Level Up Your Route: Scaling Like a Pro

Ready to earn more without adding more hours to your week? We break down three practical paths pool pros use to scale: hiring your first tech with clean pricing and standards, selling select accounts for lump‑sum cash, and building passive income that compounds over time. You’ll hear the exact numbers, the customer conversations that make handoffs smooth, and the realistic headaches to expect so you can plan around them.

We start with a readiness check: if your monthly rate can’t support wages, payroll taxes, workers’ comp, chemicals, and admin while leaving a margin, hiring will backfire. From there, we map a ride‑along training plan, why a company truck reduces risk, and how to prep clients so they’re comfortable with a new face on the route. We run conservative math: paying a tech per pool using a 4.3-week multiplier, estimating a $50 net per account at 50 stops, and showing how that can conservatively add ~$30,000 a year. Scale that approach with density and QA, and you understand how larger firms turn process into profit.

If you’re allergic to payroll, try the route-cycling strategy. Partner with builders, grow to ~90 stops, then sell a 15‑pool package each year—often worth close to 10–12 months of revenue—dropping a sizable check into the business while you reset to a tight 75 and rebuild. It’s a simple loop that improves route quality and protects your time. We also look beyond the backyard: small multifamily with DSCR loans, or cash‑heavy businesses like coin laundries, can provide tax advantages and durable cash flows that don’t depend on your daily schedule.

• Readiness checks for hiring and pricing
• Per‑pool pay math using a 4.3 multiplier
• Customer prep and selective handoff strategy
• Training plans, trucks, insurance, and QA
• Conservative profit scenarios and scaling logic
• Annual route‑sale model with builders
• Real estate and DSCR loans for passive income
• Tax advantages, deductions, and CPA guidance
• Mindset of stewardship and sustainable growth

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Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Goal: Scale Smarter
• 2:30 Are You Ready To Scale
• 4:10 Hiring Costs And Pricing Math
• 7:33 Customer Prep And Employee Fit
• 10:43 Profit Scenarios And Management
• 13:54 Training, Trucks, And Tax Strategy
• 17:16 Scale By Building Then Selling Routes

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 1:02

Hey, welcome to the Pool Guy Podcast Show. In this episode, I'm gonna go over ways to scale your business. And there are different ways to scale, and I'm gonna just give you a few categories that you may be able to apply to your business to scale your route. And this is working the same amount of hours but making a lot more money. Are you a pool service pro looking to take your business to the next level? Join the pool guy coaching program. Get expert advice, business tips, exclusive content, and get direct support. From me, I'm a 35-year veteran in the industry. Whether you're starting out or scaling up, I've got the tools to help you succeed. Learn more at swimming poollearning.com. The first thing is to understand if you're ready to scale your business or not. And this is a critical question because if you're not ready to scale, it can become a disaster. And there are certain things you need to get in place to scale properly. You also have to know which direction you want to scale. Do you want to scale within the pool industry or do you want to scale somewhere outside the pool industry where you can develop some passive income or income, future income or investment income? And it's up to you to decide what's best for you. There are a lot of single polars that scale outside the industry and are very successful in other avenues. I I gave this example before, but I know a pool pro that's really successful with coin-operated laundry machines. He has two or three locations now, and he has someone that goes in there that fixes the machines for him when they break down, and he also has someone that collects the money. So it's a very passive income outside of his regular pool service income. And I'll touch on more ways to scale aside the industry later on. Now, I mentioned you have to be ready to scale. You have to be ready for some headaches that are involved when you bring on an employee part-time or full-time. And you have to do a really good calculation of how much profit you're gonna actually make by bringing on an employee. You have to see how much is gonna cost for the payroll taxes, workers comp, are you gonna pay them per per pool or hourly? All those are factors in the overall cost of the employee. Now, your route rate should be set up to cover the cost of the employee, and if it's not, then you're not ready to bring on an employee because then you're gonna lose money. So you'll have to calculate how much is going towards payroll, payroll taxes, workers' comp, and other expenses with the employee. And then you have to also be ready with the customers, they have to be prepped to accept an employee doing their pool. This is probably one of the biggest hurdles if you've been a single poller and you're doing someone's pool for a long time and you bring in an employee, they may not like that fact, they they like dealing with you directly, and this takes a lot of work to get them to accept the employee. You have to make sure you pick a really good employee that's gonna stick with it as well, because if the employee lasts six months or nine months and you bring someone else in, that's even worse in that situation. So you have to really pick carefully. A lot of times the customer doesn't really care who's doing their pool, but there is that percentage that does care, and that's something they have to be aware of, and also try to mitigate those problems before they even begin. You know, you can say that you've grown really big in your service business, you would like to retain all your accounts, especially their pool. And would it be okay if you try out an employee on their pool, someone that's gonna do things exactly like yourself, you've you're gonna train them to be just like you and see how they take it. Kind of do like a kind of survey kind of thing with those tougher customers to see how that's gonna work. And sometimes you're gonna have to just keep some customers on your partial route and give the employee those pools where you know the customer doesn't care who services their pool, who's in their backyard. Some other challenges, of course, are if the employee doesn't do a good job and then you have to go out there and fix things, you know, pools are turning green, they have algae, or the employee doesn't show up and you have to cover the route. So, all these are definitely things to think about when you're bringing on a full-time or part-time employee. These are things on the negative end. On the positive end, of course, if you have your monthly service rate set up correctly to where you can absorb an employee and still make good money, then of course that's a win-win situation if you look at the on the income side of things, and you can do a quick calculation. Let's just say that let's just say you're charging 180 a month for pool service, you bring in an employee and you're paying him$18 per pool. That's$77. It's actually$18 times 4.3. I use the 4.3 multiplier because you have those extra weeks, and you probably got to pay the employee paid vacation as well as a benefit. And so they're gonna get paid even if they don't do the pool during those four weeks that they're off. So that's the multiplier I'm using. So 77 minus 180, that gives you$100 basically, and then from that$100, you're going to have to factor in the payroll tax you're paying every month, the workers' comp that you're paying, and other things that you're paying, and that you know, chemical costs and everything. But you should still be able to make a pretty decent profit at that point, even if you make a lot less than if you were doing the pool yourself. And let's just say, for sake of argument, to keep it simple, that you're gonna be netting. I'm gonna keep this really low just because this could happen, and it unlikely, but let's just say you're netting fifty dollars per account that the employee is servicing. Let's say he's doing 50 pools for you, so fifty dollars times fifty, that's twenty five hundred times twelve. So that's thirty thousand dollars a year, and that's on the low end, of course, that your rate's low, you're paying the employee probably a pretty decent per pool rate right there at that one. It's a pretty high rate in some areas, some areas that may not may be pretty accurate. And then if you are doing that, you're deducting everything that you're all the expenses that you're incurring, and you end up with 30,000 extra a year. It may just be worth the headache of dealing with a few times when the employee doesn't make it out there, or those few times where he may drop the ball and the pool has a problem, and you have to go out there and deal with it, but that's still 30,000 extra at on the low end there every year that you're getting with really really doing minimal effort on your end, you know, just kind of managing the employee and managing problems that come up, and so that's pretty lucrative. You can actually bring on two employees at that point then and have sixty thousand. Now you have to have your route large enough to where this is logical, but it's really doable out there if you have the right people and pick the right people. Now it's very difficult in some areas to find the right person for this and to do this correctly. And this is why you see a lot of big companies, you know, consolidating routes and buying pool companies and expanding and having a lot of employees because I mean, if you do the math here, even on a low end, if you had 10 employees, if your pool route was big enough and you had 10 employees and you're netting about 30,000 per employee, that's$300,000 a year. That's a lot of money. You have a manager, maybe, you have other managers, and you have repair techs, things like that. So there's a lot of money in scaling your business. Of course, you may just want to start with one part-time employee, and there's different ways of doing it. There's two ways you can bring on an employee, and I think it's really successful if you bring on an employee that rides along with you, probably for at least a good one month to six weeks, and they're just kind of like a ride-along partner with you. You're paying them, they're learning the pools, and you're training them to where once they're on their own, they can do the pools. And most of the time, you would want to provide a work truck vehicle for them and a gas card, you know, so that they have a dedicated work truck under your company. You can kind of get away with having them use their own vehicle, but there's a lot of gray areas if they're an employee driving their own vehicle, and you may not want to enter those kind of murky areas, you just would want to get a truck. And you can write all these expenses off on your taxes, by the way. So that's the nice thing about having an employee because it does create a tax burden on your end, and you can deduct more off of your income with these deductions, you know, the cost of the vehicle, the cost of fuel, all these things go towards your business expenses. So it is kind of a good thing on the other end of it when you're filing. You'd have to have a good CPA that walks you through, you know, is an employee something that you can bring on, and is this something that's logical? And then even in the smaller details of this, if you have a spouse that you want to bring in to do bookkeeping and do accounting for you and pay them, this also may be a way to offset a lot of your corporate tax if you're incorporated, and this is something to consider as well. So these are all different things you can, of course, talk with your professional tax advisor with, and they can help you fine-tune all of this. Let's say that you just don't like the idea of bringing on an employee, but you still want to scale, you don't want to turn down those accounts, and you can manage, let's say, 80 pools pretty comfortably on your pool route, and you just like getting new accounts, and you don't want to turn down business, and there's a way to scale here as well, and this is more or less scaling your income, but also not keeping the pools. So, let me just describe this way of scaling. And this is done successfully in a lot of areas where you're working with a builder, the builder's throwing a lot of pools your way, you're securing a lot of brand new accounts with all new equipment, new pool surface, all this is really nice to have on your pool route, and you're just building it up and you're a single polder, and you just don't want to keep these accounts. So you you're doing 80 pools, then you get to 90 pools, and what you can do is that you can sell off about 15 of the pools that you've been doing for a year. And if you're working with a builder, this is really easy to do because you can tell the customer, yeah, I'll be servicing the pools for for the builder. At some point, I'm going to transition to another service company for you. But in the meantime, for the next year, year and a half, I'll be doing the pool directly for the builder. Any problems you have, I can help you get some warranty work through the builder, and after that time, I'm going to transition you to another service company. You can have that conversation with them if you'd like to, or you can have the conversation when you do sell those pools. But let's just say you sell off 15 pools, and let's just for the for sake of argument, let's say you're charging 185 a month, and so that's uh 185, that's 2775 times 12 multiplier. So for about 30 to 33,000, you can sell these 15 pools to someone. Let's just say 30,000, you sell these 15 pools, and you just put 30,000 in the bank, and you're back down to 75 pools, and then you start building back up to 90 again, and then you sell another 15 the following year, that's another 30,000. So after three years of doing this, you have$90,000 from doing this. So very similar to the income you would have with an employee, the$30,000 example that I gave you earlier. But this way, you really have no headaches, you just have a little extra work because you're doing 10 extra pools, you know, 10 pools more than you normally would do. But then you'll break that and sell those and get down to 75 again and start working your way up again. So it's definitely a way to scale as well. You're not actually building your pool route up, but you are scaling economically or financially or with your income, I should say, make it clear here. And you're also getting a tighter and better route because you're keeping some of these really sweet pools, and your route is going to be just one of those where you're in and out, and you're actually looking for things to do at the service account because the pool is such a sweet pool. So that's another way to scale. If you're working with a builder, you're getting a lot of new builds, and you don't want to bring on somebody, you can scale this way very successfully. And there are several people that I know that are doing this, and it's really lucrative because you're selling some really nice pools too, and the person buying them is getting a really nice partial route. They're not all junky pools, they're all new builds basically, and it's really easy to transition because you can just tell the customer that you did the pool for a year for the builder, and now you're transitioning their pool over to the person you always give it to, you know, crystal clear pool pools or whatever, and you know, figure out a way to explain it logically to the customer, and you wouldn't have any problem doing this because this model again is very successful and is being utilized by a lot of pool pros out there currently. And the third way that I'll describe scaling here is scaling outside the industry. Even if you're a single polar, you could put a lot of money into your savings and you can use that money to again buy a business, like I mentioned, the coin laundry, you can buy rental real estate, which I think pool pros are really set up to do because you have good customer service skills already. You can talk to people, so talking to a tenant is no different than talking to a service customer, and you kind of know the area of your city or know the surrounding areas really well because you drive through all the neighborhoods and you know the good areas, you know, class A areas, class B, class C. And so you're not going to make a mistake of buying something that's in a really bad area that you can't get anyone to rent. So those are some advantages you have built in, and you don't really need a lot to get started. You just need about 25% for a down payment. So if you're looking at something that's half a million dollars, you would need about 125 down. Realistically, you would want to have about 150,000 because they're going to want some reserves, and then you can buy a multifamily property and then rent it out with the DSCR loans available now, which is loans that are based on the rental income of the property and not on your income. It's really easy for someone self-employed to get one of these loans, and it's something that you can do, and you can scale by buying something every two or three years, let's say, you know, putting that money to work to do that, and it's something that if you have three or four of these things, and eventually they're gonna, if you don't do anything for 30 years, you're gonna be paid off, you're gonna have some really good income later, and possibly some pretty good income currently as you're renting them and you're able to draw some income. Plus, on the flip side of that, that gives you a really great tax advantage with the IRS with real estate or a small business on the side. So if you are looking for ways to maximize your tax advantages, i.e., paying a lot less income taxes, this is a great way to do it. Again, your CPA would be able to guide you and let you know what the best way to scale outside the industry, but of course, I think the real estate is ideal for most pool pros to jump into. The bottom line is that this industry or this profession gives you the ability to scale in one avenue or another, and it would be really foolish not to use this aspect of the pool service business to scale. You know, there's a parable in the Bible about talents, you know, someone gets 10 talents, someone gets five, someone gets one, and the person that gets ten doubles them and gets twenty. The one that had five doubles it and gets ten. And the one that had one talent kind of buried it in the dirt and didn't invest it or do anything with it. And if you read that particular verse, you'll see what happens to that servant that got that one talent. It didn't turn out well for him. And the point is that you're given these resources and you should utilize them by scaling and multiplying your business, especially in pool service, where it's really a golden opportunity to do this, working the same amount of hours roughly, but making a lot more income by scaling your business. Looking for other podcasts, you can find those on my website, swingpoollearning.com. There's I have a podcast icon at the top, and you have over 1800 podcasts that you can listen to there. And if you're interested in the coaching program, you can learn more at poolgatecoaching.com. Thanks for listening to this podcast. Have a great rest of your week and God bless.