The reasons for that are obvious:

The Razor System was developed to have ONE system which withstand all tasks and challenges when going for exploration cave dives. Moving from that towards open water basic training is easier than the other way around.

What works in tough and demanding environment obviously also works in lakes and seas.

Courses were customized parallel to introduce divers of all levels to Razor Side Mount diving in different dive conditions and practise important muscle memory on skills needed for more challenging dives.

Additional equipment like lights, reels & spools, markers, stages and DPVs were integrated into the associated levels and allowed students to evolve their side mount experience. All components of the system have its function and build a solid base for basic skills before moving on to more demanding tasks.

But quite often Steve and HP needed to spend additional days in open water just to practise these basic skills with divers before they could finally progress with the actual booked cave classes. And customers requested available courses in their home countries before flying over to Mexico to dive the caves.

In order to cover the training accordingly more instructor courses in Europe and Asia were scheduled in 2013 to spread the philosophy even further out. Experienced instructors in these areas were chosen carefully by their training and Side Mount background, language skills and then personally trained alomost exclusively by HP Hartmann.

Instructor Courses were held in Germany, Switzerland and Indonesia. By the end of 2013 the total number of Razor Instructors had increased to a total of 21 covering the following countries:

UK, Switzerland, Mexico, Brasil, USA, France, Germany, Poland, Slovenia, Malaysia, Indonesia, Singapore, South-Korea, China, Hong Kong and Japan.
In the following years further courses were held in Mexico, Italy, Germany, on Malta, Cebu (Philippines) and on Bali (Indonesia).

By the end of 2022 the number increased to 86 Razor Instructors worldwide. Those new instructors covered now additional countries like Austria, Italy, Spain, Malta, Dubai, Argentinia and Columbia.

We think it is quite obvious to see that our focus is not a high quantity of instructors but insuring quality of our courses.
We encourage team work and mutual support even though we all serve the same market. We highly believe we are stronger together and able to learn and benefit from each other.
We tried and keep trying to find loyal individuals who still actively teach and dive and are open to continue their own education with the Razor System.

Our philosophy always said out loud and clear that chosing the right equipment is only half of the success. The other half of it is proper training by an instructor familiar with the system and its components. This interaction between equipment setup and defined, specific skill training with it ensures a solid training for Razor divers and the ones becoming one.

We are proud and honored to have so many skilled and well known Instructors and Instructor-Trainers worldwide joining our small Razor Instructor Team!