Pool Service Vacation Rules Every Pro Should Know

Want a pool service schedule that actually lets you take time off without losing momentum or money? We break down a practical framework for solo operators and small teams to reclaim rest, reduce burnout, and keep customers happy year-round.

We start with the hard truth: summer time off is risky. Heat, bather load, and algae pressure make July and August the most fragile weeks on a route. Then we flip the script and show you how the 48-weeks model lets you plan four weeks off across the year while billing monthly with confidence. You’ll learn how to bank those fifth service days that pop up on the calendar, turn them into smart breaks, and present the logic clearly to clients who care about consistency and value.

From there, we get tactical. We outline how to build a four-day work week that preserves Fridays for repairs, filter cleans, and green-to-clears, giving you three real days of recovery. You’ll hear how to stack pools to engineer long weekends—moving Thursday and Friday stops earlier in the week—so every account still gets serviced and you still get away. We dig into customer communication, too: who needs a heads up when you shift a visit, who doesn’t, and how to avoid creating confusion with clients who only care that the water is clean.

Timing matters, so we map out the best windows for vacations in year-round markets: March and April, late September, and October, plus the low-attention week between Christmas and New Year’s. We also talk through holiday logic for the Fourth of July, Labor Day, and Memorial Day, and why weekends should be sacred to protect your mental energy. 

• aligning time off with seasonal demand
• using a 48-weeks service model to bank days
• adopting a four-day route with a flex day
• stacking pools to create long weekends
• deciding which clients to notify and how
• choosing vacation windows in spring and fall
• handling holidays with simple logic
• avoiding weekend work to prevent burnout
• setting annual schedules and service terms

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Chapters

• 0:00 Framing The Time Off Challenge
• 2:17 Coaching Program And Resources
• 2:36 Why Summer Time Off Backfires
• 5:08 Don’t Become The Always-Working Owner
• 6:21 The 48-Weeks Model And Burnout
• 8:24 Four-Day Work Week Strategy
• 10:01 Using Extra Calendar Days
• 12:34 Stacking Pools For Long Weekends
• 13:32 What To Tell Customers And When
• 16:17 Best Months To Take Vacations
• 18:29 Handling Holidays With Logic
• 19:46 Plan Your Year And Next Steps

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 1:03

And welcome to the pool and podcast show. In this episode, I'm going to talk to you about taking time off and how to approach the customers so you can have time off on your pool route. And it is something that can be achieved, and it is also something that is a little bit difficult as well with someone like yourself who has their own service business or is a sole proprietor of a business. 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. Let me start with some of the difficulties with pool service and taking days off. First, and then I'll get into how you can achieve a good schedule of having days off and vacation days as well. And the biggest difficulty, of course, is if you do pool service as a single polar, which means you don't have employees. When you take time off, you're gonna skip that pool for a week. So it'll be two weeks before you get back to that pool technically. And in some cases, this is a hurdle during certain times of the year. And so unfortunately, most pool service pros can't take at least logically take time off like in July and August because those are typically the hottest months of the year. Now, if you have employees, they can of course cover your route, or if you have someone you can rely on to cover your route during vacations, that's fine. But there is some logic that needs to be applied here with as far as time off with your schedule. It's basically why realtors and a lot of people take time off in December because it's a slow time of year for them and they can afford to do that. And you wouldn't want to like take July off if you sell fireworks for a living, doesn't make any sense, or June off, I should say, because that's like the busiest time to sell fireworks. So think about it this way that your business is a seasonal business, and there is logical gaps in when you're busy, and there's timing involved when you're taking time off with the pool service, and you may not be able to take long summer vacations with your kids anymore if you have just gotten in the pool service from a different profession because things fall apart in the summer. Now I did take a summer off one time because I had an anniversary in my 10th year anniversary. I it was in June, and so I I wanted to go somewhere for the 10th year anniversary in June, and it turned out to be a semi-disaster, it wasn't too bad, but there were a few pools that took a long time to get back in shape after I got back. And of course, then I that's when I I realized before that it wasn't a good idea. That's when I realized that taking time off like in the middle of summer is the mo is not the most logical time to take time off for pool service. So use your judgment when you're picking time off and understand that in most cases the pool's not gonna be serviced for two weeks during that time, and that could be a problem. It may not be a problem, but it could be a problem for your service route. The second thing I'm gonna say here is that you really do want to take time off. You don't want to have your business where you never take time off. There's a a Chinese restaurant down the street from me. It's actually a Chinese restaurant, donut shop, burger, fried chicken place. They got everything there. I don't have pizza, I don't think, but they have everything there. And so whenever I go there, I I'll go there like every two or three weeks. I don't know, not that often. Whenever I go there, and usually just for the donuts, they the the person that owns it, she's like there all the time. Like I never see anyone else but the owner of the business. And this has been like for the last 15 years, I've been going there, and she's always there. Like every time I go, no matter what day I go, or what time of the day I go, what evening, morning, she's there. You don't want to be that person because that's not a life you want to live doing pool service because you got in the pool service industry to get away from doing something like that. There's a member of my group who was a car salesman for many, many years, and he never had a weekend off for like 10 years, and that's why he got out of that business, and he worked 70 hours a week and you have to sell, sell, sell. Well, you're in pool service, which means that you got into this business so you can have a life back and have free time. And if you don't utilize the vacation time, which is gonna be four weeks a year, so you service a pool for 48 weeks and you have four weeks off. Now, you know, that sounds like a lot of time, like a month off, but of course it's broken up over vacations and days off during the year, and it really is something that is achievable because many, many pool service companies do that. When you when you're looking to buy a pool route, if you go to the national pool route sales site, um, you can see that they're like they list the pools for sale and it says 48 weeks because they take that month off, and you should utilize that as well. The month off is important because it recharges you, and you really get back into a routine with some more energy, and it energizes you to have time off, believe it or not. Even though you feel tired after vacation, that vacation does recharge you and take you away from the monotony of the pool service business, which it is very monotonous doing the same pools over and over again, and it could be very boring, and you can suffer mentally if you don't take time off. And I would also recommend that you don't work weekends unless absolutely necessary. And I I went a few years when I was starting out working Saturdays, and it was no fun. I mean, first of all, the customers are always there, and so like they come out and I want to chat with you. So it's not Saturday morning, it's not a good service day for sure. And I definitely would not recommend Sunday. You probably would not you'd be frowned upon by your customers if you showed up on a Sunday. But Saturday service, I just don't think it was fun. Doing repairs or filter cleaning on Saturdays was you your week is so short, then you have Sunday and you go back to work on Monday. So it didn't work for me. Working six days a week or six five and a half days a week was not productive. And if you can go to a four-day work week, that would be like the premier uh schedule, I think, for pool service because then you can have either Monday or Fridays off every week. On that day off is not technically a complete day off because you can do repairs that day or do some other work on your technical day off, Monday or Friday, and you have four days where you do the weekly pool service route. To me, that's an optimal schedule. If you can achieve that, you're way ahead of everyone else because now you have three dedicated days off and you're working four days a week. And a lot of companies do do the four-day work week, it's really healthy, or they have every other Friday off. And I feel like that's a pretty healthy schedule for pool service because that extra day really helps you to recover or to do other things that relieve kind of those four days of work. You know, for example, if you work Monday through Thursday, and then on Friday, you use that day to maybe do some filter cleanings on your route or do some repairs or do a green pool cleanup, whatever, it kind of alleviates some of the pressure during that work week on your route that makes sense. So, how do you achieve convincing the customer, or not necessarily convincing the customer, but letting the customer know? In some cases, you are convincing them because they don't understand that you need time off. But in a lot of cases, most customers, you can explain this to them logically. Now, if you bill monthly like I do, it's really easy to explain this. Now, if you don't bill monthly, of course, you would just take the time off and not charge them for that week. That's logical as well. But if you do bill monthly, you are going to have an extra service day for that pool that you're not charging the customer for. For example, right here in January, I have the calendar here. Five Thursdays, five Fridays, and you have five Saturdays, but I'm not counting those, but you have five Thursdays and five Fridays. So if you have a cust a customer on a Thursday, they're getting an extra service visit, but you're billing them monthly, so you're not charging them for that fifth visit. So that is credit to you to take off later because you've done that week without charging them, and then you'll take that week, put it in your pocket, and take that off sometime when you can. Now I have a service agreement, and if you want this one-page service agreement, it does talk about sick days and vacation days. You can email me at David at swimmingfullearning.com and I'll send that over to you. It may take me a day or so to get that because I have a ton of emails coming in all the time, but I will get that over to you. And it's a service agreement that does talk about sick days and vacation days, and you should take at least two dedicated weeks off during the year, three if possible. And I would say, of course, the time between Christmas and New Year's should be an automatic week off for you. Thanksgiving. A lot of pool guys are taking that week off now between you know that the Thanksgiving week. Some just take Wednesday through Friday off, but you can take that as well, and you can also create extra days off during this during your pool route as well by stacking pools. So you have dedicated days off. I'll talk about stacking pools in a minute. You have dedicated days off based on the extra calendar day that falls on a lot of pool service. You know, like there's some months with an extra Monday or Tuesday. Basically, there's four extra days, usually four extra weeks of service you're gonna collect for each account you're servicing, no matter which day it falls on. So keep that in mind as well. You could take sick days and vacation days and use that up as well. But there's also stacking pools. So if you have a five-day work week of pools, and let's say you want to take a four-day weekend, you want to go somewhere Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday. Well, those Thursday and Friday pools you can put on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday and just stack those pools there and then take those four days off without cashing in any of those vacation or sick days. And that's something that you can utilize pretty easily and just work a longer day, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, and have a four-day weekend without cashing in those days. And you can have a lot of days off doing this, especially let's say you have a parent-teacher conference on a Friday. You can take your Friday route, put it on Wednesday and Thursday, and have Friday, Saturday, and Sunday off. Or if you want to go on a fishing trip, you know, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, you can do the same exact thing. As long as you get that account at some time during that week, you check that box with the customer that you were there and you service their pool that week. I get this question a lot, and that is, do you tell the customers you're taking that week off? And I just do it customer based on the customer personality and the years of service and kind of how they know me. There's some customers that are watching for you to get there at the same time. And if you're a consistent pool service, you're gonna be there the same day at nearly the same time every week. And so if you don't show up, they may be worried about you. Like what happened? Did you get in a car accident? And you know, so to relieve their worry, you definitely want to tell them that, oh, I have a teacher conference day, and I'm gonna move your pool to a Thursday from a Friday to a Thursday, or I'm going on vacation next week, I won't service your pool, and let them know that if they are that kind of a customer. Now, there's other customers that don't even know what your service day is, they don't they don't care, they don't see you, they just want to make sure the pool is clean, they're not gonna be hassling you. I don't tell those customers I'm going on vacation because they don't even know that I'm there anyway, and so it's it's a wasted effort, and it may cause confusion as well, and may open up a can of worms where they're like, oh, you're coming on a Thursday? I really want you there on a Friday. I've had that happen before, trust me. So the customers that you're just they don't even know what day you're servicing the pool, don't inform them. But customers, yes, that are very cognizant of your visits, inform them. So, you know, the majority of your customers you're going to let know that you're not gonna be there, and the ones that you know that don't care, just don't bother with that, and you just want to make sure that the customer understands that they have an extra service day on the calendar, and it's good to have a physical calendar and just pull it out and show them like look, here's January, look at there's an extra day here, and go over that with the customer if they need to see that, but definitely cash those days in and don't let them go because it's not like you're working for a corporation where you can like save up vacation days and use them the next year, or you you're gonna save up all your vacation and retire six months early. You can't do that in pool service, you can't cash those those days off in the following calendar year. So utilize every single possible day off that's offered to you by those extra days and cash those days in and don't leave them on the table because you really need that extra time and you're working for it anyway if you're building monthly, and it'd be foolish not to take those days because you're giving free service at the customer in that case and not really utilizing the benefits of that. So let me go over a few good placements for vacation time. I'm gonna go off of Southern California, so you can each state's a little bit different or areas different, not too different, I don't think. But if you're like, of course, in the East Coast where you close your pools, you got a lot of time off. But we we keep the pools open year-round. There are certain times that you want to take off. I would say for California, October is a perfect month to have a week of vacation because things are slow. Santa Ana winds usually start late October, early November, so you're safe there with the windstorms. So October would be a great month to take off. Sometimes late September is also good as well. You can pull the kids out of school for a week and take off, it's not a big deal. They can do their homework on the road and take that week off late September, early October. And then the following year, I think March and April are perfect months to take a vacation. You can even time it for spring break in most cases, and take that week off with your kids and family. So those are the two months, March and April, actually, four months, March and April, September, October, that I recommend you take off. And then, of course, the week between Christmas and New Year's is a great week to take off. And I think I would say that should be automatic, and that should be in your service agreement if you wanted to put that in there, that that's the week you're gonna be off for sure. And typically you would want to send a letter, maybe your November bill, saying that that week in December you're gonna be off. This helps customers too if they're gonna give you a Christmas bonus or a gift, letting them know that you're gonna be off. You know, let's say Christmas falls on a ther a Wednesday or Thursday, and you want your tell them you're gonna be off the 22nd through the 26th. That way they know if they're gonna give you something, they have it ready the prior week, the 15th through the 19th. And it kind of helps them also know that you're not gonna be there that week. And no one is really looking at the pool that week, to be honest with you. They have family over, they're going somewhere, they're traveling, they're not in pool mode at all looking at the pool, so it's a great week to take off. I mentioned earlier that a lot of pool pros take off the Thanksgiving week as well, and time things accordingly to your service area. Now, the last thing I'll talk about are holidays. A lot of people are like, which holidays do you take off? Well, of course, 4th of July, and you can easily stack pools that week, or sometimes easily stack pools that week. Sometimes it's 100 degrees out, it's tough on you to do that, but you can take Thursday and Friday off for 4th of July, or 4th of July is on a Tuesday, you could take Monday, you know. It's just you got a time that based on when the 4th of July falls on. It's always great when it's like on a Thursday, you could take those days off, but of course that happens every six or seven years. Sometimes it's on a weekend, that's perfectly fine. You don't have to worry about it. But if a holiday falls during the week, you can take that off. Those holidays that fall on a Monday, like Labor Day or uh Memorial Day, I don't know, those are what you have to use your judgment. Typically, you can just do a partial service that morning, finish all your pools on that Monday and be done with it, or you can move them to Tuesday. A lot of times people don't do a lot on certain holidays here, so you can, you know, of course, take Labor Day off or Memorial Day off, and then do the pools the next day, or just use a cash in a day off that week if you wanted to do that as well. It's something that you're gonna have to just sit down and see what's best for your pool service, what's the best strategy, and kind of set the schedule for the year ahead of time so you know exactly which weeks you're taking off and which days off you're gonna take here and there. Sick days, vacation days, you know, a day where you have a meeting or something, or you have something to do that day, or doctor's appointment, whatever. You have four weeks to work with right there. Plus, you can stack pools, and this is something that makes pool service great because you have a lot of free time and a lot of days off available to you that you would not have in other professions. Looking for other podcasts, you can find those by going to my website, swimmingprolearning.com, on the banner, click on the podcast icon. That'll take you to a drop down menu where I have over eighteen hundred podcasts for you there. 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 great rest of your week. God bless.