Are You Building a Business or a Job?

You didn’t get into pool service to work six days a week forever, you did it to get your time back. We talk about what it actually takes to build a pool service business that supports a four-day workweek, with steady income from weekly service accounts and enough breathing room to enjoy your weekends again. I’m sharing practical, field-tested decisions that separate “busy” from “optimized,” especially once your route starts to grow and every extra job tries to claim your calendar.

We dig into the tradeoffs most pool service pros avoid: narrowing your service menu so you’re not juggling weekly maintenance, green pool cleanups, acid washes, repairs, and installations all at once. That extra money can look tempting, but if it steals your day off, it may be costing you more than it pays. We also cover how to recognize the moment you’re ready to refer work out, collect a referral fee, and protect your schedule without feeling like you’re falling behind.

Then we get tactical about pool route optimization. A tight route means less driving, fewer long days, and a better shot at a true four-day schedule. I share a proven strategy pool pros use to consolidate their service area by selling outlying pools and buying nearby accounts, plus what to expect when you purchase part of a route. Finally, we talk hiring, including when you’re big enough to absorb payroll, why the first few weeks can feel like a step backward, and how to plan for the risk of a sudden quit.

Subscribe for more pool service business tips, share this with a pool pro who needs their weekends back, and leave a review with your biggest scheduling challenge.

We build a real plan for turning a pool service route into a four-day workweek without wrecking income. We talk through the hard tradeoffs like turning down profitable jobs, tightening your service area, and hiring help when you’re actually ready.  
• setting the goal of a stable weekly service route with three days off  
• choosing Monday off vs Friday off based on holidays and workload  
• limiting services over time to protect your schedule  
• knowing when time matters more than the extra money  
• consolidating a scattered pool route by selling and buying accounts  
• using simple ads and signs to find route swaps  
• hiring an employee and planning for training, customer pushback, and costs  
• preparing for the risk of an employee quitting and needing backup coverage  
Learn more at Sumipoollearning.com.  
Find more podcasts at swimmingprolearning.com.  
If you're interested in the coaching program, you can learn more at PoolGuyCoaching.com.  

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Transcript

Why Pool Service Should Buy Time

SPEAKER_00 1:02

Hey, welcome to the Pool Gla Podcast Show. One of the reasons why you got into the pool service was to free up your time and to have more free time. A lot of people are coming from industries where they're working 60 or 80 hours a week, and the pool service is supposed to free you up and give you more of your life back. I'm going to cover some of this in today's podcast. 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 Sumipoollearning.com. Ultimately, I think a lot of Pool Pro's goal is to have a substantial or stable income with what is your bread and butter, which is your weekly service route, and have a really limited work week, four days a week, three days off, would be ideal in most cases. Now, whether you take the Monday off or the Friday off is really up to you. A lot of pool pros find that Mondays are better because there's a few holidays that fall on Mondays, and so it's easier just to manage a route with that day off. But you can also take Fridays off or have Friday as a light day where you just have a few pools and repairs, whatever you want to do. Ultimately, you want to get to a point where you're maximizing your income and maximizing

Designing A Four-Day Workweek

SPEAKER_00 2:28

your time management as well. It does take a little effort to get to this point where you can start thinking about cutting back on your work week. And when you're first starting out, you're going to be working sometimes six days a week. This is not unheard of as you're building up your business. Working Saturdays is very common, but you have this light at the end of the tunnel, knowing that a lot of pool companies are set up to where they only work four days a week and they're off three days a week, which is very optimal, I think, in a business. And you're you should eventually try to get to that four-day work week, in my opinion, because it frees up that fifth day to do repairs and do other services and other things you can do on that fifth day. But you can also have a three-day weekend every weekend, which is great, and something to kind of optimize your time with your family and hobbies and activities. Because I mentioned at the beginning, you may be coming from an industry where I have I have one member of my group that was a car salesman, and he didn't have a weekend off for like five years or something. It was pretty crazy. Another one came from a corporate job where he was expected to work 60 hours a week minimum, and very limited time for any kind of family activities. So the goal again is to set yourself up to where you can get there. Now, when you're starting out, I mentioned you're going to be working a lot of hours and doing a lot of running around and working long days, which again is very typical of building up any kind of business. When you're building any business, you're going to spend a lot of time and invest a lot of time into that business. So don't get me wrong, I'm not contradicting in any way. I'm saying that ultimately you want to get to a point where you can optimize things. How do you get to that point? The first thing you want to look at is what your ultimate goal is in your business. Now, this is something that I talk about often, is that you really can't do too many things in your business, and also think you can optimize your time. What I mean by this is that if you're focused on weekly service accounts, that's good. But then if you're adding green pool cleanups, one-time cleanups, acid washes, repairs, installations to that, you're gonna have a very difficult time getting to that four-day work week with so many moving parts in your business. So what I suggest is that eventually, not at the beginning again, because you're just kind of getting your business started

Stop Doing Everything For Everyone

SPEAKER_00 5:03

and you're building things, but eventually you want to limit yourself to what you think is the most optimal for your time. Now I have a repair person that I use often. I'll send him out to do jobs. He has about 30 pools on his route, and then he spends most of his time doing repairs. To him, that's optimal. To you, that might not be optimal. You may want to have 70 service accounts and do repairs occasionally, and this may get you to that point where you can, of course, have less days of the week where you're working out there. Now, if you're doing everything, green pool cleanups, acid washes, weekly service, repairs, installations, you probably are never going to get to that point where you can optimize your time. Now you can bring on an employee to help do that, but I'll get to that later. But I'm just talking right now when you're getting started and you want to try to optimize your work week and your time. What's the best way to do it? So, number one is you want to limit your services at some point. Not at the beginning, but at some point when you have the service accounts that you're looking for, let's say you're at 60 accounts, you can start kind of cutting back on certain services so that you can optimize those and maybe get to 70 accounts where you want to be, and that's kind of your sweet spot, 70 service accounts, you can handle those, and you can work four days a week making pretty good money. So at that point, if someone wants to have an acid wash done, you can refer it to somebody, get a referral fee, or if they want to have a pump filter installed, you can refer that to someone as well, and you can maybe do small repairs like changing motors and things like that, and still keep yourself pretty balanced. And that's the key that you're going to have to give up some money or leave some money on the table at some point to optimize your time. Now, if you're not willing to do that, then you're never going to optimize your time and you're going to be working five, six days a week still. So part of optimizing your time is sacrificing some income or potential income because of that. And if you're at the point where you want to do that, you're going to be perfectly fine with it. How do you know you're at that point? Well, if someone wants you to do an acid wash or bid on an acid wash, and you can make some pretty good money doing that, but then you realize that you're going to have to give up one of your days off to do that, or your one of your the fifth day you're going to have to work when you normally are off and you don't feel like doing it, then you're probably at that point where time is more valuable than the income from that particular service. But if you get that acid wash call and you're like, okay, I'm going to go do this, I need the money, then you're not at that point yet. And that's kind of how you know. If you can leave the money on the table, you're at that point. If you can't, then you're not at that point yet. And you'll know when you're at that point, and you'll know when to let your foot off the gas and not take everything out there. The second thing is to have a tight route. Now, this takes a long time to develop, and this may take years to develop, but really the optimal goal is to have all of your pools in a pretty centralized area from your home so that you're not driving way out there to do a pool or way out there, or you have you know six pools in this city, five pools in this city. Now it's really hard to do at the beginning, very difficult to do at the beginning. There are some tricks you can do to optimize this. One of them is to, and this is this is done successfully by group members, by the way. I had one member that was in three different cities in Riverside County, and it was one of those things where he just was driving too far each day, and it was kind of wearing him

Consolidate Your Route To Drive Less

SPEAKER_00 8:46

out. And then he had this brilliant idea, and this idea was to sell 10 pools that were in Paris, California. And once he sold those 10 pools, he would buy 10 pools in Hemet, California. And this idea actually worked out really well. He sold those 10 pools, bought 10 pools in another area. And this may work in your area as well if you're able to do this. And if you can find a pool route for sale in your area, purchase that, and then sell the other part of your route that's in an outlying area, and this could be beneficial for two parties. You are getting you're relieving yourself of pools that are far away, someone else is buying those pools, and someone else is selling pools that are in an area that maybe they don't want to service anymore. And so, how do you find these pools? Just put a sign out of your supplier saying looking to buy 10 pools, or put a sign out saying looking to sell 10 pools. You can also, I believe he advertised his pools on Craigslist, which can sound sketchy, but it was really effective for him to do this. Now, of course, you can hire a pool broker if you have 20 pools to sell. They'll be happy to help you sell those pools at a premium and they get paid, but they're really looking for big fish, and some will take it, and you may want to sell 20 or 30 pools in one area and buy 20 or 30 pools in another area. You kind of know that you're gonna it's gonna be a mixed bag of pools that you're buying, and just like it's a mixed bag of pools that you're selling. What I mean by that is that you're gonna not get the perfect pools, obviously. If you're buying a route, you know this. If you're buying a partial route, there's gonna be some stinkers in there with some good pools, and so you can deal with that because your goal is to consolidate, and it doesn't matter if you got three really bad pools in this deal, but you got you know 12 really good ones, you can work with those bad pools because you've had bad pools before, and you can eventually wean those off your route, I guess, eventually, or you can turn them into good pools in some situations, but the goal is to consolidate, and this is a good way to kind of jumpstart that consolidation. Believe me, it is effective, and he's not the only person that's done that successfully. People have done this in Florida and Texas successfully, so keep that on your radar, that that's a possibility. And I guess step number three would be bringing on an employee to help relieve some of your time constraints. Now, this can be challenging in a lot of areas. California is particularly challenging. There's a lot of regulations, and the minimum wage here is pretty high. So getting somebody to come on the for pool service, it may take some time, but you can do it if you persevere and if you advertise. You can try indeed.com, you can advertise at your church, at your supply place, putting a sign up there looking for someone, part-time pool service professional to do 30 pools. Why 30 pools? Well, you can pick any number you want to start with, but you know, that's a basic two days worth of work for somebody, or two or three days worth of work for somebody. If that alleviates you to do less work or maybe fill that time with repairs. Now, when do you know

Hiring Help Without Losing Control

SPEAKER_00 12:17

you're set up and ready for an employee? You have to be big enough to absorb the employee's costs into your pool route. So if you're at 70 pools and bringing out an employee and giving them 30, you should have some kind of plan to build that back up and get more pools and throw more pools their way. Bringing on an employee is kind of a shock factor for customers as well. If you've been doing this yourself for three or four years and you bring someone on, they may not like it, they may push back on that. So just be aware that it's not simply hiring somebody, giving them the pools, and then not worrying about anything. It doesn't work that way. It's really complicated, and there are a lot of layers to kind of delve into when you're bringing someone on, but it's a great way to free up some time as well, and as something to consider if you are trying to consolidate, getting down to four days a week or three days a week, whatever you want to do, bringing out an employee can benefit you. So 70 pools, it might be difficult. What I tell people to do is really to stack as many pools as they can and build up their pool route to 90 to 100 pools. Now, you can do 100 pools a week. It's tough. You're working five days a week, long hours, but getting to 100 pools is optimal. 90 to 100 pools would be great to be at when you bring on an employee and giving them 20 or 30 or 40 pools. Right there alleviates all that. And if they can jump right in and take over those pools, maybe they'll ride around with you for three weeks and then you start giving them the pools. However, you want to work it. But you have to have a certain amount of pools to absorb the cost of the employee and to be able to shed and give to the employee without affecting your income too much. Now you're going to get a hit, you're going to lose money. It's going to be a hit on your income, but it's not going to be permanent, it's going to be temporary. So understand that when you bring on an employee, sometimes you move backwards a little bit as far as income, but you're going to eventually move forward pretty rapidly after that if you do things correctly. So again, it's a really complex thing to bring someone on to free up your time because at first you're going to spend a lot more time getting set up for an employee. You're going to spend a lot of time training and getting everything set up and smoothing out the customer relations that maybe ruffled a little bit. But ultimately, with someone doing 40 or 50 pools, you're doing 60 pools and repairs, you've really freed up a lot of time. There are a few speed bumps you may run into. Like for instance, if the employee quits suddenly, which can happen, do people give two weeks' notice in the pool service industry? Not necessarily. If someone offers your employee a better job or better opportunity, they can jump over and notice may be given, it may not be given. And so now you're left with 60 pools plus 50 more. And this could be a tremendous burden. So understand that there are some factors that can hurt you even more. So have a backup plan for that. If that were to happen, you may be able to hire someone right away to step in there and take over, but you may also be left doing 110 pools a week until you get somebody to take over. This means, of course, you're working like 9 to 6 p.m. plus Saturdays to manage 110 pools, and it can be done. It's not something that isn't possible, but it can't be done for like, you know, three or four months. So you have to kind of find somebody to replace the employee. And this does happen. Sometimes it's always good to have two employees that way, if one of them, two part-time employees, that way, if one of them quits, the other one can take on more pools, and you can take on more pools. So you have to figure that out. That's something that you'll do in your pool business and figure out the logistics of it. But this is an option that's going to be able to free up a lot of time for you. It is something that's going to be a real asset in your income as well. You can scale your business and make more money. But there are some things, of course, that you have to be aware of. Now, if you just want to stay a single polar and do 70 or 80 pools a week and work four days a week, limit your repairs, or maybe you want to do half repairs and half service, whatever you want to do, it's definitely something that you can achieve. A lot of pool pros have reached that level, and you know, it's something to kind of have as a goal that you're going to make good income and have a lot of free time as well, or more free time than you had in your corporate job or your sales job. And this is something that you should be focused on. Now, if you don't think about it, if you're not focused on this, if it's not on your radar, I really suggest putting this on your radar now so that you can work towards this goal and have a plan to get to this goal because having the free time is golden. There's so many opportunities and so many things you can do with that free time. You can do other things to make money, you can spend more time doing things you like and less time doing things you don't like, which is cleaning pools, I guess, in some respect, five days a week or six days a week. So definitely have this on your radar, and it's achievable, it's something that is really achievable. If you're looking for other podcasts, you can find those by going to my website, swimmingprolearning.com. On the banner, there's a podcast icon. Click on that, there'll be a drop down menu with over 1900 podcasts there for you. And if you're interested in the coaching program, you can learn more at PoolGuyCoaching.com. Thanks for

Free Time As The Real Payoff

SPEAKER_00 17:39

listening to this podcast. Haggers here week. God bless.