that actually knows what it’s doing and actually wants to be there.
There’s a catch, and it’s a fair one: if a trained-up recruit doesn’t have a position to move into once training is complete, they’re not kept on regardless. It’s not training for training’s sake — it’s training tied directly to the needs of the business, which keeps the investment sustainable rather than open-ended.
Proof in the Promotions
The clearest evidence that this model works isn’t a policy document — it’s the org chart. One former trainee, hired with no marine background, is now the company’s Operations Manager. Another started the same way and is now a Skipper. A third came through the same pipeline and is now an Engineer with the company.
These aren’t exceptions. They’re the expected outcome of a system built to grow people, not just fill rosters.
Retention Without Relying on Luck
The average tenure across the team sits at an extraordinary 10 to 20 years. In an industry known for high seasonal turnover, that’s a standout figure — and it’s not accidental.
Above-award wages play a part. So does the core group of staff who return year after year, season after season, forming a stable backbone the business scales up around during peak periods and eases back during quieter months. But Iovanella is clear that the real driver goes back to that first decision: pick the right person, invest properly in them, and retention takes care of itself.
It doesn’t mean turnover is zero. In one particularly tough year, the business lost three long-standing staff — one to a different industry, one who moved home to Japan, and one who retired. Even Iovanella’s model can’t account for life happening. What it can do is make sure there’s always someone coming up behind them.
Always a Pipeline, Never a Gap
Perhaps the most quietly impressive part of the whole approach is the planning behind it. Training isn’t reactive — it’s constant. New talent is brought through and developed continuously, not just when a vacancy appears, so the business always has people ready to step up for annual leave cover, unexpected departures, or long-term succession into senior roles.
It’s workforce planning most tourism operators talk about in theory. Iovanella has been quietly doing it in practice for two decades.
The Takeaway for Other Operators
There’s no secret formula here, and that’s exactly the point. Down Under Cruise and Dive, Billy Tea Safaris and The Adventure Company haven’t built a 20-year retention record through recruitment agencies, elaborate incentive schemes or poaching experienced staff from competitors. They’ve done it by trusting untrained locals with real potential, giving their existing team a genuine say in who joins them, and backing that decision with real money and real time.
For any business wrestling with staff shortages or turnover, particularly in seasonal or skills-short industries, the lesson is straightforward: stop searching for the perfect candidate on paper, and start investing in the right person in front of you. The skills can be taught. Twenty years of evidence suggests the attitude usually can’t.
Great Barrier Reef Tours from Cairns | Down Under Cruise & Dive
Daintree Rainforest & Cape Tribulation Tours from Cairns | Billy Tea Safaris