What Nobody Tells You About Starting Pool Service

Pool service looks like a water job, but it’s really a people job, and that’s where most new pool techs get blindsided. We break down the unglamorous realities of starting a pool cleaning business: the long hours working alone, the emotional grind of complaints, and the customer service skills you must build if you want to keep accounts and earn steady referrals. If you’ve been in pool service for six months or you’re about to buy your first pool route, this is the mindset reset that keeps you from burning out or getting pushed out.

We also get blunt about bias and professionalism. Customers will try to pull you into politics, religion, and controversy, and the fastest way to lose business is to let those conversations shape your attitude. You never know which client is your “golden goose” who can send you 20, 30, or 50 new leads, so we talk about staying neutral, keeping your truck and branding clean, and focusing on what clients actually pay for: consistent service, clear communication, and a calm problem-solver in their backyard.

Then we shift into practical growth strategy: build your service route from scratch with pool service marketing like Google Ads, Yelp, Thumbtack, and HomeAdvisor, or buy a pool route for sale and grow faster with cash up front. We cover why banks won’t finance routes, what to look for in a seller, and how fast you can realistically ramp up when leads start flowing. If you want to shorten the learning curve on pool chemistry, equipment, and troubleshooting.

• handling complaints and tough customer moments without spiraling
• why sales and customer-facing backgrounds often win early
• personal biases showing up in business and how they cost you leads
• staying neutral with customers on politics and religion
• deciding whether to build a route from scratch or buy a pool route
• marketing for leads through Google Ads, Yelp, Thumbtack, HomeAdvisor, and flyers
• why pool routes are usually cash purchases and how to vet a sale
• realistic timelines for learning pool chemistry, equipment, and troubleshooting
• using g

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Transcript

Welcome And Quick Roadmap

SPEAKER_00 1:02

Hey, welcome to the Pool Guy Podcast Show. In this episode, I'm going to talk to you about some things when you're starting out pool service. If you're new, just beginning, or you've just been in it for six months to a year. And if you're a veteran, you're going to also get some good tips out of this as well. So I'll cover some things that maybe a lot of people don't talk about that you really need to know about pool service. 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. Now I'm not sure your background or what industry you're coming from or your people skills, but one thing about pool service: there's two words in pool service. One, of course, is the pool, which is the body of water, which doesn't give you a lot of trouble as far as you can be any personality and deal with the pool. The pool doesn't care if you're a nice guy or if you're not so nice of a person. However, the second part of pool service is where trouble begins, and if you're not a people person, or if you're not someone who can learn and adapt to personality, then pool service is something that you are not going to enjoy doing because of the service aspect. This is something that I had a guy very early when I started my coaching group. He joined, and he came from a jewelry store. So he sold jewelry. I think they made diamonds and whatever. So he was behind the scenes. I don't think he was actually out there selling. I'll take that back. He was behind the scenes making the jewelry with like six other people. Really enjoyed it, decided to start his own business. He bought a small pool route and he hated it from day one. First thing he didn't like about it was that he was out there by himself. Now, something that you may not really kind of consider, but a lot of the times when you're doing the pool service, you're just back there by yourself with no one to talk to. Sometimes you go through the whole day, which are my best days, when I don't talk to anybody at all. I don't see any customers, no interactions. For me, that's like a perfect day when I don't see any customers that don't interact. But you may not be that person, and you may need that social interaction at your work. So keep that in mind that it is a job where there isn't a lot of social interaction, it's just you and the pool, and that's about it at that point. So that's one aspect he didn't like. He was getting kind of lonely. He was actually getting clinically depressed working out there. I find it very invigorating being out there in nature, being out there by myself. I get to think, but some people don't see it that way. The other thing he didn't like was the people aspect of it. He never really had to deal with people at the level that you deal with them with pool service. There's a problem, there's a complaint. That was his main problem was the complaints and issues that would arise from doing the job. He couldn't deal with it because he didn't have those skills developed. And this is something that is really important if you are thinking about getting into the pool service industry. Those that succeed are those with the background in sales. Like, you know, I had we have some car salesmen in the group, ex-police officers, people that know how to deal with customers in tough situations. Those are the ones that do the best. One of my most successful members of the group actually sold health club memberships before he got into the pool service business, and he was able to talk to a lot of people, develop those skills. Another really successful member, he actually his family owns businesses, and you know, he he started doing this, I think, when he was 25, and he would just walk back there, do the bid, tell the customer they'd have nothing to worry about, and he would get the account. And he really knew nothing about pool service. He just knew about business, knew about the way you kind of present yourself, the attitude that you have is really important with customers, like how you present yourself as being really knowledgeable, even though he didn't really know anything about pools when he first started the first six months. And these are all success stories based on prior experience. So you don't have to be in a job like that per se, but you should be able to learn customer service, dealing with customers. These aspects are things that you really need to learn if you haven't learned them yet, because your pool service will fail and fail quickly without that service aspect being really dialed in to where you can deal with all kinds of people and all kinds of problems. I don't think you hear this a lot, but I think your personal biases, I wouldn't say prejudices, but there are personal biases that people have towards other people. Those actually will come out when you deal with people. You can't hide them. Some people hide it better than others, but eventually it's gonna bleed out and they're gonna know that you just don't like them for whatever pre-existing bias you may have or prejudice against somebody or a group of people or some kind of even a political group, the same thing can happen. If one of your customers is either far left or far right, and you're maybe not either far left or far right, you may have a bias towards them. And I would say that in business, this is one of the things that really gets you in trouble. I talked before in one of my podcasts about the golden customer or the goose with the golden egg, and this is a customer that would probably bring you a ton of leads. Maybe you don't even know this, but they're like a realtor or something, and you dismiss this person because of some bias or prejudice against that person, you've just lost that golden goose or the egg. I I'm getting my fairy tales mixed up here, but the goose that produced the golden egg, and that customer could have given you 50 accounts, but since you dismissed them because of some pre-existing thing in your head, you've lost that business. And so this is one thing about business that you'll learn right away with customer service is that all those biases have to go as soon as they can into the wastebasket because you can't run a successful business if you have an attitude towards somebody without even knowing that person and dismissing them because of politics, race, ethnicity, gender. All these things do play into your core business as a pool service provider, and you have to become a little bit more moderate, I should say, like in the middle, more like a someone who bridges the gap versus somebody who's on one side or the other. And this is really crucial in business, and a lot of like big businesses make these mistakes where they get a lot of negative publicity when they do something, and whether you agree with it or not, it's something that happens that you have to be really neutral in everything. And so I would say that if you have a leaning towards one thing or another, I wouldn't have those stickers on my truck. I make it a rule not to talk about religion with customers, politics with customers. Anything that could offend somebody or could offend you would be something you leave out of your business. So I think that's an important aspect of customer relationships. You really are there to clean the pool, service the pool. You should have no political agenda, no, you know, any kind of agenda should not exist. You're just doing a business, and you have to look at it kind of like a critical thing. You're just there to do the pool, clean it, service it, get paid, and that is it. Customers will talk to you, and I've had customers all the time complaining about certain things and trying to draw me into a conversation that's controversial, and all this nod and okay, yeah, uh-huh. I would I just don't give them anything. I don't even think most of my customers know my political stance. Certainly here on the podcast, you don't know if I'm left or right or middle, because I just don't talk about it, and I don't think that's something that someone in business should be focused on. And I think this is a really critical thing when you're starting out, because your mindset has to change really dramatically and rapidly if you're gonna be successful in business. And every client is someone who's gonna pay you money, regardless of anything that's underlying that. And we all have personal biases and prejudices that we get from our parents growing up socially, and I can't say that you're gonna eliminate all of that, but you can train yourself not to have that interfere with you doing business with somebody. I think if you really want to grow out of these biases and prejudices, buy some rental properties, and you're gonna run into a lot of people from a lot of walks of life that you may disagree with, and you're going to have them as your tenants, and it's something that is gonna grow you as a person. And I've experienced this myself having rental properties and dealing with people, and it really makes you someone who understands human nature, human behavior, and all of us have one thing in common, and we're all just trying to, you know, do what we can in this country to pursue happiness, have a good life, and just enjoy the freedoms that we have. And I think you just have to get that mindset, and you'll grow into it, or you actually will go out of business eventually. You've probably been into these mom and pop stores where you know that they don't treat their customers correctly, and how long do they stay in business? Maybe nine months. Some last longer than others, but the customers will start to trickle away and they're not going to get the return calls, and they're not, you know, service providers as well. I've had run-ins with people like this as well that I don't just I don't call them back, and that's simply how business works. If you present yourself in a way that's offensive to other people, they just won't call you back and they won't use your business services. That was a long rant, and I think it was necessary to get that point across. Now, back to the business aspect. Do you build your service route from scratch, or do you buy a partial route or a full route? It just really depends on if you're coming from another profession that you can actually have time to build the route, or maybe you just lost your job and you want to jump right into it. You can, of course, build from scratch with you know really good marketing. If you have a website, get Google Ads, you can get on Yelp, Thumbtack, all those kind of sales-driven service providers where there's a representative for Yelp and Home Advisor that's kind of bugging you and helping you to get the ad out there and get clients. And it can, in some areas, be you know an annoyance, other areas it can be really helpful, but all those are kind of commission-driven sales positions where they want you to advertise with their platform, and they can be very successful. I know a lot of people that do really well on Yelp, some people do really well on HomeAdvisor, Thumbtack, all these services are there so you can expand your business rapidly and you can grow pretty rapidly with the right advertisement and marketing. On the other end of it, you could also buy a partial route or a complete route. Now, you have to understand buying a pool route does take some cash because there's no way you're gonna get financing to buy a pool route. It's just a pipe dream if you think you're gonna go into the bank and get an SBA loan to buy a pool route because the bank will be like, Well, what are you buying? Well, buying a pool route. Well, yeah, are you buying, you know, where's the business address? Well, there's no addresses, these pools in people's backyards. And how where's your collateral? How do you own these things? Why don't they're just an account? And that's probably gonna be as far as the conversation goes with any banker. So you have to have either a home equity line of credit, cash saved up, some way to buy this pool route, and then of course, you have to understand that you're buying something from someone who's selling their pool route. So for whatever reason they're selling it, they may not be retiring, they may just be getting rid of some pools they don't like, they may be retiring, or they may just have too many accounts and they want to get rid of some accounts that they don't particularly care for. So just be aware that buying a pool route, you know, sometimes you're gonna get an excellent buy, especially if the person's retiring. Other times you have to really understand what you're purchasing, just like if you're buying, and I'll go back to the rental property example again. A lot of times when you're looking for a rental property, the best ones to buy are for those that are retiring out of the business, or they passed away and it was inherited by their hairs and they want to get rid of it. Those are pretty clean transactions. Other times you're buying a property from somebody who's just having a lot of problems, doesn't manage it properly, and it's not kept up well. Again, you're buying something that has a lot of baggage with it. So understand the reason for the sale and what you're actually purchasing. So it's something that you need to consider. I do like working with national pool route sales, I think they vet the sellers pretty well. Nothing is 100%, but they're as close as you can get with their guarantees that they have built in, and it's something that is relatively safe. But again, you have to do your research and understand that you're putting a lot of your cash assets into this, and you have to do a really diligent job with venting everything. How fast can you build up a pool route from scratch? Well, it just depends on your area. I'll give you an example here. If you're like in the inland empire of my area of Southern California, I'm gonna just pick a city at random. Let's just say Ranchucamonga is a city that has a lot of pools. It's kind of like a really affluent area of the inland empire here. You can probably expect to get two good leads every week or land two good leads every week from Google Ads. If you have a good ad campaign and you're spending a thousand dollars a month, probably about two pools a week would be on average, you're gonna get two accounts. So, in the course of you know, three months, you're gonna get 12 pools by using the Google Ads, and then you're gonna have to supplement that with other services like Yelp that can get you leads. So the leads are really important. Leads, leads, leads are the big thing when you're advertising, and you want to get your foot in the door to get in the backyard. So these leads are really crucial. And yes, the salespeople on Home Advisor can be annoying calling you and having you change your territory or do more services, but people do get leads from that, so just understand that there are services out there that's gonna help you get service accounts. You can do door flyers, you can do whatever you want, but it's gonna take a lot of marketing and a lot of time to build up your pool route from scratch. So don't think that you're gonna just drive down the street and everyone's gonna come out of their house and want you to go in their backyard to do the pool service. Doesn't work that way. You really have to get in the door, and the leads are really important. I'll talk a little bit here at the end about the learning curve. Yes, when you're starting out in pool service, even if you work for somebody for a year, you probably don't know enough to know enough to really do the job and not have a problem. That's why I have this coaching group, it's really good. There's a group me app where you can post questions in there, you can text me directly. There's a lot of things that you don't know that you should know, and if you don't know what you should know, you don't know what you should know. That makes sense. Just like anything, if you took me to Joanne's fabric, if they're still around, I'm not even sure if they're still in business. I know the one by me clothes, or fabrics or Michael's a good example, they're still in business. And you told me that I had to knit a sweater, I wouldn't know what I needed to know about that, because I never have done that before. I probably won't do it either. But I'm just saying that if I don't even know from the beginning what I need to do or what I need how to do it, then I don't know the questions to ask to get that done. And of course, chat would be helpful, but if you've never done something or there's so many aspects to it, I'm sure there's plenty of aspects to sewing that I know nothing about. Same thing with pool service, there's a lot of aspects with equipment, with chemistry, that you really don't know nothing about until you need to know about that particular problem or equipment or chemic chemistry issue. And so there is a learning curve, but the good thing about pool service is that you can learn it, and it's something there's you know, there's of course YouTube, there's chat, there's my coaching group, there's these podcasts here, lots of material out there to learn. And so I would say within zero to six months, you should be able to run your business fairly effectively. From six months to one to two years, you should have some deeper concepts and know how to troubleshoot a lot of things, and then from years two to five, you should be getting some expertise at a certain area of pool care, and know a lot, and know a lot of problems, troubleshooting things to do, things not to do, and of course you're gonna make mistakes along the way, and that's why I partnered with UPA to have the liability insurance, and hopefully you can join a group and you can get that knowledge so that you don't make any kind of liability, general liability mistakes out there. And I think the number one thing is understand that you probably will never know everything, but within the first six months, if you really apply yourself, you should know quite a bit to sustain your business. I I'll end with this story here. I had one guy who was doing a bid, and some people are bolder than others, so call me like right in front of the customer, like, hey, you know, I'm here with my customer, and can you help me solve this problem? I think that's probably kind of weird, but I've had that happen before. This one guy he went to do a bid, he pushed the wrong button on an automatic panel, and the valves went into spa drain mode. He's like, hey, I don't know what I did. I hit a button and the spa's draining down, so you know what do I do? So the easiest thing, and this is something that I learned from experience, I told him, just go out there and turn the subpanel breaker off for about 20 seconds and turn it back on. And sure enough, he did that, and of course the aqua link went back into regular mode, and whatever he hit was cleared out of there. But I could have spent some time on there telling him, okay, now you go there and you go to spa drain and whatever, but you learn these tricks that if you wanted to get back to just the regular program that was there, just turn the breaker on and off. And this is what these this is what my coaching group is for, and what other groups are for as well, the UPA groups that you can join and go to the meetings. You learn these things, and no one's gonna know everything at the beginning, but the more knowledge you have, the better you are gonna be at running your business. And of course, try these different groups, Facebook, whatever, and get as much knowledge as possible within the first six months. And I think it's very cliche to say that anyone could start their business, but that's not the truth of it. Anyone can start a business, but a lot of businesses fail out there. So I'm not gonna say that, yeah, start a pool service business, you can do it, because you may not be able to do it and you may do it poorly. And if you really want to start a business, you really have to understand all the aspects of the business you're getting into and how to run it properly. But I think it's a big disservice to anyone to say that you can do it. You could become a plumber or electrician, or you can become a landscaper or a pool service provider. Not everyone can do that, and so I'm here to say that if you wanted to do it, yes, you could probably do it if you have if you take the right steps, and it's really important to really like the field as well and invest your time in investigating it. And if you may not like pool service, but you might like something else, another service industry. But I think the future definitely is the service industry, and it's a way to make really good money and have freedom in your life. And I would say that the pool service industry is one of the best service industries out there today. Looking for other podcasts, you can find those by going to my website, swinging for learning.com, and clicking on the podcast icon. There'll be a drop down menu with over 1900 podcasts there for you as well. And if you're interested in the coaching program that I offer, you can learn more at poolguidecoaching.com. Thanks for listening to this podcast. Have a great rest of your week. God bless.