Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (33:54.602)
Yeah, look, I'll point out everyone in the industry feels like costs are going to keep rising, right? And it's just, unfortunately, an inevitability, especially with sort of inflation. So the question is, okay, what are you going to do about it? And it was really interesting to see that most respondents, what was it, 74% of them said they were planning on raising prices accordingly, because they have to in order to keep the profit margins. And I think just getting a data point like that is...

reassuring right there safety in numbers to know you're not the only one who's going to do it in fact if you're in the 26% who's not doing it you probably need to Reconsider because your costs are continuing to rise and I think we're also saying that pool owners will pay for quality services And and they're there everyone understands that price costs are going up And as long as you continue to deliver a good product, then people are willing to pay for it

One interesting thing that stood out to me in the report was around the number of people that want to decrease the customer account and increase profitability per poll. 33% of people want to reduce their customer account and increase profitability per poll. And that's great because the more folks I talk to in the pool industry, the more I realize that these larger service companies and the...

the ones that have built really good, profitable businesses, they know when to throw in the towel and say, you know what, you may not be the best customer fit for me. Find another provider who can give you the service that you need. Everybody has those customers that call and don't respect your weekend time off and everything is a 911. I think when you're starting out, the natural instinct is to try to get as many customers as you can and hold onto them. But what I realized is that

Rudy (35:35.424)
Mm-hmm.

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (35:48.37)
time is your most valuable asset. If you can't make the time for great customers and you've got you know the same few customers that are sucking up all your time and your bandwidth and your energy then you're doing your company a disservice. And so I was encouraged to see that.

Rudy (36:04.423)
That's something I believe should be done annually. Figure out what your market can bear and adjust your price accordingly. You want to charge as much as you can. I mean, you don't wanna take advantage of people, but at the same time, you wanna get your worth, you wanna get your value, what you bring to the table, you should be paid for that. And the fact that some...

much less experienced gets this much doesn't mean I have to get that much too. I do think also that there are a lot of folks out there that are still afraid to raise their prices.

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (36:44.603)
Mm-hmm. Sure, it's hard.

Rudy (36:46.251)
They're afraid they're gonna lose that customer. In fact, there's probably some folks who haven't raised their prices in five years, seven years, 10 years. I know they're out there. I know this for a fact. So the fact that you guys offer, if you get a little further on throughout the document, you'll see that they also offer two templates, Andrea, for price increase letters, which I think is fantastic. Can't find the words. Here you go.

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (36:57.367)
Yeah.

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (37:00.791)
I-I-

Andrea The Pool Girl (37:11.992)
Yeah, I just saw someone on Facebook asking about $70 a month service. It's like a, you know, not a pro group, but like somebody in one of the town groups was like, I used to pay $70 a month. Where can I find that here? But the cool thing about that thread was everybody here, you know, they were all like, no one's, it's like, it's way more than that. So that's good to see. But yeah, that's good to know.

Rudy (37:35.531)
So what do you guys think the solution is to this rising cost in multiple price increases throughout the season?

life we've been living for the past few years. It seems like every week something is adjusting upward.

What do you think is the best option?

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (37:57.002)
Yeah, look, I don't think there's not just one silver bullet, right? I think it's a combination of a lot of things, but one of them is you have to really know your numbers and you have to understand what your costs are and what your costs are on a per pool basis and your profitability on a per pool basis, right? And I think there's a lot of...

people out there that maybe assume they're profitable because of X, but then when you really peel back the onion, you realize actually you're not. You lost money on these three pools if you factor in all of your overhead and sort of shared expenses. So I think knowing your numbers is absolutely critical. I think embracing technology, whether it's skimmer or any other type of technology to just operate your business more efficiently. Again, I think there's a tendency to underestimate the cost associated with just

people, right? Time is money. And if you're accepting a check from a customer because that customer refuses to get on an ECH or credit card, there's time associated with that cost, right? So I think just really understanding where you can automate different aspects of your business to save time is absolutely critical as your costs continue to rise. And one standout to me was the companies that are charging separately for chems.

are doing much better. I heard a pro in Phoenix, he was telling people, oh, you know, it's all good. You make all your money in the winter. And that's because he had an all-inclusive price that included chemicals. Last year was a really, really hot summer and pools were chewing through chlorine and chlorine costs were going up and the folks who were charging for chemicals separately.

They're great. They're fine. Even if you're selling your customer a bucket of tabs, you still have the ability to not have that hit your service rate. When we looked at the data, it was really interesting. In half of the country, what people are charging for a service, including chemicals, cost is lower than the base cost for the people that charge for service plus chems separately. So there is a lot of

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (40:11.294)
In my opinion, that means to me that there are a lot of people out there that are leaving money on the table. And there's a pro out of Phoenix who said it best. When he goes to his customers, he says, I do charge separately for chemicals and here's why. I service a lot of short-term rentals. It's not fair for me to charge you for the chemicals that I'm having to dump in that pool because it has super high usage and there's parties every weekend. So in order to keep things fair, I'm going to charge you just for the chemicals that you use.

and bill for those separately. And Skimmer makes it really easy to do that because anything that's logged in the field, you can associate a price to it, it gets fed all the way into the invoice. So I think if you're, I get why people wanna include chemicals in the price. I know that especially in large swaths of Florida, a lot of people are billing on a chems included model, but I think there is an opportunity if you are savvy enough to not have things like weather and chlorine costs and other chemical costs.

impact your profitability by charging for those things separately.

Rudy (41:16.091)
I am a huge proponent of charging separately for chemicals. And I'll tell you, I did include some chemicals when I had my service company. And that was a good decade ago that I sold that. I included chlorine, pH, and total alkalinity adjusters. Everything else was extra. So it wasn't all inclusive, but I did include those. I wouldn't include those now, not with the way prices are

These are a commodity and they're adjusting frequently. I can't expect my customer, my customer, to deal with a monthly price increase. It's not gonna happen. They're not gonna be as forgiven as we are expected to be from manufacturing and distribution. We're not, but some say we don't have a choice. Whole different story. But regardless, you know, here's the thing.

including chems, was a big part of the norm decades ago, or decade ago, two decades ago. So let's call that the status quo.

Sticking with the status quo on this right now, let me ask you guys this, what about the last three years has been status quo?

Rudy (42:39.199)
That's why this won't work.

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (42:40.143)
The only constant is change. Yeah. I mean, the fluctuations just in chlorine alone, right? Massive.

Rudy (42:46.355)
You cannot hit an industry that's going through constant change using the same methods we used 10 years ago over and over and over again, hoping that they'll still work. It's just not going to happen. So we do need to evolve. And I think your report shows that better than ever.

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (43:07.19)
You know, one of the other things in the report that stood out to me were the number of pros that were shopping online now and looking for better deals online. I think COVID had a lot to do with that when you couldn't get chlorine or you couldn't get parts or, you know, a freeze caused a shortage of things that are in your local distributor. People were desperate for parts. They were going online. They were ordering stuff. They were shop pricing. They were comparison pricing. They were looking at shipping dates. And I think a lot of those behaviors...

I've kind of spilled over. I see it in pool forums all the time. People are like, hey, my local distributor is charging this, but I can get a five pack on Amazon. I've tested these. They work just as good. So I see those kind of posts happening. And with the number of items that you can get in a day or even next day or even same day, I think that we're gonna see more pros looking online to shop.

for everyday parts and supplies that they may have been relying on a local distributor for. And I think the distributors know that and they're playing catch up, right, to try to get everything online and make sure their inventory management systems are real time and up to date because that's absolutely the trend.

Rudy (44:09.706)
Why not?

Rudy (44:23.675)
I did an entire keynote on this for the WAC on dealing with change and how all these different things were going to put us out of business each decade from this to that to the other thing. They've come up, mail order, internet, et cetera, and then even long before that, and none of them ever do. I think in the past, the rumblings have been, don't support internet sales. Don't support it, don't support it, don't support it. Internet sales aren't going away. E-commerce isn't going away.

The best thing for us to do is to work with it, not against it, ride the wave. I think seeing the number, it's ingrained in my head from your survey, 17% purchasing online for use. That's a huge number. And again, why not? Because you got a lot of folks going to Lesley's just as much, 16%, right? Big chunk going to SCP, but okay, I support.

distribution, guess what? They're not entirely distribution anymore either. So why not get what you need? If you can find it at a better price, get it quicker. Take a look at it that way.

Andrea The Pool Girl (45:36.589)
And Amazon, there's an Amazon warehouse by me and you can pick stuff up. I was just thinking as we were talking, what if Amazon started selling chlorine and stuff like that, you can go pick it up. I mean, I would, it was cheaper.

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (45:37.056)
Oh, you...

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (45:47.846)
Look, I'm a perfect example as a pull owner before I joined Skimmer. My filter completely blew up and cracked during the freeze. And I had what my pull guy quoted me for a repair, but then I looked online and saw that I could get it myself, you know, $400 cheaper. And also, you know, it was pretty plug and play. And I was like, well, you know, maybe this is a repair. I can DIY.

Like I understand that consumers are going to go and shop and price compare online. And that's another reason why you can differentiate yourself on service. And I think there are a number of great pool service companies that do just that.

Rudy (46:32.523)
Somebody who does DIY will always have that option of being DIY and they're likely to go that route. Somebody who doesn't do DIY, it's hard, it would be hard to convince that person to go that route. They just don't have that skillset and hopefully they know it. I'm not gonna say that your service guy wasn't worth $400 for doing the installation, but just like we're looking at pricing, so are they. And just like we're turning to online.

purchases, so are they. I will never, ever be a proponent of not shopping small business.

I will not, but I don't think...

That's what we're looking at here, at least as far as our purchases go, because what business there is small business? Lesley's? Are they the smallest one, Heritage? It's certainly not SCP, is that small business? No, so the fact that we are shopping from Amazon, we don't have a choice. None of our options are shopping small business. None of our options are keeping it local. I can give it to the local SCP, you think that stays in my town?

No. Lesley's, no. Amazon, no. So what's the difference? If you have the option to shop local with mom and pop, then definitely do that. That's the better way to go. That supports the industry better. But a lot of us don't have that anymore.

Rudy (48:07.912)
Moment of silence.

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (48:09.41)
Preach. Preach Rudy.

Rudy (48:11.563)
Dude, that was... All right, so.

Rudy (48:20.747)
Price increases, talk to me about that. Who's looking at raising, you said, did we touch on this? How many folks are looking at raising prices? How many are not? Okay. Okay, gotcha, gotcha.

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (48:31.562)
Yeah, I think I mentioned it's 74% of folks. And 40% of people are looking at price increases of between 11 and 20%.

Andrea The Pool Girl (48:31.634)
Ha!

Rudy (48:42.267)
Okay, shout out to Eric Taylor of chlorine king and Chantelle Dooley of Dazzle Pools who contributed to your findings with comments. Okay, I'm sorry, Nick. Yeah, I didn't mean to interrupt you.

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (48:55.51)
That's okay. Yeah, I think there's a lot of room for price increases. I know a lot of people have just been holding out just because of the economic situation, but I think it's time. And you know, when we researched this, when we did a webinar on how to raise prices, the general advice was, you know, you try to limit your price increases to once per year. Which seemed to be what was most comfortable for people.

When you do it, there's never a good time to do a price increase, but typically if you're going to do it, it should be in a season where other services might be hard to find. So springtime is coming for a lot of people in the country. I talked to a few pros in Atlantic City. What a market that is. I mean, they just do pool openings, four weeks of service, pool closings. Every year it's just nuts for them during that time.

they're having to raise prices too. Their labor costs have increased, repairs, parts, everything that they have to buy has increased. So it makes sense that folks in those areas would raise prices once a year when they sign those service contracts for four months.

Rudy (49:56.178)
Oh, absolutely.

Rudy (50:16.391)
I started, I serviced, I was actually, I was in the industry up in New Jersey on the Long Island for quite some time before moving down to Florida. But we did answer, I did ask a question at the beginning. We did circle back and ultimately answer that, but I do wanna bring attention to it again because it is absolutely, in looking at some of these numbers that you've shared, the most asked question that I've seen thus far is referring to the Midwest pricing

monthly rate including and monthly rate plus chemicals. And I think you answered that, but the folks that are including chemicals are in fact charging less than the folks who have chemicals extra. And that's the base rate, right? Not the extra charge.

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (51:03.758)
Correct, that is not including the chemical costs.

Rudy (51:07.388)
So, the f-

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (51:08.662)
And Rudy, that's true in the West as well. So look at that last section on the graph. Yeah, especially in California, Arizona. It makes no sense, right? They're charging less and not including the chemicals that they're then eating. So it's kind of a double whammy.

Andrea The Pool Girl (51:08.953)
Wait, so they're worse than Florida?

Rudy (51:14.287)
Is it? Okay.

Rudy (51:30.239)
So one of the questions was, are these numbers accurate? And these are accurate, 100%. So what I'm going to do is attribute it to what I said a moment ago about the status quo. The folks that are still including chemicals are the folks that are more timid in increasing pricing to be in line with inflation.

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (51:53.262)
I think that's right. And yeah, I think that's right. There might be some other factors, like maybe some of the folks that responded happened to be in markets that are particularly low or high and that's skewing the data. But I mean, there was enough respondents to where we think we would have sort of accounted for any of those kind of outliers and the data is definitely accurate.

Rudy (51:53.343)
Does that sound about right?

Rudy (52:15.039)
Okay. And that does lend toward what Nikki said before about the amount of people that wanna charge more work less, right? Why not enjoy life? If you don't have to work as hard and you can make more money at it, isn't that the right decision?

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (52:22.498)
Thank you.

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (52:30.702)
We're supportive of that. Yeah, we did a podcast a couple of weeks ago with a gentleman named Casey Graham from Yummy Pools out of Atlanta. And he is not your typical pool guy. He's an entrepreneur. He's built and sold multiple businesses. But his big piece of advice, and if there's one thing I can impart to your listeners, it's this. Figure out a way to work on the business, not...

Rudy (52:32.323)
Hahaha.

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (52:54.802)
in the business. If you are the guy that's getting cell phone calls and having to go out and do repairs on your own and having to cover routes all day, there's no way you can grow your business because you're too much, you're too far in the weeds to be able to take a step back and work on the strategic things that matter like marketing, like looking at profitability. You're not going to have time to do that if you're the guy in the field, if you're the guy that somebody is calling.

on their cell phone to get service or to respond to a 911. And so that was an interesting piece of wisdom. There are plenty of people out there who run great businesses that don't wanna grow, that are completely happy with their 70 pools a week. And we service tons of those customers too and more power to you. But if you want to grow your business, you have to get out of the business, out of the day-to-day of the business so that you can work on the business.

Rudy (53:48.955)
I don't, I have not had the pleasure of meeting or knowing of Yummy Pools. I do know Eric at Chlorine King extremely well. I don't know Chantel either, but I did read through everybody's contributions and they did all seem solid to me. So I do agree. We do need to find ways to...

better the quality of life while we do this. If anything, the pandemic has, there's been a lot of change and big shifts in a lot of different directions. And, you know, maybe that shouldn't have been something that needed to be shifted. Maybe we should have already been there, but I think it definitely gave it more of a push in that direction.

That's for sure. So, greater, you know, one of the best ways to do that is greater product inclusion. And I'm just scrolling through here, expand into other lines of business, right? 35% of respondents, I have to cheat on this one. I don't, I didn't memorize all the numbers. So 35% of respondents are looking to add services and lines, can you speak on that for just a moment?

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (54:37.294)
Green.

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (54:58.062)
Thank you.

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (55:02.742)
Yeah, sure. I think that the types of services that people are providing are expanding somewhat. I spoke to a manufacturer of an AI powered platform that makes cameras that can monitor if a pet or if a person is in the pool. And if you're not home or if you're inside, it'll actually send an alert to your phone or an alarm.

if it sees somebody splashing in the pool, but they have a really neat model. You know, they'll work with pool pros, they give them a discount so that they can sell and install the cameras to their end customers, and then they give them a cut of the revenue gained each month for the service subscription. So there are people out there and companies that are figuring out creative ways to partner with these pros who are in the backyards every day to...

get their product out there and to help the pros make more money too. And I think we're going to see a little bit more of that moving forward. Yeah. And that's to me, it's, it's kind of like, like Nikki said, the pros are in the backyard already. You've earned the right to, to service that pool and the customer presumably trust you. And so what our pros are telling us or the survey respondents were saying is, look, we, we can offer more services. We can expand. We're already in the backyard. We've already done the hard part of getting a customer and earning their trust. Now let's.

let's be able to sell them more and just take advantage of that relationship in a good way, right? Like again, it's trust and you know, and so I think there's absolutely the ability to just continue to earn that right to service more.

Rudy (56:30.901)
Oh yeah.

Rudy (56:39.187)
Oh yeah, absolutely. So there's a couple of old expressions. One's don't turn a deaf ear to opportunity, but don't turn a blind eye to it either. Your texts are in backyards. They see what's in the backyard weekly on a regular basis. They're the ones who see all the opportunities, or if they're not paying attention to it, then they don't see the opportunities. In either case, that's your greater product inclusion.

They need this part, they need this, even broken pieces, it happens. Baskets been cracked for a month. Okay, why? Right? Safety. I'm a huge proponent of layers of protection and that camera fits right into that. We should be in backyard selling safety.

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (57:10.894)
for sure.

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (57:31.318)
You know, it's funny you bring that up. That's one of the things we've talked to different groups. Like there's Collins Hope here in Austin that is dedicated to preventing childhood drownings or any sort of drowning, accidental drownings. And there's an opportunity for Skimmer to play a bigger role in that. And, you know, we've got checklists already in the backyard and we're trying to figure out, hey, how can we highlight safety more and not just to the pool, the pro in the backyard, but also to the pool owner.

Right? Like we send an email every time somebody, one of our customer pros leaves the backyard, the pool owner gets an email. We could put something on that email that talked about, hey, this is dangerous. You know, you need to remove these rafts or whatever, the gate latches broke, whatever it might be. So I think over the next couple of years, you'll see Skimmer really trying to play a big part in helping just make backyards even safer.

Rudy (58:26.087)
Come join me in West Palm on Friday. So I'll be actually talking a little bit about layers of protection. This is the actual name of the event, the Fuck Drowning Conference that's being held by Life Saver Fence down there in West Palm.

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (58:46.678)
That's awesome, Rudy. There's also protection when it comes to equipment too. It seems like the last few years, the number of freeze events that we've had in the South has increased and they've become quite severe at times. And we had a pro in Austin, really great guy named Rafael Galloway, but he had a whole email ready to go. As soon as he found out that we were gonna have freezing temperatures, he sent out an email to all of his pool owners and he said, hey, you know.

Here's what I'm going to come out to do. He includes it as part of his service, but next year he was thinking about doing an add-on service too where he'll actually come out and install hose bib covers for your hose bibs so those don't freeze. But starting to think about other ways to help your customers to protect their investment, but also look at other ways to help save them money. And that's just, it's part of good service, right? If you're in the backyard, if you're dealing with water in the backyard and you're trying to help people protect their investment, it's a...

It's a good way to add extra value and earn even more trust and referrals for that matter.

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (59:59.07)
It looks like Rudy Houdini'd offline.

Rudy (01:00:02.523)
Rudy is here. I think Andrea is muted though. So you can see, you can hear me and that and...

Andrea The Pool Girl (01:00:09.416)
My bad, I thought I was unmuted. I'm not.

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (01:00:13.682)
Isn't it crazy? We haven't figured out like a universal sign for you're muted. Like over the last four years on the call, but somebody should just do that.

Andrea The Pool Girl (01:00:18.916)
Yeah.

Andrea The Pool Girl (01:00:23.324)
Yeah, that's hilarious. No, that's a good idea. I don't know why that happened, but anyway. So I don't know where... Sorry, tell us again where we can get the report and stuff because I think I just wanted to go back to that really quick because I think we just said that one time so let everybody know where we can get it.

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (01:00:44.074)
Sure, it's getskimmer.com slash state of pool service. And it's absolutely free. You can download it. I wanna say it's close to 50 pages long, the report, but like others have said, we tried to organize it.

Andrea The Pool Girl (01:00:58.032)
Yeah, I was actually surprised to see that it looked like an actual book. Oh, okay.

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (01:01:02.914)
But it's not like a, it's not a scary 50 pages, right? Again, very readable. Lots of, lots of pictures and graphs.

Andrea The Pool Girl (01:01:06.961)
No.

Andrea The Pool Girl (01:01:11.238)
Nice, we like those.

Rudy (01:01:14.499)
I was absolutely floored to see so many plan to grow their business through acquisition. 31%. That's a big number.

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (01:01:24.892)
Mmm.

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (01:01:30.346)
Yeah, isn't it crazy how it feels like people have very different viewpoints on that. I've talked to some people who are very passionate, our customers, who would say, I've learned the hard way, I would never acquire another route. And then obviously 31% of people say, no, absolutely. It's a tool I'm going to use to grow.

If you've got the right marketing machine behind you and you've got the right guarantees in place to make sure that you're paying for pools that are going to stick around, it isn't a bad way to grow a business. To own an area of the market or carve out your niche within a geographic area, from what I've heard from talking to pros, buying is a good option. If you're trying to grow quickly, if you've got the mechanisms in place to do it, if you've got the money to do it.

It's not a bad way to plant a stake in the ground and really own an area of the market. Or like Casey Graham from Yummy Pools, a larger share of the market just in general in Atlanta. It's also another area where...

technology really can enable that transaction. In other words, like if you're buying a route from somebody, like a Skimmer customer, for example, like they've got all the historical data. You know how it's been serviced, when it's been serviced, how much, what the dosages are, what the size of the pool is. You have photos of it all. So it just, it makes it a lot less scary to buy a route, right, like the information is there. And then you can, again, a Skimmer customer, like you can just import it over to your file and then boom, just like that. You've...

got your routes updated, right? So it's not as maybe overwhelming of a transaction as it was 10 years ago before there was a lot of technology that had all of this information and already stored.

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (01:03:16.406)
Did you ever buy or did either of you guys ever buy routes?

Andrea The Pool Girl (01:03:20.924)
I was just gonna, that's actually pretty cool. So you don't have to like re-input everything. Like when you buy it out, it's just already, you can transfer it.

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (01:03:28.318)
Yeah, yeah, you would just call us and yeah, you just call us and we do it on our end. But yeah, we just move it over to your to your account.

Andrea The Pool Girl (01:03:37.04)
Oh, that's pretty cool. To answer your question, I've never bought a route, but I did sell the route that I had, so... Never bought one.

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (01:03:43.8)
Yep.

Rudy (01:03:43.955)
And I sold my, I never bought a route either, but I did sell my company, lock, stock, and barrel, trucks, employees, and all. So, but, it's kind of interesting to see that so many of the people surveyed are looking to either increase the amount of employees they have or stay the same. Nobody's looking for a reduction in force. And then to the beginning,

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (01:03:51.15)
Mm-hmm.

Andrea The Pool Girl (01:03:52.112)
I just sold my pools. I still have my riptide.

Rudy (01:04:14.035)
These are the same people that wanna work less and make more. So, what they're looking to do is take better care of their staff as well. That's what I'm getting.

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (01:04:27.902)
Yeah, Rudy, I looked at the data just yesterday from our survey respondents and found that for a large swath of the major markets in the US, the average pay is between $21 and $25 per hour. Now, that doesn't mean everyone's paying hourly wages. There's a lot of people who pay by the pool. But there are that was kind of the going rate. The exceptions largely being Puerto Rico and Hawaii. Puerto Rico, they pay less. Hawaii, they pay much more.

But for most of the country and most major market areas, the going rate is between $21 and $25 per hour.

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (01:05:09.246)
Not a bad living, especially relative to other industries, for sure. Yeah, and I think there's sort of an acknowledgement, and we've seen it in the industry, certainly in our customer base, but even beyond of how important it is to take care of employees and hire the right ones and train them well, give them the tools they need, and then retain them, especially the good ones, right? The cost of turnover is just so high. And if you can...

keep your employees engaged, and especially if you're willing to raise your prices to keep good talent, it's a much better way to run a business than have a revolving door of constantly trying to find techs and train them up. That's a difficult journey.

Rudy (01:05:52.679)
I've seen, not from this report specifically, but from another conversation or two that I've had with a few different folks that stated, it's hard to hire the quality people you need when the price on product keeps increasing. So they're dipping into their payroll to buy product is what's happening. And that's scary.

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (01:06:21.962)
Yeah, and it's also not, doesn't have to be that way because they're forgetting about, well, what if they were able to raise their prices a little bit, then they wouldn't have to dip into either product or payroll, right?

Rudy (01:06:35.051)
agreed. So you know what happens and it's, it's one of the, at some point in time, and I'll tell you, when I was looking to open my pool service company, I did do a competitive survey. I did look at what the market could bear and pretty much decided I'm not going to do it because I can't make money at it. So, so what I did instead was I charged what I thought it was worth.

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (01:06:57.825)
Mm-hmm.

Rudy (01:07:04.559)
It wasn't, I mean, within reason, there's nothing wrong with being the highest priced person, the highest priced service company in town, if you can show the value.

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (01:07:22.91)
That's right. Somebody has to be the highest.

Rudy (01:07:22.919)
And I think a lot of this lends toward that. Yeah, somebody has to be the highest, why not me? Why not you? Why not the people listening? There's nothing wrong, you know what? See who charges the most now and raise your price 10% higher than theirs. Give that a go.

Andrea The Pool Girl (01:07:41.416)
That'll be fun.

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (01:07:42.134)
Well, like you said, you've got to live up to your end of the bargain, but that's under your control. You can do that.

Rudy (01:07:50.851)
I think people don't mind paying for something that they're actually getting, for the most part. At least the customers you want are the customers that don't mind paying for something if they actually get it. Let's go with that one.

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (01:08:05.262)
I love it. I'd go so far as to say, I think they would even want you to feel like you are fairly compensated for what you were doing. Right. I don't think that you're, I would like to believe that. Right.

Rudy (01:08:13.395)
Wouldn't you though? I-

I, you know, I am on board with you on that. Talk to me about social media versus referrals.

Andrea The Pool Girl (01:08:24.168)
sure.

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (01:08:27.758)
So I'm going to cite Casey Graham again, because he actually had some real good data behind this. But he's using what's called Google local service ads. And so if you go into Google and you search for, you know, pull service company, it'll show you the ones that are in your area. And there's a little bit of verification that needs to happen. You have to like take a picture of your location so they can make sure you are who you say you are.

Rudy (01:08:28.508)
Okay.

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (01:08:53.542)
But typically you'll be the first to show up in a Google Map or the first to show up as a recommended kind of service provider. Those leads cost him somewhere between $20 and $30 a month. He closes between 55 and 60% of them. And so at the end of this, the moral to the story is he gets positive ROI in month one for just paying for the service on Google.

Google local service ads. So there is opportunity out there to go out and not just post stuff on social media, because again, the only people who are gonna see that are the people that are already following you. But also to maybe put some spin behind it. I've heard people spending money on all kinds of platforms, Nextdoor, Angie's, a bunch of different places. And the conclusion I've come to is it's completely.

dependent on the market that you're in. And it also depends on your ability to be able to pick up the phone when somebody calls. So if your Google is actually tracking, if someone clicks on your link and then clicks on your phone number, they're actually tracking if somebody picks up the phone or not. And we see that on our own skimmer profile. They're gonna give priority to people who are picking up the phone and answering the phone, then.

Rudy (01:10:07.899)
Oh yeah, absolutely.

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (01:10:12.594)
than people who aren't. So again, this is another reason why you should make the time to work on your business and not be so far deep in it that you can do things like this and respond to those people that are calling in. Referrals are always going to be a great source of business, especially when they're your neighbors because as we know windshield time is lost time. So that is a great way to find new business. We have a lot of customers that are using our service reports.

and including custom text in their service reports that say, happy with our service, refer a neighbor, and get a month free. And so that's just another good way to just increase and stay in front of your customers and keep it top of mind. There are plenty of times that I've gone to Nextdoor and someone says, hey, I'm looking for a new pull service company, and someone will say, oh, use my pull company. They send email reports. And I'm like, hey, that's a skimmer email. And so having that customer communication is always great.

Rudy (01:11:04.385)
Thank you.

Rudy (01:11:07.979)
How cool is that?

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (01:11:09.146)
at being able to prove that. I've seen actually our service emails, some pros are putting them on their website saying, if you work with me, this is what you get after every visit. And they'll show the pictures, the dosages, the chemical readings after every visit and using that as a differentiator. So there are opportunities, even if you don't have sort of the bandwidth or the capital to invest in paid marketing, there are ways to leverage.

things like our service emails to be able to increase the number of referrals that you get.

Rudy (01:11:50.123)
Sorry, I was just looking at the yummy pools thing. I really have...

Rudy (01:12:07.951)
So we're seeing more and more people actually using accounting software than we have before, using scheduling software than we have before. Do we expect those numbers to grow?

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (01:12:27.29)
Yeah, they will. I think so. I think we did a lot of research on the industry three years ago as far as how much technology is being adopted.

Rudy (01:12:27.356)
largely over 2024.

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (01:12:40.694)
just say the industry was kind of far behind other industries, right? And we're starting to see more, I mean, not just platforms like Skimmer, but like you said, accounting software, online payments, all these things, but it's definitely trending in that direction. And I think candidly we're kind of right in the middle of the...

quote, adoption curve. Like I think we're halfway there in the journey, maybe not even, I think we tell people we're in maybe the third inning right now. And there's just still so many people, Nikki referenced the Atlantic City Show. I mean, we got people showing up at our booth with their route books and saying like, can you help me? Like, I have all this information, I need to get it into a computer, into a phone, whatever it may be, but there's still, and these are in some cases running thousand pool operations, right? Like big operations.

using technology. So I think we have a ways to go. And even, I will say, even the skimmer customers that we have, a lot of them aren't using to the fullest all of the features that we have, right? Because, well, we've never done it that way, status quo, right? And so I think there's an opportunity even for those folks that are using technology to use it even more, more efficiently. Yeah. The number of folks I spoke to, Rudy, in Atlantic City who are running off a paper,

Rudy (01:13:50.667)
I think... I think that should be...

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (01:13:57.726)
I mean, it was like that when I started Skimmer two years ago and there were a good number of people that were on paper. And then we started seeing more and more people using Google Sheets and other things. And now it's like, I think the other thing that's happening is that people who are familiar with digital technology are now getting into the business, who were born kind of with a computer in front of them. These older generations that...

we're not accustomed to technology, you're sort of aging out of the business where their kids are taking over. And so we're seeing a lot of demand from those types of operations where their kids are going, mom, all this lives in your head. There's no way I'm gonna be able to run your business this way. Let's go look for technology that can solve this problem.

Andrea The Pool Girl (01:14:46.472)
Were you talking to my mother? Just kidding, that's what she did. She was on paper for so long and it was funny to go in her office. It was like, how do you even know like who's paying you? And I don't know if she uses Skimmer. I think she still is on paper, but yeah, it's funny.

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (01:14:49.601)
Hahaha!

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (01:15:05.058)
We have some pretty cool like before and after photos of people like that, like your mom, like here's before Skimmer with post-it notes all over and like, you know, all the door hangers, like boxes of door hangers and all these things. Triplicate carbon sheets for employees. It's always fun, yeah. Yeah.

Andrea The Pool Girl (01:15:07.912)
Thanks for watching!

Andrea The Pool Girl (01:15:14.166)
Oh no.

Andrea The Pool Girl (01:15:19.044)
Oh yeah.

Andrea The Pool Girl (01:15:24.637)
Yeah, I remember back when I first started cleaning pools, everything was on paper and there's just this wall of clipboards and you had your Monday clipboard and your Tuesday clipboard and now that's just all gone. Yeah, it's great. And the GPS too, like that saved my life a couple times. Oh no, not for everyone.

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (01:15:40.367)
Not for everyone.

Rudy (01:15:48.843)
All right, fine. Now let me ask a little bit of clarification if we can. Looking at your spotlight on pool supply, are these pool service techs that are utilizing retail stores? Is that what that's referring to or is distribution in those numbers?

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (01:16:09.154)
So what we did is we looked at where people are just shopping in general and we took the top ones and put them into the report. There were plenty of respondents who reported shopping at small local mom and pop stores, but they weren't significant enough to include in the report. So there were a ton of responses on that and a lot of manual work that had to be done, but we...

We knew which ones kind of fell under the pool core umbrella. We knew which ones fell under the heritage umbrella. So we rolled those up.

Rudy (01:16:43.735)
Where do you think, and you've seen, I don't know if these were in the results at all, where does big box DIY fall in? Where do wholesale clubs fall in? I know those are two resources, wholesale clubs more than big box DIY for chlorinating products in the post pandemic years.

Are those in these charts?

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (01:17:13.198)
We didn't target that, but we do have additional questions on buying just in general for next year, which include things like being part of a buying group of some kind. And so that's actually great feedback. Yeah, I was at Costco this weekend looking at chlorine tubs and it's real.

Rudy (01:17:36.715)
They are there and they did seem to be there when they weren't anywhere else. Between them and Lesley's, it seemed like they always had chlorinating products on hand. I don't know why. They just seemed to have when others were running shy. But then again, there was a tremendous amount of stress put onto the market too with the problems with everything.

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (01:17:42.217)
Mm-hmm.

Rudy (01:18:05.463)
Chloralkali suppliers, resin suppliers for buckets, trucking strikes, employee shortage, workforce shortage, right? So everything hit the fan. So I think the motto should be buck the status quo. That should be it going forward because the status quo is gone. It's over. There is no status quo.

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (01:18:21.293)
sure.

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (01:18:32.378)
I used to work with this old, his name is Red McCombs, this old Texas billionaire wore a cowboy hat, just very sort of stereotypical big text kind of guy. He had an expression, he said just that, there's no such thing as status quo. You're either moving forward or you're moving backward. If you don't know which one you are, that means you're moving backward. I couldn't agree more. This industry is changing.

very rapidly and kind of got to get with it or you're going to get left behind.

Rudy (01:19:04.839)
I could easily talk with you on this subject for another three hours. I could, but... Ha ha ha.

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (01:19:12.616)
I don't have three hours unfortunately. Not right now, maybe next time.

Andrea The Pool Girl (01:19:14.923)
Hahaha

Rudy (01:19:15.463)
But I don't, yeah. But with that said, Andrea.

Andrea The Pool Girl (01:19:20.812)
I have one last question because this we were talking about this before Rudy had his little kicked himself out and we didn't get to record it Are you really gonna do like a snake ID thing in skimmer because that really would be awesome

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (01:19:34.182)
What she was saying is it would be great if our app had like a snake identifying feature in it that could tell you if the snake was venomous or not. And what I was talking about was a pool scout that can identify animals that that's the company. Right. But I think it's a pretty novel idea. So we need to build an integration with them.

Andrea The Pool Girl (01:19:43.428)
Yeah, just take a picture of the snake.

Andrea The Pool Girl (01:19:50.137)
Oh, it was different, okay.

Rudy (01:19:58.235)
Right now, right now what happens when people need ID is they take a picture of it and send it to Andrea or myself. Yeah, that's typically what happens. But that's a touchy subject in Florida. We'll end on this note because it's an interesting story. So we do see lots of snakes in swimming pools. Really?

Andrea The Pool Girl (01:20:00.388)
Yeah, yeah.

Andrea The Pool Girl (01:20:05.56)
And they tag me or they tag you, yeah.

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (01:20:06.089)
Right?

Andrea The Pool Girl (01:20:14.888)
Wait, one last, one more thing. Did you guys wanna, sorry Rudy, did you guys wanna give away the code to the pool show? I just looked at it and it popped into my head.

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (01:20:23.502)
Oh yes, that's for the Orlando show. And we're going to post these on our social media. But just today, for everything under the sun, if you want to attend the show, you can get free exhibit hall access with Skimmer's code. That code is 131821. So for your Florida listeners, and I know you have many, if you want to come to the show for free, 131821 is the code.

Andrea The Pool Girl (01:20:28.261)
Orlando show.

Rudy (01:20:29.459)
Hold, Andrea.

Andrea The Pool Girl (01:20:43.962)
Awesome.

Andrea The Pool Girl (01:20:48.069)
Yes, we do.

Rudy (01:20:52.467)
That is an important point. Thank you for bringing that up.

Andrea The Pool Girl (01:20:52.688)
That's awesome. Thank you.

Andrea The Pool Girl (01:20:57.132)
Now we can go. On that note, yeah, so follow us. Thank you guys for talking to us and everything and thanks for being so awesome. We all know I'm a fan. So anyway, with that said, follow them, follow Skimmer, check them out. Follow us, like us, Talking Pools. And I don't know, that's all I got. So Rudy went away again, but.

Rudy (01:20:58.611)
Alright, take us out of here.

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (01:21:19.946)
And if you want an exclusive offer, we are officially partnered with Rudy. Go to get skimmer.com slash talking pools. We've got an exclusive offer there specifically for your listeners. They can try skimmer for free.

Andrea The Pool Girl (01:21:27.521)
Ooh!

Rudy (01:21:28.907)
GIMMER

Andrea The Pool Girl (01:21:32.872)
That's awesome.

Rudy (01:21:33.188)
Skimmer, one of our newest sponsors. Welcome aboard.

Andrea The Pool Girl (01:21:36.752)
Yay, thank you, cool.

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (01:21:38.53)
Thanks.

Rudy (01:21:40.511)
All right, everybody. Thank you for tuning in. Nikki, thank you. Jack, thank you. Everyone else, until next time, be good, be safe.

Andrea The Pool Girl (01:21:46.012)
Thanks guys.

Jack Nelson & Niki Acosta (01:21:47.586)
Thank you guys.

Andrea The Pool Girl (01:21:53.992)
What's your problem?