Why Some Pool Pros Choose Comfort Over Growth

Growth sounds glamorous until the math, the hiring headache, and your calendar disagree. We dig into the real choices pool pros face: stay a sharp, profitable single poler or build a team and chase scale. Along the way, we unpack why the labor market has shifted toward gig work, how rising wages squeeze entry-level hiring, and what that means for route capacity, pricing, and your stress level.

I share the quiet obstacles that keep owners from adding a first tech—payroll setup, workers’ comp, trucks, scripts for client handoffs—and the fear that a new hire might walk, leaving you with 50 extra pools overnight. Then we pivot to a practical workaround used by savvy operators: partner with builders, service new pools for a year, and sell a partial route at a clean multiple. It’s a repeatable way to capture account equity, protect quality, and avoid the overhead of managing staff, all while keeping your book at a healthy size.

If your wiring favors systems and leadership, we also map a path to scaling well. That means hiring with a promise—training in a real trade, time off, competitive pay, and a future in repairs—so you can compete with Uber and Amazon Flex. With one solid tech you can double routes, with a second and a repair specialist you unlock higher-margin work and the chance to step back from daily skimming. Still, we’re honest about the tradeoffs of a multi-truck operation: more moving parts, quality drift risks, and the need for strong software, QA checks, and culture.

Whether you thrive with a tight 60-pool route and a side portfolio of real estate or dream of a 10-truck fleet, the win is clarity. 

• labor market shifts to gig work and wage pressure
• barriers to hiring including payroll, comp and trucks
• income math for adding a tech and route capacity
• passing on new accounts versus smart partial route sales
• builder partnerships and one-year account valuation
• when personality fit favors staying small
• investing profits outside pool service
• how to attract hires with training and benefits
• benefits and strain of

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Transcript

Welcome And Topic Setup

SPEAKER_00 1:03

Hey, welcome to the Pool Guy Podcast Show. In this episode, I'm going to talk to you about scaling and specifically why some pool pros like to remain single polars and not scale, bringing on multiple employees growing to a giant company. And I'll go over some of the benefits of staying small. And of course, there are benefits of also getting larger, and I'll cover those as well. 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. And the number one reason why a lot of pool companies stay small and don't grow beyond themselves is the fact that there really isn't any reliable help out there, and it's getting harder and harder to find somebody to hire to do pool service, much harder than it used to be five years ago, ten years ago, 15 years ago. A lot of that has to do with the gig work available out there. Uber, Uber Eats, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart. A lot of those services, even I would say some Amazon services as well, have taken up a lot of the employees that people or the people that would be employable in the pool industry are now doing this kind of work where it's relatively easy. Ed, you actually make really good money doing this. I've had some rental applications from Uber drivers before, and they're making somewhere around$8,000 per month doing Uber, Uber Eats. It's really crazy the amount of income they have. And it's the same thing with some certain Amazon independent drivers. They also have really good income as well. So these services are easy work. You're driving around, and you're not really doing any kind of physical labor except taking the package out of your car, of course, and dropping it off, or picking up somebody and driving them to the airport and having to sit in traffic. So it's something that is very attractive to a lot of people in that demographic where they would actually be attracted to doing pool service because it's very similar. You're driving from stop to stop, cleaning the pool, and you're getting a pretty good income. And that really has hurt the kind of pool of employees, in my opinion, more than anything else around the nation. That's hurt us as an industry getting qualified helpers because there's much easier work out there that pays really good money with tips and everything. The other problem in California, Southern California, I'm not sure about the rest of the state, but here in Los Angeles County, the minimum wage is like$19 or$20. But most places are hiring you at$20,$22,$25 an hour. And so that also affects getting someone who's looking for part-time work to make extra money. When they get a job and get$20 plus dollars an hour, it really affects, you know, paying them per pool to get that employee and to give them a good income where they can make pretty good money, just flipping burgers all day long. So another problem is the high minimum wage in my area, causing less and less people to be attracted to doing pool service. So obviously, if you can't find an employee, you have to stay small. You can, of course, hire relatives and friends, but that comes with a little bit of issues, you know, you when you kind of mix business with family. So I would really say that a lot of the problems that we face here in my region of Los Angeles County is really finding someone to hire. And that's basic basically the bottom line. If you can't find someone to hire, you're going to stay small. And there's some benefits to staying small that I'll cover, but this is probably the number one issue that we face. Finding someone that's actually going to go out there, service 50 pools a week, show up, do a good job, and want to do pool service. I think the second thing that stops a single polar from scaling is not really understanding or knowing how to scale successfully, how to bring on a how to bring on an employee, all the things involved in it, talking to customers, you know, letting them know that there's going to be an employee servicing the pool. All these things are kind of foreign to them because maybe they've been doing their their pool route themselves for 10 or 12 years, and the bring on an employee is kind of like a foreign territory for them. You know, they don't know about payroll, hiring a payroll service, they're not sure about workers' comp, you know, how to get that for their employee. Should they get them a truck, should they use their own truck, you know, how much should they pay them per pool or per hour? All these are really foreign to somebody who's never hired somebody. And it's one of those things where instead of taking the time to really do this stuff and you know investigate and actually bring someone on board, it's just easier just to continue doing your pool route and not have to worry about bringing someone on board. So I think the knowledge gap and also there's a fear factor. You know, you bring this employee on, you give them 50 pools. What if they quit on you, then you have you know 80 pools you're doing plus 50 more pools? And getting to that point where you can give employee pools is also something that can be problematic. You know, if you only do 70 pools and you want to bring someone on and give them 30 or 40 pools, you do affect, you do effectively impact your income because you're paying the employee, you're paying payroll, you're paying payroll taxes, you're paying workers' comp. So that does affect your bottom line. And sometimes it doesn't make a lot of sense unless you have a lot of pools that are in excess, which means that you're working, you know, six days a week, or you're working all day until the sun goes down and you have you know 90 or 100 pools, and then you can break off 30 or 40 of those pretty easily without having an effect on your income dramatically. But can you afford an employee is another factor in this whole equation. You know, do you have enough pools to give them? Do you have enough income after paying them to make up for the loss of the full income of doing the pools yourself? All these are factors. You know, how do you do the payroll? How do you, you know, do the insurance? All these things are things that are questions, and sometimes the answers are a little harder to get to, especially the question of if I bring an employee on, am I going to have enough income? Am I gonna build up my income quick enough to cover the extra expense of the employee, the loss of the income from doing the pools myself, how many accounts do I need to bring in to make up for that? How quickly can I build up the route? All these things are factors when you bring on an employee that a lot of single pollers just don't want to deal with, and so they just stay small for that reason, and they don't want the headache of having to watch over an employee or deal with customers that maybe don't like something the employee did, and it's just much easier to say small and not really worry about you know having an employee doing 30 or 40 pools. On the flip side of that, you're passing up a lot of business because you you're at you know 70 pools or 80 pools and you're maxed out, and so if you get calls on new service, you generally just pass those up because you can't build any more because you're really maxed out and you don't want to work, you know, six, seven days a week. That's crazy. So you don't take on those pools, you don't want to work, you know, 12 hours a day till the sun goes down, and so you pass up work. Now there is a way to capture accounts and to not pass up on those accounts as well, and still stay a single polar, and it's a really an effective method, especially if you work with a builder. If you've if you're doing startups for a builder and you're getting a lot of accounts from the builder, there's a really effective way of staying a single polar and also not losing the extra income from those extra accounts you can't service. And this is something that several people do in my region. They work with a builder, they get these brand new pools, they take them onto their route, and then what they do is after a year of service, they actually sell all those pools that they've been doing for a year to another company. And this is a pretty lucrative business because let's say you have 60 accounts you service regularly, you're you're doing work for the builder and you get to 75 accounts, 80 accounts. When you get to 80 accounts, you sell 20 accounts that you've been doing for a year, and it's really a really easy sell, too, because you can tell the customer that you've worked with the builder for a year doing the account, and you're going to pass the account on to Steve's pool service. He's someone that you partner with, and they're going to take over the pool after you've, you know, the one-year mark, or you've been doing it for a year, and normally you pass the pool on to the person you partner with. And so if you have 20 pools and that you've you're going to sell that year, because that's kind of the way you do your business, you get to 80, then you sell 20, get that down to 60. And basically, if you're getting let's just say 180 per pool, and that's that's two times 12 per pool. That's each pool is worth about 2,000 roughly. So 2,000 times 20, and you're gonna sell those 20 pools for$40,000, and then you're gonna have that income that year, and then you're gonna do the same thing again where you build up your pool route, and then you sell those 20 pools to somebody else. And of course, this is a pretty lucrative thing to do. If you you don't want to, of course, sell accounts that are less than a year, in my opinion, but if you had them for a year, there's definitely value to it. And if they're brand new pools or if they're newer pools and they're good pools, you can sell those continuously. And this is a great way to supplement your income. Say, say a single polar, but you've just made like 40,000 by selling those pools off, and you're not growing, of course, getting bigger, but you're not losing that income that you normally would have if you had an employee doing the pools, and it's something that again people do in my region because they really can't bring in an employee to service the pools, and so the only other option is to sell off a partial route every year or every year or two, and that way you're still acquiring new accounts, you're not passing up business per se or passing up money because every account does have value. And if you missed that multiplier, if you're buying pools through a pool broker, they're using a 12-time multiplier on the pool route. So technically, if I just do the full 12 times, if you do the 180 times 12, that's 2160 times 20 pools, that's actually 43,200. And so, again, the accounts have value after a certain amount of time. I think a year is a good point, a year or two. So you're kind of rotating the pools out after a certain point. And again, it's a great strategy in an area where you can't find an employee and you're not passing up business at that point. Now, another problem with bringing on somebody again is maybe you're not geared towards that and you're overloaded. You know, let's just say that you bring on an employee and you can't handle the complaints, you can't handle him missing days, and your personality just can't handle an employee. And that's also something that's true of single polars. There, there may be maybe something inside them, there's just kind of a you know, they just don't have that skill level. That's okay, it's normal. You may not have the skill level to do that, and there's nothing wrong with that. And staying small does have its benefits, you can manage everything, and you still make really good money, and you can take that money and reinvest it somewhere else. I talked about a pool service pro in my area that buys coin laundries. He doesn't bring on employees, he just takes the money he makes, any extra money, and then he reinvests it in coin laundry businesses. You know, that he has, I think, three of them now, and he just has someone getting the coins for him. A lot of them take credit cards now, and so he's making a lot of money doing that. You can do real estate, you can scale outside a pool service without having to bring on employees, and so that's the great benefit of having the extra money of being self-employed. If you don't want to have someone else come in, just stay small and use that extra money you make to scale outside the industry, and that's perfectly fine as well. And so, if you're working four days a week doing 60 or 70 pools, and you're fine with that, and you're making good money, and you're still acquiring some accounts here and there that you can build up and sell, I think you're fine as a single polar. You really don't have nothing to worry about, and there's no need for you to build an empire. However, building up a pool route with one or two employees, with you know, three or four employees with a dedicated repair person does have its benefits as well. If you can do that, and if your plan is to scale eventually, you can find employees. It's just one of those things where you have to market it a certain way to get people to work for you. They're learning a trade, first of all, so that's something marketable there. Second of all, you may give them extra benefits, you know, a vacation pay. You may pay them more than they can make at a minimum wage job. All these are things that you can do to offer somebody to bring them on board and and you know, allow them to become a pool technician is something that's better, I think, than doing Uber all day. There's not much skill involved in that. And if you're building up a skill in a trade, one day you may be able to go out on your own and have your own business. A lot of people don't want to start their own business, but it's great to have this trade available or the skill that they're learning out there. And so there are ways to get employees in areas, and there are ways to build up a route if you wanted to. And the benefit of that is that you're scaling. So now you have 140 pools versus 70. You've doubled your pool route, you're paying the employee, you're paying for the insurance for the workers' comp, and you're making a lot of extra money, and then you're growing even bigger, bringing another employee, and then eventually you can get managers and you can kind of step back a little bit and let things kind of run themselves without you being hands-on completely. You may not even clean pools anymore unless the employee is sick and you take over the route for the day. So there are benefits with scaling as well as staying small, and it's one of those things where you have to kind of is it your personality to grow big? Do you want this empire? I have a friend that I trained back in 19, I believe it was 1990, and right now he has like 14 trucks and he has two repairmen. He's pretty gigantic. He's so big that he doesn't even know how many accounts he has sometimes because there's a lot of ebb and flow. He's well over a thousand for sure, and it's one of those things where sometimes he's giving free service because he he loses track if you know a customer canceled and the guy's still doing it. That's how big he is. That it's hard to keep track of all the accounts. Now, you can get that big if you want. There are benefits to that. There's also drawbacks to that because the stress level is higher, there's a lot more things to juggle, and it's just really up to you. There's nothing wrong with staying small and investing outside of pool service, and there's really nothing wrong with getting bigger in the industry either and building up a big service company. Again, it just boils down to what's your goal in the industry, what's what favors your personality type better, and what are you comfortable with. There's really no right or wrong answer, I think, if you should build up an empire or just stay a single polar. Looking for more podcasts, you can find those on my website, swimmingpolearning.com. Click on the podcast icon on the banner, and there'll be a drop down menu with over eighteen hundred podcasts there for you as well. And if you're interested in my coaching program, you can learn more at poleguidecoaching.com. Thanks for listening to this podcast. Have the rest of your day. God bless.