The First-Year Mistakes Every Pool Service Owner Makes

Underbidding can feel like the fastest way to grow a pool route, until you realize you are working harder for less money and dreading stops you used to feel excited about. We walk through the business-side rookie mistakes that quietly wreck a pool service business, starting with the most common trap: quoting a pool, cleanup, or service call without accounting for the real variables that drive time, chemical cost, and effort.

We get specific about what makes pricing tricky when you are new: pool size differences, heavy bather load, hidden debris from trees, and the true cost of green pool cleanups that require extra filter cleanings and a lot more chemicals than you expected. You will hear practical language for fixing an underbid the right way, including how to be honest with the customer, explain the reason for a rate change, and be willing to walk away rather than stay stuck in a bad deal that damages your mindset and your service quality.

We also share a simple framework for pool repair and equipment installs using a baseline hourly rate, realistic time estimates that include parts runs, and the “headache factor” for tight equipment pads and unexpected plumbing. Then we zoom out to route efficiency, covering why outlying pools and problem accounts can drain your day, and when dropping them is actually the move that increases profit per hour and makes the work feel fun again. If this helped, subscribe, share it with a pool pro friend, and leave a review so more service techs can price with confidence.

We break down the most costly rookie mistakes pool service pros make when building a pool route, especially pricing errors that quietly crush profit. We share practical ways to bid smarter, correct underbids without panic, and design a route that feels lighter and pays better.
• Underbidding weekly service and getting trapped at a low rate
• Spotting workload drivers during a bid like pool size, trees, and heavy use
• Fixing a bad bid by owning the mistake and giving the customer options
• Avoiding losses on green pool cleanups by pricing for time, chemicals, and filter cleanings
• Setting a baseline hourly rate for installs and repairs
• Adding a headache factor for tight equipment pads and surprise plumbing
• Dropping outlying pools to reduce drive time and tighten the route
• Letting go of problem accounts once replacement income is in place
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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:14

Welcome to the Pool Bay Podcast Show. In this episode, I'm going to talk to you about some rookie mistakes you can make with your pool route. Specifically on the business end, I'll cover some of these. And I've done several on the chemistry and maintenance end. And I think the business end is something that a lot of people make mistakes on. And if you can avoid these, you're way ahead of everyone else. 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. This first one I've made myself many times, and it's something that really

Welcome And Coaching Invite

SPEAKER_00 1:02

affects your business in a negative way for sure. And that's when you underbid a pool or a job or service call, and I've done this, I've been guilty of it. Sometimes it's really hard, and I'll admit it's hard to price things when you're doing something if you don't have if you don't know all the variables behind it. And there's also some baseline pricing that you should develop in your business, of course, so that you can avoid these mistakes. For example, a 14,000 gallon pool cannot be you cannot charge the same for a 30,000 gallon pool. It's just there's a lot more going on, it's a bigger body of water, and you have to charge more for the pools based on sizes

The Underbidding Trap In Pool Service

SPEAKER_00 1:44

in your area. Thankfully, there aren't too many of those pools in my service area. But if you do get a pool that's big or difficult, you have to charge accordingly accordingly for that pool. So I've been guilty of taking on pools before where they have heavy usage. I'm not really aware of it because you don't know. You know, there's some signs that pools heavily use, but you may not see them when you're new to the business. There's also some signs that the pool is going to have a lot of leaf debris in it. You may not notice that either when you're doing the bid. And it's really hard to take a pool, service it, and then tell the customer, oh, you know what, I underbid the pool by $50 and I have to charge you more money. That's not really good business, a good business practice to get into. And it doesn't go over too well with the customer. Now, I did have one of my members in the group that was really savvy about making adjustments into situations like this, and he would tell the customers, and he had the situation, particularly where he took a pool on, didn't realize how much more time it would take the employee to do the pool because there were so many trees that he wasn't really paying attention to when he did the bid. Honestly, he missed a lot of stuff, and the pool just took so long to clean every week that he told the customer that he pretty much put it this way. I understand that if you know you if you don't want to continue service, I completely understand, and it's my fault entirely. When I bid the pool, I didn't realize that it would take an extra 25 minutes to clean it each week because of all the other trees around it. And I'll have to raise the rate by I think it was like $50 or $60. And I understand totally if you don't want to go for it, and it's my fault for bidding it too low, and it's okay, I understand if you want to cancel service, but I can no longer continue doing the pool at the price I quoted you. And believe it or not, the customer actually took that nicely and raised the service rate for that pool. And of course, he was willing to walk away at that point, so he had nothing to lose except maybe his little bit of his business face for underbidding it. Another one of my members bit a pool, I think it was like 25,000 gallons, had like a slide, and he saw all these pool toys around there, and he bit it, I believe he bid it for like 160 or something, and it should have been more than that, of course. And after he actually left the stop, he texted me and he's like, I just left the place and I severely underbid the account. I'm not exactly sure what I was thinking at the time, but now I realize that this pool is gonna be killed in the summer and it's bigger than I normally would service. You know, I I don't I would quote for that size pool. I wasn't thinking, what do I do? And I basically told them, you know, just let the customer know that you made a mistake in your bidding, and you understand if they want to get another bid from someone else, but you can do the pool for this amount and apologize to them and do that because otherwise you're stuck doing the pool at a low rate, you're gonna get frustrated, you're gonna be upset with yourself, upset with the customer for not really a good reason because you're the one who underbid the pool, and it's just not a good situation for yourself mentally. And really, it's you can walk away from the pool at that point, lose face with the customer, or just let them know you made a mistake in bidding. But I was not really experienced enough back when I started to do these things. I'm telling you this now because I have more experience and I can give this advice to people as well. But when I first started, I was under bidding and I didn't really know a strategy, or be able I was not able to talk to anybody that gave me a strategy to fix the situation or to even understand why I'm so frustrated doing this pool and I'm not making good money on it, and I'm really upset going there. To save yourself frustration, needless anguish, and of course, you don't really care for that pool because you're not getting paid for it or paid enough for it. Go ahead and either let that pool go on your off your service by letting the customer know that you no longer service the pool, or you can ask for a raise because of the situation that you pretty much underbid. So you want to avoid underbidding as much as possible because it is kind of a gray area and a sticky situation to ask for more money. This happens with green pool cleanups too. I've been guilty of this too, where I look at a green pool, I think it's gonna be easy to do, and I'm not really paying too much attention to the details because I was new to the business, and I really didn't know what a level three or four or five pool looked like, that there was a difference in amount of chemicals and time and filter cleanings. And so I think I bid like a level five pool. It was really a really bad pool where they had tadpoles and mosquito larvae in there, and I bid it like at least three or four hundred dollars under what I should have bid it, because it was took two more filter cleanings and a lot more chemicals, and I really lost money on that pool. I didn't make any money at all, and maybe I was even upside down on the chemicals and the time spent there and the filter cleaning charges. So that definitely

Green Pool Cleanups Cost More

SPEAKER_00 6:57

does happen. So to avoid that, you you can't, of course, get experience automatically, you know, it's not something that you can do. I mean, if if I was working in a in a business where I didn't have a lot of insight or experience in, I really wouldn't know how to bid the jobs. I remember I was at my mechanic one time, and he was having to do the timing chain on my Nissan, and he actually went onto this website, and I'm sure you can go to chat GTP now, but he had this website that all the auto repair stores paid for, and it would actually give you an estimate, you put the vehicle in, the job that you were gonna do, and it would shoot out an estimated amount of time to do that job, and of course, that's how he was able to bid that and realize that he's not gonna lose money on labor, and he can get the part for whatever price and sell to me for whatever markup, and all this information was there, and he was showing me this program like this is how long it's gonna take to do this timing chain. This is why I'm gonna have to charge you, I think it was $1,800 or something like that, because it was like a 10-hour labor job. Well, when you're starting on pool business, you don't really know that screen pool is a level 5 pool and you're gonna have to clean the filter three times and you know throw in $200 worth of chemicals. So I would say that the best thing you can do to avoid underbidding is to bid higher than you think it's gonna be. Now, this is pretty good business practice anyway, but if you get to a green pool and it looks like you know you were gonna bid 600, go ahead and bid 800. Because then you have a little cushion built in there, and that will cover any kind of miscellaneous things that you may have missed. Same thing when you're doing like a cleanup, you know, like when you're doing a general cleanup for a customer, always bid a little higher, and you have to factor in the hourly wage into that factor. So if you don't know what to bid, just kind of come up with an hourly rate that's good for your area. Let's just say that your

Build A Baseline Hourly Rate

SPEAKER_00 9:03

hourly rate is $130 an hour. So if you're gonna do a motor install and it takes you two hours to do this because you have to calculate, you're gonna pick up the pump, I mean the motor at the shop, bring it over there, take off the old one. I can do it probably myself in about 45 minutes when I'm at the site carefully, you know, removing everything, putting everything back, getting everything running. About that much time would take, but just figure in an hour and a half, two hours because there may be things you run into, and plus you have to go pick up the part and bring it back there. So that's two hours, or that's $260 would be your minimum charge to do the motor install. Then you have the markup on the motor itself, and you know, it's one of the easiest things to get started doing it that way, just get an hourly rate and use that rate as your install rate. And of course, you can learn how to add flat charges in there when a situation calls for it. You know, maybe the there's pipes over the motor and pump, and you have to actually cut some plumbing to get to it. It's not unheard of in California, believe me, it's a pretty tight equipment area. So there was one pool I remember in particular where the builder had built the pool and the pumps were facing outside from the wall of the house. So if you look at the back wall of the house, the pumps are like facing you forward. But then if you look at it carefully, the pumps and the motor behind were right by the wall, like with a quarter of an inch or half an inch of space. So there's no way to take the bolts off, take the motor off, get the diffuser out, the impeller, and take off that motor. The only way to do that would be to cut the pump off, remove the plumbing, pull the pump forward, then take the motor off and change it. That's not a $260 job at that point. That's like a $500 job because of all the extra time,

The Headache Factor In Installs

SPEAKER_00 11:01

effort, re-plumbing to do that. So you have to kind of be wise and understand that you have an hourly rate, but there's also the headache factor you add into that when you look at a job. One of my members was starting out and he was gonna do a pump and filter install on the same day. And he told me, you know, he would give the customer a discount, or he gave the customer a discount because he was gonna do the pump and filter on the same day, and he figured that he can give him a break. I said, that was a mistake because when you're doing two pieces of equipment, chances are something's gonna go wrong, and you're gonna have a problem, and it's gonna cost you're gonna be there for much longer than you think. And that came to pass that he was out over there doing the plumbing. He was out of a certain fitting, I think it was he missed an elbow or something, he couldn't have one, so he went to go get it, came back. Then he realized that he he didn't have another part, had to go back to the store and get it. By then the supply place had closed, now he's going to the Home Depot to get parts. It was a big mess. And he said that he started the job like around nine in the morning and finished it when it was dark out, and he charged him a discount for doing both the pump and the filter together. So he realized I learned my lesson. You have to just calculate the time plus headache factor, and realize that it's not simply just your hourly rate, it's also other factors involved in that. So get an hour hourly rate though, so you kind of have a set rate to work off of as your baseline, and then add to that depending on what you think the job's gonna entail. You may not know this starting out what you're gonna run into. So you may lose a little bit of money at the beginning, but you learned the lesson, and that lesson will allow you not to lose money again on the next job that you do. So don't think that you're gonna go out there and be able to bid everything perfectly. You won't be able to, but you can certainly learn from underbidding, and then next time when you go out there, you're gonna know how much to bid for that job. Same with pool service when you're bidding on pools. You will know more or less your base rate that you work off of. You let's say it's $160 a month, and then you go up and down on that base rate depending on factors when you get to that pool and you're doing the bid. But again, it's really hard when you underbid service to raise the price. It's always better to overbid service and get the job. If they don't give you the job and you don't really need the job, but if you do need the job, then you can if they want to chisel you down a little bit, I would say it's fine to a certain point. But you really want to bid accordingly so you don't lose money because you're out there to make money, of course, and if you consistently underbid, leave money on the table, you won't survive in business long, and it's really cutting into your profit, and it may not make the job worth doing if you're not getting paid for it. I'll touch on a couple other things that were mistakes I made that I learned from this this next one. Here is when you have an outlying pool, and I was driving about 15 minutes out of my way, maybe a little bit longer to get to this pool. It was a really easy pool, nice pool, nice customer, and then driving another 15 minutes back to the regular part of the route. Now, of course, it's unavoidable when you're starting out, you're gonna have pools spread out everywhere, and it takes years and years to tighten your pool route up. I understand that. But if your route is fairly tight, going 30 minutes out of your way, one way and back, total of 30 minutes out of your way to do one pool isn't completely logical. And once you get a pool in your area that's tighter, I would highly recommend dropping that outlying pool or maybe giving it to a buddy, selling it to a buddy, or giving it to them,

Outlying Pools That Break Your Day

SPEAKER_00 14:46

and they could take that pool. But going out of your way for one pool is really a strain on your day, and it's eventually gonna wear on you, and you're like, why am I driving all the way out here to this pool? And once you get a customer again that's gonna replace the money you may lose from the one you're gonna drop, or the outlying pool, I should say, that you're planning on dropping, go ahead and drop that pool, and you'll be you'll be happy. And there's no reason to hang on to it, it's just kind of one of those rookie things where you're like, I can't lose this account, and I don't want to, you know, drop this thing, but you're better off dropping it, getting a pool closer, and then getting another one closer, and you're gonna make more money and spend less time driving. So the sooner you learn that, the better off you're gonna be, I think. And the last one is a pool that's a problem, you want to get it off your pool route as soon as possible. You know, if the pool has a ton of leaf debris in there and you're spending 45 minutes cleaning it, and you're only charging the rate that you would charge for a pool that doesn't look anything like that, or the pool, the customer is not the friendliest person, and they're picky and they're always causing trouble, and you're getting you just dread going there or running into the customer, you time it so that you hope they're at work, so you never see them. Once you get another pool that you replace the loss of income from that one, I would recommend dropping it immediately. Because really, there's it's your business should be something you enjoy doing. You should enjoy the customers, enjoy

Drop Problem Accounts And Feel Free

SPEAKER_00 16:19

the pools that you're servicing. And when you're in a situation where you don't like the account and you're doing it, you're dreading it, at that point that account needs to be eventually dropped. And believe me, the freedom from letting go of a bad account is really liberating. You're gonna, you know, if it's a Thursday morning, the next week you're gonna be so thankful that you don't have to go out to that pool anymore, and you'll be relieved and you'll have a smile on your face when you wake up in the morning. It's that you know invigorating when you do something like that. So I definitely recommend that you drop a problem pool as soon as you can and pick up another nice pool to take its place, and your life will be much better. Those pools you have to drive really far to get to, unless you have to, because all your route is spread out. Once you drop that pool, you're also gonna feel a lot of relief and you're gonna enjoy your day out there much more. Looking for other podcasts, you can find those by going to my website, it's awayfullearning.com. On the podcast icon, there's a banner or on the on the banner's a podcast icon. Click on that, there'll be a drop to the menu with over 1900 podcasts. And if you're interested in the coaching program, you can learn more at FoolGuyCoaching.com. Thanks for listening to this podcast. Have a rest of your week. God bless.