Lose a Few, Earn More: Smart Pricing Strategy

Prices are rising, but your margins don’t have to suffer. We share a straightforward playbook for pool service pros to raise rates with confidence, keep client trust, and improve the health of your route. It starts with two paths: a respectful, optional price increase letter that invites customers to accept a set monthly bump, and a universal increase that risks a little churn but often delivers a bigger annual lift. 

From there, we dive into national pricing data and what it does—and doesn’t—mean for your local decisions. Using a state-by-state service rate index, we talk about anchoring your monthly fee in the middle of your market, where perceived value is strongest and bids land more reliably. We also explore how to diagnose the tipping point in your area, avoid the race to the bottom, and justify your price with tangible outcomes: consistent clarity, reliable visits, and clean equipment that runs right through peak season.

Raising rates isn’t the only lever. We cover practical adjustments that protect margins without shocking clients: moving specialty chemicals like phosphate removers and algaecide to seasonal packages, billing fairly for heavy-use pools by placing chlorine on-site, and trimming accounts that drain time and inventory. 
• framing an optional increase to boost acceptance
• universal vs opt-in raises and revenue math
• reading the national service rate index by state
• finding the local sweet spot for bids
• moving specialty chemicals to itemized or seasonal fees
• billing fairly for heavy-use pools and extra chlorine
• increasing filter cleanings for revenue and water quality
• trimming high-drain accounts and adding smart ones
• balancing profit, retention, and technician workload

Skimmer list of pool service rates by area and price increase template:

https://www.getskimmer.com/priceincreasetoolkit?

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Transcript

Why Price Increases Matter

SPEAKER_00 1:03

Hey, welcome to the Pool Guy Podcast Show. In this episode, I'm going to talk to you about price increases in the service industry, particularly if you service pools, how to approach your customers with price increases. And everyone's familiar with rising prices and everything. So this may not come as a shock to your customer, but I think it's also helpful to have a strategy when you're increasing your prices. 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. For 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 actually, Skipper has a great free resource, and I'll put the link down in the description of the podcast for you to get this free downloadable. I guess it's not technically a guide, but there are a lot of different links to different aspects of increasing prices. In fact, I'll just go through it real quick for you. So when you click on the link, it'll give you a downloadable site to go to to download everything you're gonna need. And basically, you have a you have some templates to email the customers for price increases. So it's basically a toolkit with a bunch of different things in there. There's a service rate index, which is pretty interesting. I'm gonna go over that in the podcast here for you. It's basically a survey of how much pool pros are charging across the basion. There's also a webinar with Casey Graham and how to double your profits, and then there's strategies to increase your pool route, and then there's the increase letters, which and they also have a price increase in profit calculator. I haven't gone there yet, I'll probably get there. But it's interesting the price increase letter. I'll actually read it to you so you get an idea of the general idea of their price increase letter. I have one similar that I sent out as well, and it's in a Google Doc file. And let me read it to you because I think they take a pretty interesting slant on it. And this is from Casey Graham. And I'll read this letter verbatim here for you. It says hi, it's for the customer, and then put the customer's name. The economy has been in turmoil for a few years, with the rising costs from our distributors and wages increasing to hire to keep great pool technicians. We are focused to do a small price increase. Most companies mandate a price increase and don't leave the customer with any options. We do not believe in doing this. Instead of a mandate, I want to personally ask you this. Would you be willing to accept a$25 a month price increase on and you can put the date here, you know, June 1st, 2026? If this is acceptable, acceptable to you, no action is needed, and you will see the increase added to your next invoice. If for any reason you don't want to or can't accept this increase, all you have to do is reply to this email. I will personally get every one of these emails and ensure that you don't see the increase on your next bill. We will keep focusing on making your pool yummy clean either way. Thank you, Casey Graham, CEO of Yummy Pools. And then of course the customer may respond, and then you would just type some canned responses not that for them not to worry about it, and you're still gonna clean their pool the same way without the increase. So it's an interesting strategy to give the customer the option to accept the price increase. My particular logic is that if a cus if you increase all the customers$25, let's say, and you have 70 pools, and I guess this is a way to kind of save accounts without using my method, which is a more mathematical method. But if you had 80 pools and you raise everyone from 125 to 150, I'm just using a low number here. So$25 times 80 is 2,000 more a month with the$25 increase over 80 clients. But if five of them cancel service because they really don't want to pay that increase, so you now you're at 75 pools times 25 dollars, that's 1875. So you've added 1875. If you lost five customers, but you're charging more to the 75 customers you've kept, so 75 times$25, that's 1875 again times 12 months, that's$22,500 that you're making over the previous year with five less customers. Of course, you're going to have to subtract the five customers you've lost, and so 125 times 12, that's 1500 times five. So that's 7500. Now, if you ask the customers for a$25 increase, and let's say$65 said it was okay, and$15 didn't want to go up, then you would have$2525 times$12, you would have an increased revenue of$19,500, and you would still have those 15 customers that weren't paying you the$150, they're paying you$125 still, and you don't really lose anything on your route at that point. So I guess either way would be effective. I would rather raise everybody and kind of just cut your losses if anyone cancels, but effectively, I think it may be a strategy you may want to try to implement if you ask the customers for the price increase instead of mandating it to see how effective that is in your business model. And it could be that if you're in a really competitive area, that may be the way you want to go. But I thought it was an interesting strategy as far as raising the prices in a kind of more diplomatic fashion. Let me talk about the service rate index that they created, which is really interesting and it's pretty in-depth. So they have 30,000 skimmer users users with over 900,000 pools. They've actually crossed over a million pools at this point. So with 30,000 users, there's plenty of data to gather for them. So it has per stop or flat monthly. So I'm going to use a flat monthly. So you have a map basically of the United States here, and it shows all of the states, and it shows the colors will show the high and low average costs by being a lighter color of tan or orange, and a darker color going towards brown for those areas that charge much more for monthly service. And you can do with chemicals or without. You can just pick a particular state if you wanted to, or a set of states. So I'm just gonna go ahead and look at the entire map here, and it's an alphabetical order. So if you're in Alabama, your low range is$201 a month, your low average is$233, your high average is$243, and your high range is$269 for pool service. And it's interesting because Arizona is right below it, the low range is$112, low average is$136, the high average is$142, and the high range is$166. So I think all of us should be moving to Alabama within the next six months to get those good service rates. And of course, you pretty much know certain areas are going to be much more expensive than other areas, especially you know, really competitive areas like Florida. They seem to have some of in California some have some of the lowest rates out there. I would say that these the low range is on the really low side for my service area in Los Angeles County, San Bernardino, you know, county area. The most people are charging in the high range of 159 is the high range California. So I would say that the low range of 104 is pretty really extremely low for the cost of living in California. So I would say that you'd have to charge a lot more than$100 a month for a pool service if you're going to survive here in Southern California. Unless you're doing chemicals only or something like that, that's a really low monthly service rate. That's like$25 a week, which is not really, you know, gonna pay the bills. So I would say that if you are doing pool service, you are more in the high range in California. The low range is just not a realistic place to be in, and you would be in the high range. Most of the pools in my area are anywhere from 150 to 185, depending on the service area. There's a tipping point, of course, of going over a certain amount for your area. You won't you won't land too many bids if you're too high, and if you're too low, you're not going to make any money. So you really have to look at this rate index carefully and kind of gauge it by your particular service area. So the 7500 minus 22,500, you're still net 15,000 that year with losing five customers. So the math works pretty good. It's not a total loss if five people don't want the price increase. You still have a pretty good profit with five less customers. I do see an error on the chart. Actually, Hawaii showing the per stop service rate and showing in the monthly service rate category. So it's something that they'll probably correct. But overall, you get an idea, get a snapshot of what people are charging across the country. I would say California seems to be a little low for my in my opinion on the rates that I've seen in my area. Same with Arizona, probably. And let me get the Texas right. Texas is kind of like the state where everything is. Everything's big, you know, big hat, no cattle, kind of thing. And you know, everything in Texas is big. I was at a barbecue place in Dallas, and it was probably the size of a you know six restaurants combined together here in California. So of course, Texas is a great way to set your rates. The low range of Texas, 187, the high range is 259, and the pools are probably bigger than they are here in Southern California in some respects, depending on the region. So every state's gonna differ in pricing for sure, and you'll have to find your area pricing specifically for your county and the pools around you, so that you're kind of within striking distance when you're going to get bids. I would say you don't want to be the lowest pool service company price-wise in your area, nor do you want to be the highest price pool service in your area. You want to fall somewhere right in the middle, the sweet spot. So people are charging 160 a month on a low side, and on the high side, they're charging 200. You at 180 or 185, you're in a actually a good sweet spot where you're making good money. You're not the lowest one, you're not necessarily the highest one, and people may gravitate towards you based on the fact that oh, you know, maybe the low the low price one is just not going to provide good service, and that's kind of like a mentality that people have that if the price is too good, it's probably too good to be true. Of course, price increases are the simplest way to increase profits in your business, although it's more painful to the customer. You can also do things so that if let's say you don't want to go all the way to$20 increase, you want to increase it maybe$15, and you can figure out ways to offset some of your costs. A lot of this has to do with your chemical usage. Maybe you can buy chemicals in bulk somewhere and save money per you know per pound, or if you do certain things to change how you're billing the customers for chemicals. Let's say, for instance, that you were adding phosphoryl removers without charging the customer, or you're adding some algecide each week without charging them, you can start implementing it to where you purchase the container of phosphoryl remover or the bottle of algecide and give it to the customer, leave it at the job site or at their pool, I should say. Not really a job site, it's their your service account. And you can also implement charges at the beginning of the summer. You can do a water conditioner slash algebra charge at the beginning of spring before summer hits, and that will cover them for any bore you to adds at the pool or the pool X unit or anything else you're gonna use, and you can set that at say$110 or$120, and that's the charge that every customer receives. We used to do this back in the day, it was called a conditioner charge. We would charge everyone before summer, and this I'm dating myself here, but I'm gonna say that it was something around$45 a month to charge them for the pool conditioner, and we would you know use that to offset some of the chemical costs. And this would be for adding cyaneric acid to their pool. Of course, with the advent of tablets and everyone using tablets, you no longer have to add cyaneric acid to the pool, but you can actually convert that conditioner charge to an algecide charge, and that will increase your profit and it will offset any kind of algicide you may use in the customer's pool. Again, if you're gonna use a Polar X or Borids,$120-130 for that charge would be pretty fair to cover the cost of the product you're gonna put in there. And you can also move certain things outside of your billing. For example, if you're not charging for trichlor tablets, which you should be charging them for a 50-pound bucket and leaving it at your at the pool. But if you're not, you can implement that slowly, bring the customer to where bring it up to the customer to where they're gonna pay for the tablets. You can also reduce the amount of maintenance chemicals you're putting in the pool for certain accounts. A lot of times some accounts will require more chemicals, and sometimes you absorb it in your business thinking that it's gonna even out. But let's just say that you don't want it to even out anymore in this pool that's on your route that you're putting in, you know, three pounds of cal hypo every week because it's heavily used or there's some kind of problem and using a lot of chemicals there. Just charge them for a 50-pound bucket or 25-pound bucket of Calhypo and leave it at the customer's house and let them know that their pool is actually a heavy use pool that you're gonna have to charge them for some extra chlorine. Most people aren't gonna really push back on that because they really they already know their pool is a heavy chlorine pool, especially if all the kids are using in the summer. So that's one way to offset some of the cost by specifically targeting customers that are heavy use, and also targeting customers are pools that are actually draining your resources. You know, if you have a pool that's taking a lot of time and chemicals and mental anguish when you go there, dropping that pool is actually going to save you a lot of money, and you're still within a limit of losing that account without having to worry about it, you know, shedding one or two pools and raising the prices, and getting rid of those pools specifically is not a bad idea at that at that time, and it's something that may help you. So there's a lot of different things you can do inside of your business besides just raising prices across the board. You can make some cuts, you can move certain charges, you can implement some other charges for the customers, and all of this really helps. One thing you can do also if you're in an area like mine where you clean the filters every six months, if they're the you know, full-size D filters or quad cartridge filters, you can go from every six months to every four months. In fact, the manufacturer does recommend something more or less around three or four months in their manual, and so you can actually increase your filter cleaning by one more time per year. And if you charge$90 per filter cleaning and you have 70 filters that you clean, and you're adding one more of it per year, of course, that requires you to do it and do the work, which you may not want to do if you don't like filter cleaning, but 70 times 90 is$6,300 more for that year by just adding one more filter cleaning service instead of going every six months, you're going every four months, and you're capturing$6,300 more dollars without increasing the prices on your customers, and it may even save you a lot of headache. You know, if you're doing it three times a year, that means that the pool's gonna run much more efficiently, so it's a win-win for you and for the customer. And of course, you wouldn't implement that on every pool, but you can maybe do half the filters every four months the first year, and then start gradually moving everyone to that four-month schedule for filter cleaning to increase your revenue and increase the water quality of the customer's pool by having more frequent filter cleanings. And last, I'll just end with there is some straight math as well. If you have 80 service accounts and you can actually add three more, you have room in your your route for three more without doing anything, and let's just say you're charging, I'll just use a 150 number, even though it's a little bit low, times three, that's 450 times 12, just by adding three pools to the route that you can handle pretty easily. With you know, these aren't pools that are going to take a lot of time and effort. You've increased your annual revenue by 5400 gross there by just adding three pools. So if you're at 60 pools and you go to 70 pools, you can definitely add more revenue just by adding more accounts. You just can't do this if you're already at the peak where you're at 85 or 90 service accounts. If you're one polar, you have to be careful that you're not overloading yourself. But if you have room, you know, simple mathematics, add more accounts, you're gonna get more revenue. And it's not all about price increases that add revenue, it's about fine-tuning your business and finding that sweet spot where you have just enough pools on your route and you're charging enough for them. And if you do raise the prices and lose accounts, you're still in a win win situation. If you're looking for other podcasts, you can find those on my website, swing for learning.com. Click on the podcast icon on the banner. There's close to 1900 podcasts there for you to download and listen to. And if you're interested in the coaching program I offer, you can learn more at poolguycoaching.com. Thanks for listening to this podcast. Have a good rest of your week and God bless.