Simple Math = BIGGER Profits

Pool service business growth doesn’t require fancy spreadsheets or complicated “business math.” It requires seeing the few numbers that matter and pulling the right levers on purpose. We walk through simple, real-world pool route math using an easy baseline monthly service price, then show how tiny changes compound into big annual gains. If you’ve ever felt like you’re working hard but the profit isn’t moving, this breakdown will make the problem visible fast. 

We start with the most straightforward revenue driver: adding more recurring pool service accounts. Just five additional pools can add roughly five figures to your annual gross, and it often equals only one extra stop per workday. From there, we look at price increases done the smart way, including how a modest $10 monthly bump across a stable route can generate thousands without adding labor, and how combining new accounts plus pricing strategy can push the gains even further. We also talk through the reality of churn and why you should factor in the occasional dropped account when you run the numbers. 

Then we shift to the profit side: cutting expenses and plugging revenue leaks. We cover how small savings on chemicals and supplies add up when you buy in volume, and why missed billing for small parts quietly drains your bottom line. To keep everything clear, we recommend a simple profit and loss spreadsheet you will actually use, plus a practical framework for upgrading your route over time: the one for one rule, where a great new account replaces a bad one so you earn more and stress less. 

If you want more pool service income, better margins, and a cleaner route, subscribe, share this with another pool pro, and leave a review so more people can find the show. What number do you want to improve first: accounts, price, or expenses?

We break down why pool service is one of the easiest businesses to run by the numbers and how small, repeatable moves can create a big annual profit swing. We share simple formulas to grow revenue, cut waste, and tighten billing so your route pays more without getting overwhelming.  
• why recurring pool accounts make revenue math simpler than many service trades  
• adding five service accounts and what that does to monthly and annual gross income  
• using modest price increases to boost revenue without adding workload  
• replacing low-paying accounts with better-priced work when it makes sense  
• finding “fat” in expenses through bulk buying and small monthly savings  
• tightening billing so parts and small repairs do not fall through the cracks  
• using a basic profit and loss spreadsheet to track results  
• applying the one for one rule to improve route quality while you grow  
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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 1:04

Hey, welcome to the Pool Game Podcast Show. I think a lot of people over analyze and overdo their business math when it's actually a very simple thing. I'm gonna go over some ways to increase your income and maybe reduce some expenses and some really simple math formulas for your pool service business. 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. Pool Service is a very interesting sector, and as far as service goes, the only one that's pretty comparable

Simple Math For More Income

SPEAKER_00 1:55

is gardening service, landscaping gardening, and possibly house cleaning services, where there are some recurring service accounts every week or every month, depending on the business you're in. Other service businesses don't have that luxury. Plumbers, electricians, they may have a few maintenance accounts that they service often. Pest control, I would probably put in that category to some extent, but they probably get a lot of people calling them for one-time service versus rather monthly service or weekly service in their business. So we have a unique sector in the service industry. It's even different than retail. You know, if you have a a burger place and you want more revenue, you have to advertise and try to get more customers to come in the door. So it's a whole different dynamic. And I must say that pool service is for good and bad, is an easier mathematical business than the other ones. What I mean

Why Pool Service Revenue Is Unique

SPEAKER_00 2:56

by good and bad is that it can be a really positive, it can also be a negative factor. But of course, I'll stay positive here because I'm talking about increasing income in your business. And the easiest way to increase income, and it's pretty obvious, and it's not raising prices across the board, although I'll address that in a moment. The easiest way to increase the revenue in your pool service business is to get more service accounts. It's not rocket science, and it's very mathematically sound, and it's something that I mentioned it will affect you negatively if you start losing accounts. That's the big thing about pool service, but it'll affect you much more positively when you start to get more accounts. I'm just gonna use a simple number here throughout the podcast. I'm gonna use 180 as my baseline. Now you may charge more, you may charge a little bit less for your service, but 180 is a pretty good baseline.

Add Accounts To Grow Fast

SPEAKER_00 3:58

And let's say you have 70 accounts at $180, and this is really simple math. You could do this yourself and follow along. That's $12,600 a month. And if you times that by $12, that means you're making $151,200 a year off those service accounts at $180 a piece. Now, this is your total income. I'm not talking about any expenses yet or any minuses, so that's pretty good. $70 times 180. Now, if you just add five more accounts to that, so now you're doing 75 times 180. And okay, we've got two million. I think I forgot to reset the calculator. You would like to get that much, but 75 times 180, that's 13,500 times 12, and that's 162,000. So you added about 10,000 more to your pool route just by adding five more pools a month. Now, of course, I'm simplifying things and adding five pools may be difficult in the area. It may take some time to do that. You may lose an account here and there, so it may not it may not happen instantly, but over a course of a few months, you can certainly scrape together five more accounts by advertising door hangers, asking people for referrals, and it does happen. You do build gradually if you are wanting to build. An easy way to build accounts is to mark your truck somehow. Like if you don't have a full truck wrap, which a lot of companies don't have, you can get magnets for the doors and advertise your business there. You can you know do Google ads, you can do it all different kinds of ways to advertise it. So it may make sense to spend a thousand dollars a month to advertise to get those five accounts and just subtract that from the total. So it took you three months to get the five accounts, take three thousand away from that when you're doing your net sheet and you're in a better position still, you're plus still. So that's the easiest way to increase your revenue. You have to do more work, of course, because you've increased one extra pool per day. So, you know, if you do 70 divided by, let's just say you work four days a week, just to keep it simple. That's about 17 accounts, and now you're doing 18 accounts or so. It doesn't break down actually even across the four days. Let me try it against five days. That's 14 accounts per day if you have a five-day pool route. So you have 15 accounts per day now. So it's not gonna kill you to do one extra pool, and you increase your income by $10,000 a year. Gross income I'm talking here. Now you can achieve something very similar by raising your prices. And I always feel like you want to have justification for raising your prices, and sometimes the economy does justify it. You know, fuel costs are up, of course. Chemical costs are always pretty high on the list of reasons to increase your prices. But I'll just go back to the simple math. If you have 70 accounts and you raise it by $10 a month, that's $700 more a month. $700 times $12, and that's $8,400 a month, a year, I should say more, $700, $80, $8,400 just by a $10 raise across those 70 accounts, and you haven't added any more work to your load, you just went from $180 to $190 a month, and

Raise Prices Without Overreaching

SPEAKER_00 7:40

you've increased your revenue by $8,400 that year. Now, what if you happen to do both? Now, this is something again, it's simple math, but it's getting a little more complicated because if you raise your price on 70 accounts and two or three drop, you have to factor that into the equation. You know, that's a negative loss. But then if you add five pools at 190, so you lose three, so you're at 167. I mean you're at 67 pools, I should say. Getting the math mixed up here, you're at 67 pools, but then you add eight more because you lost three, and so now you have 75 pools at 190. That's 14,250 times 12. That's 171,000. So you've pretty much added 20,000 to your bottom line in the following coming up year by raising your prices and adding five more pools. So I would say logically, it does make sense sometimes in conjunction to getting new accounts, to also increasing the price on those all the service accounts across the board when you get those new accounts. Now, a lot of times you have pools at varying prices on your route. You may have some older accounts at a lower price. Let's say you have five pools at 140, you have some pools at 160. This does happen out there where there's a variety of different prices when you acquire them. Raising the prices gradually takes time, and so you may have some really low pools on your route. I would say it does make mathematical sense to sometimes let go of someone at 140, let's say, if you can get an account at 180 or 190 to replace it with, you know, mathematically, let's say let's just say you get it for 180, you know, 40 times 12. That's a swing of 480 dollars a year, which is quite a lot of money, and it does add up over time. So sometimes it

Drop Low Paying Pools Strategically

SPEAKER_00 9:58

does make sense to you know drop Mr. Jones, who you had for eight years, and they're barely creeping up to 140 a month. There's some math there, but if you of course like the account, then math is not always all there is to the equation. Now there's some math on the other end that also will help you as well, and this is kind of savings on some of the expenses. Now it doesn't seem like a lot when you save ten dollars here or five dollars here, but if you really do the math correctly, a ten dollar savings can't be substantial. I'll put it this way. Let's say that you buy your trichlor tablets at for the customers at March and there's a sale, and you're gonna save ten dollars per bucket that you're going to get, and you're gonna buy 60 buckets, so you ten times sixty is six hundred dollars. That may not seem like a lot of savings, but if you add that in with other savings, and let's say you've been able to shave off some money here and there and other things, and also maybe cut down on some other costs in your business, and altogether you've taken that six hundred dollars a month plus you know fifty dollars for something here, a hundred dollars for something there, and let's just say that you've gotten that ten dollars off each

Cut Costs With Small Savings

SPEAKER_00 11:25

tablet and other things, and it adds up to about two hundred and fifty dollars a month. If you times that by twelve, that's three thousand dollars. And so not only have you increased by adding five accounts, you've also taken three thousand dollars off the bottom line. I'm not talking about making cuts that will affect your business, but there are there is fat there that you can remove from your business to save a little bit of money. $250 a month is not a huge amount of money, but as a multiplier over the course of a year, it does add up to a lot of money, and it does really move the needle because when you're subtracting the extra profit from your liabilities, which is your cost, three thousand dollars is a pretty huge amount of money. You know, that's that's uh you can do a lot with that money for sure. You can buy two bottom feeders basically, or you know, you can whatever you want to do with that money. Another thing that really affects the bottom line is if so, I remember that three thousand dollar number I have there. So here's another thing that affects a lot of businesses. When you forget to bill customers for things, when you I've been guilty of actually forgetting to bill a customer for like a new motor install, like a huge amount of money, and you know, they message me like two months later, it's like, hey, are you gonna ever bill me for this thing? And so those big things, of course, are pretty big, but little things, you know, automatic cleaner parts, pump baskets, o-rings, tank O-rings when you do a filter cleaning, all of these do add up. And let's just say that I'll keep it simple. Let's say $150 of parts are falling through the crack every month on your pool route. You're just not tightening things up, billing customers for everything. Sometimes you're putting on this part, and you just you feel like you just should give it to the customer at that point. So, of course, 150 times 12 is 1800. Add that to the 3,000, and you're almost at $5,000 for the whole year and

Stop Losing Money On Unbilled Parts

SPEAKER_00 13:28

missing money revenue from parts you're putting on and not recording or billing the customer. And for some costs you can save on buying bulk. Like if you buy a pallet of triclore tablets, you put money out, but you save money at the same time on the other end of it. Because really having cash in the bank, it's good to have an emergency fund, of course, but having cash in the bank doesn't really serve you. What serves you is getting discounts while you go all year round to save money at at the end of the year when you're doing your accounting, you're going to see a pretty good savings by working the other end of things. And you really don't need really fancy accounting programs. I mention this a lot. I go on to Etsy, it's a craft site, but they actually have really good spreadsheets there, and you could buy a really good business profit and loss spreadsheet there. I don't recommend just using you know Excel or Google Sheets. So just go over to Etsy.com and type in profit and loss, and you'll find something that you're gonna really like. So I would utilize that tool and then plug in the numbers. It that this is what takes the longest to do is putting in the numbers if you haven't done it yet. So you'll have to spend a Saturday afternoon plugging in all the numbers, plugging in all the accounts into this spreadsheet. It's well worth it to do this, and then of course, you have to update the sheet ever so often. It's always good to have a profit and loss sheet that you can refer to because honestly, you have to know if you're making a profit or if you're losing somewhere on this sheet. And I've

Buy Bulk And Track With Spreadsheets

SPEAKER_00 15:04

also mentioned this, and I can't patent this or trademark this, but it's the one for one rule, and I use that term, and people have used that term as well. I'm probably not the originator of it, but the one for one rule is simply when you get a new account that's really good, and you have an account that's not so good, maybe it's on you know it's a you know heavy debris pool or it's far away from your other pools. The one for one rule basically is when you get this one account, you're at 70 pools, you get this one account, you have one that's no good, you can drop that bad one, and you're not no worse off, you're actually better off, and you haven't moved any of your income, but you have actually freed up some time, and mental anguish is gonna be reduced out there, and then this one-for-one rule can be used as you build a 75. So you get two accounts, you're at

The One For One Rule

SPEAKER_00 15:59

72, you see one that you you have one on your list that you don't like, drop that one, you're at 71, then you get to 73, then you drop another account that maybe is 15 minutes out of the way, then you're at 72 again, then you add two more, you're at 74, you see where this is going. You can eventually get to 775 accounts by dropping five also that you don't like, and so you would normally be at 80, but since you let those five go that were kind of low-hanging, you're still at 75, which was your goal, and you have a much better pool route at that point. This takes time. I'm I'm speeding things up here. It's not an instant thing, but this could be over the course of a year or a season. But this can't be done if you actually do it, and that's the biggest thing. Implement something, implementing something is the step that a lot of people miss. They'll hear this and then they won't do it. But if you do it and you see the numbers that I gave you earlier, where you can pretty much increase the revenue of your business by close to 20,000 a year by raising prices really minimally across the board and adding five new service accounts. So it can be done, and you've just added almost 20,000 more. Well, actually, over 20,000 if you cut the fat and the other end of things. And it's a really easy thing to do if you really put your mind to it and actually do it. Looking for other podcasts, you can find those on my website, somebodypoollearning.com. On the banner, there's a podcast icon. Click on that, there'll be a drop down menu of close to 2,000 podcasts for you to listen to there. And if you're interested in the coaching program they offer, you can learn more at poolguy coaching.com. Thanks for listening to this podcast. Have a great rest of your week and God bless.