Stop Driving, Start Earning: Building a Tight Pool Route

Driving less can be the biggest raise you give yourself. We dive into how to tighten your pool service route so every mile worked actually pays, from drawing smarter borders to pruning outliers and building compact days that feel smooth even when things go sideways. You’ll hear a clear framework to map clusters, create crossover paths for flexibility, and avoid the trap of taking “just one” out-of-area account that costs you twice in time and stress later.

We get specific about choosing corridors and neighboring cities that balance workload after winds or storms, so you don’t get crushed in one zone while another sits clean. You’ll learn how to handle sensitive account changes with simple, client-friendly language, and how to partner with nearby pros to swap or transfer accounts without burning goodwill. We also break down when it makes sense to buy a small, tight route inside your target area, then sell or let go of far-flung pools to compress your map fast.

To keep the pipeline aligned with your plan, we share practical tactics for targeted Google and Facebook ads, neighborhood canvassing, and a disciplined lead filter that protects your borders. The result is a schedule designed by intent, not chance: day-specific clusters, predictable drive times, and time saved that turns into higher margins or earlier finishes. If you want to earn more by driving less—and keep your sanity when the winds kick up—this conversation gives you the playbook. If it resonates, subscribe, share with a fellow pro, and leave a quick review to help others find it.

• mapping current accounts into clusters
• designing crossover days for flexibility
• setting borders and pruning outliers
• diversifying cities to balance wind and debris
• smooth client transfers without drama
• partner swaps and mini-route purchases
• targeted ads and saying no to bad-fit leads
• day-specific scheduling that saves time

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Chapters

• 0:00 Welcome And Big Promise
• 3:18 Defining A Tight Route
• 4:58 Mapping And Smart Crossover
• 6:23 Dropping, Selling, And Buying Accounts
• 7:58 Setting Territory Borders
• 10:14 City Differences And Wind Zones
• 12:34 Tight By Day, Not Just Radius
• 13:54 How To Transfer Accounts Smoothly
• 15:34 Partner Swaps And Picky Fits
• 17:04 Targeted Ads And Lead Filtering
• 18:34 Avoid The Outlying Account Trap

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 1:51

Hey, welcome to the Pool Guy Podcast Show. In this episode, I'm going to talk to you about how to become more profitable by doing something really simple. And this is not just going to make you profitable, but it's going to make your day a lot easier and more pleasant. And that is having a really tight pool route. 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. Of course, this is much easier said than done, and I realize that. And it's not something that I'm trying to be unrealistic about. Because a lot of times to get tight takes a very long time. Even over a course of years, it may take you that much time to get your route pretty tight into a small community. And then of course, if you're in a rural area, tight means different things. You may just drive five minutes or five miles, you know, whatever, to your next stop. But in an area like mine where you're in a small suburban area and houses in the whole neighborhood would have pools, it's more realistic to get tighter. So how do you start to develop a tight route? Well, first, I think even if the route is not super tight, and everyone has a different definition of tight. Some people are like, well, I want all my pools like in the same community. So I'm in a cul-de-sac and I'm doing 10 pools in one day there, and then I'm another area and I'm doing pools all on the same block. That's a little unrealistic, and it can happen. I'm not saying it won't happen one day, but it's unrealistic to have you know a whole block of pools and you dominate that area and you're doing all the pools. You more or less will have pools scattered about within, you know, driving sometimes just one minute or two minutes, which is ideal, and that's something that you can work towards. But how do you actually kind of get there? Well, the first thing is to map out your service area and to see, like, you know, you can try to get tight by just changing pools around to see if you can make it tighter that way. But also, as I was saying before, I got a little sidetracked there. You will also want to make your pool route cross over. And so you're you're in an area where you're not doing all the same pools in an area on the same day because crossing over is important, especially if you're going to take a few days off and you want to move pools, and if you want to stop by a pool that has a problem, you're crossing over the same general area, which is nice. And you may not, of course, be within five or ten minutes of a pool if you don't have that kind of built in right away. It takes time to kind of get that crossover built as well. So getting tight requires a lot of effort, and it requires you to drop outlying pools or sell outlying pools to someone else, and it may even require you to purchase pools from someone that's in your area that has pools that fit your area that you're trying to get tight in. And how tight do you want? Well, I would think that you would want everything within a radius where you're not driving more than three or four minutes between pools would be ideal. You know, if you're driving five or ten minutes, it's not quite tight, but it's not terrible. And if you're driving five or ten minutes and you're doing pools that are close together at that point as well, that's fairly tight. It may be virtually impossible to get your route so tight that you're just driving two minutes in between each stop every day that you're servicing them. But as long as you're getting more condensed, I should say, where you have maybe a five-minute or ten-minute drive, but then you have three or four pools in that area, it's not terrible. But you just don't want to be so spread out that you're driving five or ten minutes in between each service account, or if you're driving five or ten minutes to do one pool, driving five minutes back the other way to do two or three pools. So kind of get that coordinated, and you'll have to really make a tough decision on where you're gonna actually put your borders of your territory. And this is probably the toughest part of getting tight because you know, are you going east, are you going west, are you going north or south of the route? And is there a particular city that you want? Because here in my area, I'll just give you an example of the San Gabriel Valley. In my area, you have you know Laverne, you have San Dimas, you have Glendora, you have all these areas that are pretty tight together, and you can focus on one city very easily and have your route in that area, or you can have some crossover with cities if you wanted to. Same thing with the inland empire. You have Ontario, you have Fontana, you have Rialto, and you can pick and choose. By the way, those are all really bad areas of the wind, so you want to be careful not to get too far into Rialto, but you kind of get the idea based on your area. I don't really know Florida as well. I can't name like cities right next to each other on the spot like that, so I apologize for that. And Arizona, similarly, you have Phoenix, and you have, of course, all those areas like Chandler and you have uh all those areas that are like in that area, and you have to kind of pick those areas, and you can definitely focus in one city, of course, in my region very easily, and just like if you get a pool account from you know another city, like if I was getting accounts for I wanted to focus on Glendora, California, let's say, and someone called me from San Dimas, I'll be I'll give that pool to a friend who does that area, and if they get one in Glendora, they'll refer it to me. You can do like an even exchange type thing with another pool company, and it's one of those things where if you're just in a specific city, it's also good, but it's also bad at the same time. Because here in my region, we have what's called the Santa Ana winds, and some areas get hit harder than others. Believe it or not, it's just one of those weird things, and I'm sure you have this experience like in Arizona with the monsoons, where some areas it just gets killed by the winds here, but then you're like one city over, you know. If you're in Glendora, it gets destroyed, but then you have pools in Laverne, and that the pools look fairly good, or you have pools in Claremont, they look great, and having them in different regions is also nice as well, along like a corridor, and you don't want to have to drive again really far in that corridor to get to them, but having them in different cities also is nice for that reason, and also nice because you have different kinds of clientele as well. You have people that are maybe overly picky in one city over another, and this is true everywhere. And I found this true like from one city to another, customers are really different. It's weird, but it's true, and so you may want to build your route to where it's not just like one whole area, but you're in a corridor, but it's still tight. So one day you're going to one area for and maybe another day you're going to another area, but it's still a very tight route in that direction. So there's all different ways of looking at it. When I'm saying a tight route, I don't necessarily mean that you just want to have your house here in the center and you want to have everything in a three-mile radius. That may not be logical and it may not be possible, but a tight route can also be tight for just that service day or two service days in a row. So don't think that you have to, you know, sell really good pools or get rid of really good pools because you want everything within like three or five minutes of your house. And you really don't want too many service accounts in your neighborhood either, because then you'll have the customers knocking on your door, you know, hey, can you help me get my heater working? So that's something you want to probably avoid is anything in extreme close proximity to where you live for that reason. And believe me, that happens. I've had that happen to me. So I'm telling you this out of something that's that's that's the truth that happens. And of course, building your route specifically for days that are tight is also pretty smart as well. Now, how do you tell the customers that you're dropping their account or if you're gonna sell maybe five or ten pools? Well, it's pretty simple. You can just be honest with them that your business has gotten larger and you're having trouble going to their doing their service servicing their pool because you're trying to consolidate your service route, and their pool unfortunately falls outside of the area that you're servicing now. And people understand that that you're overworked, you have too much work, you don't have time, and you don't they don't want you working 60 hours a week, believe me. Most people understand that there's a limit to how much you can do, and they'll understand that, and it usually they're gonna be fine with that, and you can tell them that you know to make things easy, you have another pool company that's gonna take over the pool. Now, whether you want to use the term sell their pool, you just open a can of worms at that point and you have to explain a lot of things out. You can say that you know you are going to transfer service over to you know Jim's pool service. He's a friend of yours, he'll take care of the pool. He's gonna assume the same terms that you had for the next six months without changing anything. And you're basically saying you sold the pool without saying you sold the pool. If you use the term like, oh yeah, I'm selling your pool to my friend Jim, he's great, he has a pool service. It just sounds weird, you know, like you're selling my pool? I mean, I mean, this is I I hired you and now, you know, it's it adds a lot of confusion. So there's other ways of phrasing it that make it easy for the customer to digest it. And I suggest doing that, that you're having someone take over the account, and of course give a guarantee to your friend that if they cancel or switch within like a month or two that you'll give him back his money, and you can do like a handshake deal with like three or four pools, and that's a good way to consolidate without losing those accounts. Now, there may just be a situation where you you just have to lose that account. And I've had that situation before where I tried to give it to somebody and nobody wanted it because they were just overbooked or they didn't like that area or whatever. You know, I sent them a picture, they're like, Oh, I sent a picture one time of this pool to somebody in an area that I didn't service really. I mean, I could have taken it, but it would have been out of the way. And he's looking at this picture, he's like, I don't really like how close it is to the fence there. You know, when I'm cleaning it, I'm not gonna be able to get over to that side of the pool really well. I'll pass on it. I was like, man, I was gonna like give you this pool like really, really cheap, but you know, some people can be picky. But anyway, you want to find ways and kind of get with people so that you can, you know, swap accounts if necessary, or swap areas or accounts in certain areas, and then you want to consolidate your advertising as well. Now, this is pretty easy to do if you're doing Google Ads. You can specifically gear the Google ad to a specific part of the city or the area in the city. I'm not sure how specific you can get it. I've tried getting it really specific. Facebook also you can get pretty specific as well in your service area, and you can get like a um a region area and expand out the map as well. But you want to try to be specific in your marketing going forward to that area. If you're doing door hangers, of course, just canvas those neighborhoods in your immediate tight service area that you're trying to build. And if you get phone calls from people and it's far out of the way, don't even give the bid at that point. I don't think it's not even worth it to do the bid on that and just tell them that you don't service that area or you're consolidating right now and you're not gonna service that area in the future. And you could refer it to someone else if you want to do that, but again, you just don't want to be taking accounts, new accounts out of your area just to take them. It doesn't make a lot of sense because then you're gonna have to move them again, and you're not consolidating at that point, you're still expanding your territory or your service area. And I say that because it's the truth of the business, and I've fallen into this trap too myself. So I'm I'm saying it out of experience that I've gotten a call from someone who won pool service, and I'm like, well, that's it's a little bit out of my area. I'll take it. I mean, it's not a big deal. That I'll take the account and I'm like, wow, I'm driving like five extra minutes here to get this account. Is it really worth it? So that means I'm spending 10 minutes driving, five minutes there, five minutes back to my territory. I could almost do another pool in that time. I shouldn't have taken this account, and now you're stuck with it, it's hard to get rid of it like within the first two months because the customer's like, why do you take the account if you can't service it, you know? And then you have the fear of them like leaving a one-star review. So just be careful that if you are in the process of getting tight and consolidating your business, that don't take those outlying pools at that point. You know, I know that it's it goes against your business sense to pass up a paying account, but really you're trying to get tight at that point. I did mention at the beginning that you can sell pools and you can buy pools, and it may be lucrative if someone has a small 15 or 20 pool route and you have the cash available and it's really tight and it's in your service area and the pools are pretty good to actually purchase those pools and then after you purchase those pools, maybe sell or get you know let go of a few outlying pools and get tighter that way. And it's it's a very good way to tighten up your pool route without advertising and trying to market and trying to get those pools because someone has them already, they want to sell them, and you buy that little tight you buy that route in a tight area that's in your already tight area, and you get even tighter at that point if that makes sense. And it's not a bad idea to do that. Now, ideally, the great thing to do would be to have like four or five pools in a row, you park your truck there, and you can kind of walk up to cul-de-sac to all these pools. That's great, and you will get there one day, it just takes time, and it's not a pipe dream that you can have a route that's that tight. It's been done by a lot of people, it just takes a lot of effort and a lot of thought and a lot of perseverance because it does take time to get tighter, and it takes also the ability that I mentioned earlier to pass up an account that's outside your service area for the sake of staying tight. And eventually you're gonna be pretty good where again, if you're not in a rural area where you're driving far anyway, that you have a lot of pools in the same neighborhood, a few blocks over, a few streets over, maybe a mile away, or maybe you have you go a mile and you have three or four pools over there. And if your whole service route is like that, it's golden. You don't have to be driving, you know, 15-20 minutes in between stops or areas. And again, split those areas up day specific. It's easy to do, you just map it out, you know, like you're a little bit over towards the west on Tuesday, and then you're a little bit towards the east on Wednesday. It's still, in my opinion, pretty tight because even if you have to drive 10 minutes to get to that area, you're still gonna have all those pools clumped together there. So think about it, figure out a way to tighten up your route because time is money, and if you can shave off 30 minutes or an hour driving, that's like two or three pools you can add to your service route that day and make more money, drive less, and build up a tighter route. It's something that can be done, but it takes a lot of thought and effort, and it takes time to do this, it's not instant. So if you're if you're still kind of scattered about, don't worry about it. You know, it's normal, it's not something that happens overnight, but you can make an effort or start moving in that direction to tighten things up. If you're looking for other podcasts, you can find those on my website, SonyProLearning.com. Click on the podcast icon, there'll be a drop-down menu with over uh eighteen hundred podcasts there. You can listen at your leisure. And if you're interested in the coaching program, you can learn more at poolguidecoaching.com. Thanks for listening to this podcast. Have you guys your week and God bless.