Atlantic Diving Supply’s founder Big Mike--an avid diver in the Norfolk, VA area - has a belief that every individual should go diving at least once so that they might see the world looks like from underneath the water. While running a local dive shop that offers training and equipment rentals in Virginia Beach, some of his dive instructors (who happened to be Navy SEALs and military working divers) commented that the students had better equipment than they did when serving as members of the armed forces. Big Mike knew this was an opportunity to serve the community that serves the nation— working with his son, Luke Hillier, they were able to bring together their diving knowledge and applied it to the needs outlined by his Navy SEAL dive instructors to develop equipment solutions for use by the Department of Defense. That’s when ADS was born.

Today, ADS is a top 50 Federal Government Contractor. The company offers custom kits and mission-ready solutions that fit the unique needs of the Department of Defense, field medics, aircraft maintenance crews, State and Local law enforcement and firefighting agencies, and (of course) dive search and rescue teams.

As ADS grew, the company’s leadership “recognized the need for taking information out of emails, hand-written notes, or back-office systems and moving it into one, centralized enterprise platform,” said John Scardino, Business Analyst and Salesforce Admin for ADS.

The team turned to the FedRAMP-authorized Salesforce Government Cloud to deploy a modern, digital platform capable of supporting the organization as their business grew and their competitive landscape changed, enabling them to maintain a strict focus on the customers at the heart of the mission.

ADS’ IT services team started with Sales Cloud, developing an enterprise-wide CRM that gave the right employee the right access to mission-critical data exactly when the needed it. “We're really using all parts to drive collaboration internally, and bring together one complete value prop to customers and suppliers,” said Scardino.

They configured the CRM to support the company’s many functional areas, including its warehouse division, finance teams, and marketing organization. “Data is only as good as what you put in. Over time, we learned how important that is, and thus we’re very proactive about it,” said Chris Philbrick, Vice President of Marketing at ADS. “For years now, our mission as a team is to be one that is data-driven. Salesforce has really helped us make decisions based on data.”

Next, they layered on Service Cloud, including features like Knowledge which extend an intelligent, client-centric view to the ADS Customer Loyalty team responsible for providing quality, post-sale services. Since then, the company’s cloud footprint has grown to include Event Monitoring, Identity Connect, Sandbox, and more.