Scaling Up: How to Build a Bigger, Better Pool Route

Growing a pool service business comes down to clear choices and honest math: buy a route, build organically, or blend both. Each path has tradeoffs in cash, time, and risk. Buying through a trusted broker can deliver instant revenue and a safety net, but it requires real capital and commitment. Building through ads and local outreach can be cheaper per account, but it demands relentless effort and tight tracking. The right choice depends on your market’s competition, your cash access, and how quickly you need dependable monthly revenue.

Route purchases can be a smart investment when you treat them like an asset, not a gamble. Most brokered routes trade near 12 times monthly billing, which implies a one-year payback if retention holds. You’re not waiting a year to see money—cash flow starts day one—but mentally assigning that revenue to repay the purchase keeps you disciplined. Brokers add value with short safety periods and seller training, which matters when some sellers vanish after closing. If you finance with a home equity line of credit, understand you’re “all in.” Buying a partial route can de-risk your entry, letting you learn which pools to keep, which to swap, and how to manage density without overextending.

We share a practical roadmap to grow a pool service business with real numbers, clear tradeoffs, and field-tested plays. From buying a partial route to building a referral engine and partnering with builders, we map the paths that scale without wasting cash.

• when buying a route makes sense and why broker safety nets matter
• financing realities, payback math, and retention risks
• organic growth via Google Ads, Yelp, HomeAdvisor, and Thumbtack
• door hangers and targeted mailers that lower cost per account
• market differences that favor partial route purchases
• referral rewards that convert and sustain growth
• builder partnerships and NPC startup methods for easy wins
• simple metrics for route density, churn, and margins

Join the pool guy coaching program. Get expert advice, business ti

Support the Pool Guy Podcast Show Sponsors! 

HASA 
https://bit.ly/HASA

The Bottom Feeder. Save $100 with Code: DVB100
https://store.thebottomfeeder.com/

Try Skimmer FREE for 30 days:
https://getskimmer.com/poolguy 

Get UPA Liability Insurance $64 a month! https://forms.gle/F9YoTWNQ8WnvT4QBA

Pool Guy Coaching: https://bit.ly/40wFE6y

Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Growth Gameplan
• 2:16 Buying A Pool Route: Pros And Cons
• 6:08 Financing Realities And Payback Math
• 10:45 Broker Safety Nets And Private Deals
• 15:28 Organic Growth And Ad Channels

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 1:02

Hey, welcome to the Pool Guy Podcast Show. In this episode, I'm going to talk a little bit about growing your pool service business as you gear up for the upcoming season. Or if you're in the midst of the season in your area, here are some ways you can actually grow your business, and I'll give you some tips on how to do this the most effective way, of course, based on the competition and the availability of service accounts in your area. 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 swimmingpoollearning.com. I often get asked if buying a pool route is a good idea, and I'm going to say that yes, under certain circumstances, it's actually a great idea if done correctly. The ideal with national pool route sales, that's the broker that I prefer to work with, and I've been working with them probably for five or six years now, maybe even longer. I think longer than that, I should say. And we have a somewhat of a partnership, it's not really a huge partnership. Basically, I'll allow someone who buys a pool route to join my coaching group for six months free, and they had the benefit of having my coaching while they're kind of learning the ropes. Of course, they're trained by the seller, and the seller should be communicating with them to help them out. Sometimes sellers just sell it and leave, and that's part of what happens. And so I step in there and I'm just kind of like a little bit of a support for them. And it's something that you have to think about when you buy a pool route. You're investing a large amount of cash basically, or funds you're getting from maybe an equity line of credit, because you cannot fund a pool route any other way. You can't get an SPS loan or small business loan because there's no physical, unless you're buying a store, of course, or pool route with a store, there's no physical location to the pool route. And so no bank is gonna lend you money for something that's not really tangible. You don't have an address to give them except your home address, and this is not gonna work out. There's no banker on earth who's gonna give you$150,000 to buy, you know, a pool route of intangible assets, really, the bank can't secure anything against. So the money has to come from either the cash you've saved up, investments you cash out. I mean, if you have a 401k and you cash out some money there, it's probably not super advisable. And home equity line of credit is probably the easiest way to access money to buy a pool route. So you're all in basically if you do this. It's like if you become, if you go to school to become a doctor, you're spending$500,000 to become an MD. And if you become a doctor for a year and say, eh, I don't really like it, I'm gonna go do something else. I think I'll I'll, you know, I'm gonna do, you know, I'm gonna become a professional fly fisher or whatever, you know, or I'm gonna race cars for a living, a NASCAR. You have a$500,000 debt, you're never gonna pay that off doing kind of these other things unless you're like really good at it. And it's something that you have to think about. That investment's never gonna pay off if you don't become a doctor. Same thing with the pool route. If you invest$100,000,$150,000 into it, you have to be all in to make this thing work. And so it's something to consider, but it's something also to realize that you may want to buy just a partial route in that case. You know, get started. Most of the pools you're gonna buy through a broker are at 12 times the monthly income. Logically speaking, you're going to pay off your investment in 12 months, 12 times, 12 months, and then after that first year, that income is gonna be yours. Let's just say you're buying a 20 route pool route, they're getting 180 dollars per month, that's 2160 per pool then per year times 20, that's 43,200. So you invest$43,000 in year one, you have zero income because you're gonna if you look at it as just a straight, you know, purchasing the route, not getting any money the first year, and then the second year you're gonna get that income. So it's actually not a terrible investment. It does take a lot of activity on your part to do this. Now, with natural with national pool route sales, if you lose two of these accounts, and if you if it's not your fault within their their 90-day safety net period, they'll give you the money back for those accounts, so they'll credit you back, you know, 4,000 to 300 and I'm doing quick math in my head, 320 if that happens. So that's the benefit of a buying it from a broker, is you have that safety net. Now, of course, if you're at your supplier and a pool guy has like 10 pools for sale and you're selling them really cheap, you can't buy those. The risk is probably low because you know you're only buying 10 pools and you're getting a discount, you don't have any safety net, but you probably don't need one if that's the case. So there is some benefit with purchasing a route because you have kind of an instant route, and you if you look at it mathematically, of course, you're investing the cash, so you are getting income. Now, I did say that at 43,200 you're getting nothing that first year, but you're actually getting that money every month, I should say. You know, let me break it down monthly here. So 43,200, you are getting 3,600 a month gross from those 20 pools. I just said you're not making any money because you're paying off that debt basically the first year, but the money's coming in, so you're having instant income with those 20 pools, and then you can build on that and you know get pools here and there in that area by advertising, you know, door hangers, you you know, get you know, direct mailers, uh, Google ads, things like that. And so that's the second way to grow. And so I'm kind of morphed into the second way to grow by talking about the first way to grow, which is buying a pool route or a partial route. So the second way to grow is just organically. Now, of course, if you're spending two or three thousand dollars a month on advertising on Google Ads and Yelp and Home Advisor, Thumbtack, I don't know, maybe you can buy pools cheaper than spending that money depending on how many leads you get. So it's all mathematics. Can you buy 10 or 15 pools versus advertising and hustling and getting out there? Now, all those services I just mentioned, except for Google Ads, they're not quite as aggressive. They email you, they're not gonna bug you as much, they may call you, but Yelp, Home Advisors, Thumbtack, all those are sales-driven marketing companies that will really hound you to expand your services, expand your area, and they all cost money, real money to get into to help you build up your route. Now, some of those are more effective in areas than others. Some people really like them. I have a few people here that really like Yelp, it's been really helpful for them. Some people here also found Yelp not helpful, so it's hit and miss and home advisor. Some people love it, some people hate it. Same thing with Thumbtack. Thumbtack seems to be successful for certain service companies. Like, for instance, I found a lot of companies on Thumbtack that I use as vendors, like house cleaners and things like that, and it seems really successful for them. For pool service, it can be, but you really have to realize that there's a lot of tricks to the trades in these things. Like, for instance, my carpet cleaner had a hard time breaking in the certain some of these apps because people would be advertising$20 per room, and they get to the house and they're like, Well, yeah, the carpet's actually really dirty. It's gonna be like$100 for this room, but they get the lead because they're advertising for$20. In pool service, it's harder to do that. You can't really advertise, you know, pool service for you know$80 or$90 a month and get there and say, Well, yeah, it's gonna be$150 for your pool. You're not gonna get that lead in most cases. So it's harder for us to kind of adjust our our marketing to get in your foot in the door, I should say. So be careful of that, that there are people out there that are gonna undercut you and get their foot in the door before you with some of these services. Google Ads is relatively safe. You know, basically, it'll just put your pool service out there on online if someone's searching for pool service in your area. It does cost a lot of money. I think per dollar, Google Ads is probably more expensive than the other services, but it's a little bit safer in the fact that you know you're competing against maybe three or four other companies advertising on Google in your area, and it's something to consider, depending on again, some marketing strategies are more effective in your area than others. You just kind of have to try them and see which ones work for you. Now, if you have zero pools and you're trying to build organically from that, you really have to work hard. This is your full-time job basically. If you have a full-time job already, you're gonna have two full-time jobs basically if you wanted to do this this way. So be aware that growing organically is not something that you can be like, well, I'm gonna spend$500 on Google this month and see how many pool hits I get. It's really an aggressive thing that has to really be done correctly to be successful, otherwise, you're wasting all that advertising dollars. Now I mentioned door hangers a little earlier. This is actually fairly effective still. Certain areas won't let you walk around the neighborhoods if you're you know in like a gated community. Some gated communities have an HOA pool, so that's kind of out anyway. But door hangers are pretty effective. Just go on Google Maps. You can actually uh use mailing services. There's a service that I think it's called, let me pull it up here so I can give it to you. Here it's a pretty catchy name, so I should have remembered it. It's called pool list usa. So they'll actually even do the mailings for you, so it's pretty it's pretty cool and effective way of doing it. You kind of just have this company do everything for you. Uh pool pool list USA. So they make pretty good flyers too. You know, again, you got to do your dollar per cost. So let's say you spend, let's just say you spend a thousand dollars with this company to get these mailing lists out, and you get two service accounts. That's a pretty good return on your investment, right? There, you know, out of a thousand, you get two service accounts. You may not think that's a lot, but if you just do the math, if you bought those pools and let's say you're charging 180 a month times two times 12, you know, it would be$4,320 to buy these two pools using the math to buy pools with. So spending a thousand with this company to get two pools, not terrible. If you get, of course, five or six pools, then you're golden at that point. Now with Google Ads here in my area of Southern California, the San Gabriel Valley, Inland Empire, Orange County, Los Angeles County, you can probably expect during the summer to get about two leads every to capture two service accounts every week with Google Ads to be effective. It varies by area, but some areas more people are looking for servers in other areas. But we're not in the super competitive area here. There's a lot of pools available. There's you know, there's a finite amount of pool companies doing pools out there, and so it's not like some parts of Florida. You know, I've heard that other parts of the country, like pockets in Florida, like are super competitive, and the only way you can get a route is by purchasing a partial route. And that's okay if that's the way the math works for your area. There really is nothing wrong, again, with purchasing a partial route, if you can handle it. You know, if you let's just say you grew your pool route to 20 pools organically, and you want to kind of jumpstart your business by buying 20 more pools. I say go for it. There's nothing wrong with that. It's actually a really good game plan because you already have 20 pools that you've been servicing and you kind of are familiar with it. So when you buy those 20 pools, you're gonna know right away which pools are good, which pools aren't good. You can kind of remove those and say, you know, I don't want this pool. Can you give me another one instead? That gives you kind of a leg up. There was a a person in Florida, um, his name was Orlando that I interviewed several years back on my podcast that the only thing he would ever do is buy pool routes, and that's how he kind of built himself up, and he became really successful doing that because he knew exactly which routes he wanted to buy. Another guy in Florida that was a group member for many years, he actually got so successful at doing this that he was able to get people contacting him, wanting them to sell pools to him, and they sold them pools really on the cheap, basically, you know, like four times or five times the monthly rate, because he was doing this so much that he was out there doing it, and people were just selling him these pools, and he would just buy them all up. So there are there are ways of doing this successfully by purchasing routes. You can, of course, buy them through a broker or buy them, you know, with a sign at your supply place. Just be aware that there's no guarantee and no safety nets that way. But there's all different ways of doing it. You know, I think there are routes for sale on Craigslist too. I've seen those too. So just be aware of what you're doing, of course. If you're starting out from scratch and you want to buy a pool route, I do recommend you go through a broker because you'll have that safety net and you'll have some owner training, and it's a little bit easier if you're not in the industry. But if you're already in the industry, there are many different ways to build up your business organically, buying a partial route, buying a full route. All these things are ways of doing it. Now, there is a hidden referral system that you can activate with your customers that are existing. I should say your existing customers is probably a better way of saying that. I'm not sure why I said it the other way, but you can do this by offering them a$200 Amazon card if they give you a referral that you keep for three months. I wouldn't give them the money for someone they refer to you, and then after a month they don't continue service. So tell them that there's you know maybe a two-month or three-month time period where you'll give them this$200 Amazon card after a certain period of time. And believe me, if you're giving people two or three hundred dollars in Amazon cards, they're going to be telling everyone in their neighborhood about you and their friends at parties and relatives, and it's a great way to get referrals. You pay for them in a way, but 200 bucks versus$1,000 on Google Ads or$2,000 for an account is a much better deal in my book than anything. So those referrals really pay off. And of course, you have to be good at surfacing their pool to get the referral. You can't like, hey, can you refer me to a uh for$200 and their pool has like algae in it, and you skip it every other week? Probably not gonna get good referrals at that point. But if you're doing a great job, which you should be doing, you're gonna get these referrals, and you can build your entire business on referrals at some point, which is really golden. There are many, many companies here in my area that don't advertise one bit, one penny, not a dime goes into it, and they keep building up their business because of these referrals that they get from existing customers, new customers referring them. All these are great ways of getting customers. And the last one I'll touch on here, and this one I think is really lucrative in certain areas, is to partner with the builder and start doing their startups. You know, give them a pretty good discount on what you're gonna charge them for the startup, and start doing startups for the builder. Get in the people's backyards by starting up their pools, and startups are pretty easy. You know, don't get scared of them. There are things that can go wrong, but the majority of times you can do this. And if you learn the startup method that's effective, just go to the National Plaster Council and National Plaster Council, just Google that, and then they have the startup that they recommend there. Follow that, and you can start up just about any pool effectively using the National Plaster Council startup method, and then you can, you know, of course, be in the backyard doing the startup, and the chances of you getting that service account are much higher because you're already back there doing the startup. So I think that's a great way to get accounts as well. And the nice thing about the new build accounts is that all the equipment is brand new, everything is brand new, and so these are usually sweet and easy accounts to maintain. So don't neglect networking with builders to do startups, even if you have to offer some pretty good discounts to the builder. I would do that because you're in the backyard and you're going to get your foot in the door, foot in the gate, foot in the pool, however you want to put it, and you're gonna be the first one there. And that's usually the person they're gonna hire. They're not gonna be going to the you know online looking for another pool service company. If you're already there in the backyard and you're doing a great job with their startup, they're probably gonna hire you nine out of ten times or ten out of ten times if they are looking for a pool service company. If you're looking for other podcasts, you can of course find those on my website, swingingproollearning.com. Just click on the podcast icon on the banner. There'll be a drop-down menu with over 1800 podcasts there for you. And if you're interested in the coaching program that I offer, you can learn more at poolguycoaching.com. Thanks for listening to this podcast. Have a rest of your week. God bless.