The Pool Service Community

In this episode of Talking Pools, hosts Steve and Wayne discuss various aspects of the pool service industry, including the evolution of services, the importance of community and networking, navigating insurance challenges, and the impact of technology. They share insights on client relations, the significance of proper maintenance, and the intricacies of pool renovations and inspections. The conversation emphasizes the need for pool professionals to be proactive, knowledgeable, and ethical in their business practices.

takeaways

• Everyone starts out as a service guy in the pool industry.
• The new CPO manual has significant updates.
• Community and networking are crucial for success in the pool industry.
• Insurance policies often exclude certain types of coverage.
• Asking the right questions can save time and money.
• Maintaining good client relations is essential for business.
• Technology is rapidly changing the pool service landscape.
• Proper documentation is vital for client disputes.
• Renovations require careful planning and communication with clients.
• Good business practices lead to positive karma and long-term success.

Sound Bites

• "You can start out as a service guy."
• "You need to ask the right questions."
• "You have to do good business."

Chapters

00:00
Navigating Drone Insurance and Regulations

25:56
Understanding General Liability and Property Damage Coverage

Transcript

SPEAKER_06 0:53

Happy, happy Thursday, everybody, and welcome to Talking Pools with Steve and Wayne. As you can see, I'm not talking too well. I kind of lost my voice yesterday, and I sound all scraggly and whatnot. So I'm not gonna do a whole lot of talking today other than I want to get a couple things started before Steve takes over. Number one, welcome back to to Kelly, Kelly Clancy, who one of our original talk show Talking Pools podcast uh hosts. She's on Saturdays now. So please make sure to turn into her pal her podcast when you can. The other thing is, is I don't know how many of you have gotten this yet, but this is this is the new CPO manual. I know it looks backwards on the screen, but the big difference is we're gonna have to spiral down so it's easier to fold flat. It's been updated tremendously. If you're an instructor, the new slide deck is coming out probably within a month or so, but it's something new. So if you're interested in taking CPO, you're gonna be seeing that particular manual. And if you don't don't, it's uh later edition, so don't use it. Use the new one. So I'm gonna stop talking because my voice is really dying right now, Steven. That's okay, Wayne. I guess it doesn't hurt. It's just you know, I sound like I'm spanky McFarland from you know our gang back in the days, but I know I just our gang.

SPEAKER_04 2:15

Yeah, I just Hey everybody. Um, all right, Wayne, awesome. Thank you. So definitely, yeah, everybody check out Kelly Clancy. She's gonna be on Saturdays from here on out. And she was with us at the beginning. So she had some a few different guests on the last couple times. They were actually from the pool and hot tub alliance. And then Rudy had on a pretty cool guest last week or the week before last, I guess it was. He had Jeff Hampi on there, right? So that was a really good episode. And that just goes to show you that like you can start out, everybody starts out as a service guy, right? Like with pools, like that's the easiest thing to do. It's the easiest way to get a job. And honestly, like if you can do decent pools, like you can do pools pretty much anywhere. Like you can move to anywhere in the country and have a job for at least part of the season, right? Right. And there's so many different things that it's you know, that's opened up for me in a sense, where now we do leak detection and we do renovations and we do consulting and we do expert witness and inspections and a bunch of different things. I don't know many people that are, you know, unless you're doing 200 pools and you're doing them yourself or like with one other person, then it might be a viable option. But I I always say that between 40 and 60 pools, once you get up to that number yourself, uh shit starts to go sideways. Um, if you have a family or you know, you have a young baby at home or something, like now all of a sudden it's like, wow, like how many pools do I have to do to pay for daycare? Right. And I don't know if you've seen the prices of daycare Wayne lately, but they are it's been a while. Yeah, exactly. But no, just absolutely like some of the babysitters are getting paid more than people than that clean pools. It's not even close, you know, and these kids are 16, 17 years old. But my point with with Jeff is that Jeff is like a, you know, he's an artesian tile master now, is really what it comes down to. And I don't think that he ever, you know, saw himself doing that. And I kind of listened to his story a little bit, which was pretty cool. But he was on a bunch of jobs and he just saw that the tile guy was making a shit ton more money than anybody else, even the general contractor. Like the tile guy came in and basically named his price. And you know, God forbid it was a fully tiled pool, which honestly, like not many people are doing, and like that's when you go and hire a person like Jeff. And just to give you an example, the reason that most people don't do it is I went out to a commercial job. And I think I might have talked about this on the show already, but it was a fully like a hundred and almost two hundred linear foot pool, all one by one tiles. And they called me out and they were like, we want to retile it or we want a fiberglass. And I was like, I was like, why don't we just plaster this baby? You know, like let's just let's save everybody some money and some grief and let's plaster the thing, right? And I got out there and they opened up the back and it was like a vaulted stainless steel pool that was sitting on like the you know the fifth floor of this uh high-rise building. So I was like, okay, cool, I guess we'll go the tile route. But to fully re-tile the pool, I mean, it's not just a hundred thousand. That's not even just two hundred thousand dollars. We're talking like over a quarter over a quarter million dollars here, you know. So now you're getting into these numbers that are just so insane. And that's what Jeff was saying. Like, he has like a Hall of Fame quarterback that that hired him, and like somebody that's like uh, you know, Instagram influencer, he was saying, or you know, those are the type of people that are getting fully tile pools, right? Like it. Yeah, and those are they're not going in on a one million dollar house, they're going in on a 20, 30 million dollar house, you know. So, but Jeff was saying that he's so busy now that he actually is retiring from the 14 PSI industry lounge as their their moderator, right? And that's something that I understand and respect because you know, I started the we started the CPO, the certified pool operator group on Facebook back in 2010, and it started out just as an independent thing where I was answering questions for people that like we couldn't get to and wanted to have like a forum, and also it opened it up for other people that were CPO certified to answer questions and ask questions and all that. Right, but it became a lot after a while, and you know, you and Rudy are in there as well too, as moderators and or administrators, but to keep up with that on like a daily basis is almost like uh a job in itself. In itself, that's right, and we're not getting paid for that shit, and people forget that sometimes. And you know, if you guys out there, the listeners, if you aren't utilizing the Facebook groups and you're on Facebook, like you do not even have to speak, like you could go and be a fly on the wall, like as long as you're CPO certified, you can get into the CPO group, which is certified pool operator-cpo. There's a like 14 PSI industry lounge, and Jeff really explained it a little bit better, and I have a better understanding of what that group is now. And that's a group where they still talk about expert stuff, but it's more of a group like a lounge, like, hey, we're done with work, we're gonna come talk smack about our customers and have a couple drinks and have a bit of fun. You know, where a lot of the other groups are like people are coming there, you know, strictly looking for information and different things like that. But my whole point is you don't have to post in these groups if you don't want to. And it has an amazing search function. So from since 2010 to now, this is 16 years, Wayne, of information that and Facebook, they are they're fucking gathering your information, whether you like it or not. Okay. So all of these posts are saved, all of these responses are saved. So if I have a problem with black algae, like I'll go into the group and I won't even ask a question. I'll just go and I'll search for black algae. And tons of posts will come up with people who are like, hey, I use this, or I use you know, crushed up tri-chlor tablets. And you're just like, wow, like I didn't even really think about that, you know? And you just learn different ways that people do things, right? And I learned through the group one time I was just searching because one of my plasters called me and she was like, Hey, every time my son goes out to you know start up these pools, the calcium it starts out at 70, 80, and then two, three weeks later, it's at like 400, 500. She was like, How is that possible? And I was like, Okay, I'm like, What what are you using? You know, and they plaster two, three pools a day. So they have to get started at six in the morning or seven in the morning. They're not drill, you know, they're not hammering until eight. But if they're starting a plaster job, they're starting it at six a.m. What they were doing is they're adding calcium chloride to the mix, and uh that was you know coming out of solution and precipitating and going into the water, and it was just making driving the calcium up for no reason for no apparent reason, is really what it is, you know. So they were like, is there any other products that I could use that, you know, in in place of this? And there are some products that you know will do the same thing where it sets the plaster for you, but it doesn't heat it up and uh it doesn't have calcium in it, is is the big thing. And I actually found that in one of the Facebook groups I was like searching through and I was like, oh my God, I was like, This is the answer, you know, um, which was really cool because it's really cool to find out. Go to these groups and you know, look up something and and find out. So if you guys aren't on the tip of these, you know, these Facebook groups, they've been out for a while. Um, there's Facebook groups out there for everything now, you know, like anything that you want, like remote control car racing, that I've seen all types of crazy groups. And there's more and more every year. And like there's ones now where I just saw there's like a leak detection expert group where like in a lot of these groups, like you actually have to be a pool professional or you actually have to be a leak detection expert. And you know, as we get further and further into the you know, the evolving of these groups and these online networking communities, it's a great place to to meet people. And you know, one of my biggest clients who is actually one of my partners now, um, he owns like a really big swim school. Um, we I found him on Facebook. He was asking a question and nobody knew the answer. And I like I hit him up via, you know, I DM'd him and that kicked off a what's now a 10-year relationship with he's the reason why I'm in with you know with the school systems and different things like that, because I would never want to deal with a school system by myself or a city by myself where he has at least a bit of a buffer. He has, you know, employees that are able to go to the pools and you know be the CPO and different things like that, where like I don't have time to be doing that, but he has the infrastructure already to do that. And it's been one of the most fruitful partnerships that I have ever had as a pool person. And, you know, he fully trusts me and leans on me. And anytime there's a question, and like the last time I was uh, you know, out of state over by him, I actually had to, I thought I was gonna have to go there at like three in the morning because he had like a full a full day. And this is, you know, when you go sometimes. The next thing that I'm gonna talk about is when you don't take a job, and this is this is when you bend over backwards. So I had went home and uh, you know, was going out and like checking on all of the the other pools that we had, and he has this one exclusive pool that's his swim school owns, and like they are packed all day long. And he had like classes all morning, and then he had like rented out the pool from like 1 to 3 p.m. or something like that. And the day before, I'm literally like on my way back to my parents' house, and I get a call, and he is like, hey, he's like the heater is down over at that one place, which is up, you know, where I just was an hour away. And I'm like, so I start troubleshooting with the girl that's there, and I'm like, I'm like, it's the fusible link. I'm like, I would never do this, but if you are going to be there tonight until 9 p.m., I can get the heater working for the next five hours for you. And then I thought I was gonna have to go at four in the morning, but this girl was nice enough to come in early and like return the heater back on. I was like, look, I was like, basically, if we leave the heater on like this and something were to happen, I was like, honestly, this thing could burn to the ground, you know. Before, before, you know, volt voltmeter, before you learned how to use a voltmeter, a lot of guys out there learned how to use paper clips and alligator clips, right? And you could you could tell with uh you know a with a safety features on the heater. You can tell just by taking an alligator clip and putting it to the next station, and you know, okay, oh, this works. And it's basically if it if it jumps it, it's the piece. If it doesn't, it's the you know, it's the other piece. So there's only like five to seven safety pieces in in all of the heaters, and some of them are you're able to override. Some of them you wouldn't want to override, like the you know, like different like rollouts and different things like that. And it just depends like where it is on the heater. And a lot of times the heater is just like running rich, or you know, the venting is a problem, and now it's coming out, there's fire coming out underneath the uh, you know, underneath where the heater actually is. So we were able to at least save the day with it. And I had someone drop off a fusible link that day at 8 a.m. So like we only had to do this for like six hours, and someone was there literally looking at the heater while it was happening. And that is the only I would never even do that for a client. And I probably I told him I was like, I'm never even, we're never even gonna talk about this again. But he understood the risk and I told him, I was like, this place, I was like, it could burn down to the ground. I'm like, are you prepared for to have that happen? And he was like, Yeah, he was like, let's do it. So, you know, I was able to to save the day for him, but that's not something that you know you you normally would do, and it's not what the safety functions of the heater of the heater is, but this is how you are able to to troubleshoot the heater to to figure out you know what's kind of wrong with it, right? So those that's the instance where you know I bend over backwards.

SPEAKER_02 14:10

I had anything again. Wayne and Steve by here let the knowledge begin.

SPEAKER_01 16:23

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SPEAKER_00 18:00

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SPEAKER_06 18:27

And when I used to take technical questions, and of course you'd always get the one that says, My pool water is cloudy. Why? Oh my God. I must go through a list of about 20, 25 different questions as to what kind of conditions. And I remember one time somebody said that, and I spent like 10 minutes asking questions. And she said, Why are you asking me so much? And I said, Well, I'm trying to figure out what your problem is, because it could be chemical, it could be the actual pool itself, it could be environmental factors, it could be infiltration. Yeah, it could be a bunch of people. Exactly, exactly. So sometimes people get annoyed when you ask so many questions, but hey, this is the read we the reason we're asking them is to solve your problem. Right. No.

SPEAKER_04 19:11

And if you don't have hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of the Insurance Interlude with Steve Sherwood from Talking Pools Podcast and Pat Grignon from California Pool Association. So, Pat, thanks again so much for coming on. We love we love having you on, and we've just been getting uh great feedback from all this stuff. So let's just keep trucking. Thanks for having me. Appreciate it. Um so we live in, and I just was talking about this in one of my other shows with our with my co-host Wayne, and like I almost blew off my whole day because my phone didn't charge. And I thought that something was wrong with my phone, and I was like, oh shit. I'm like, I'm gonna have to go to the Apple store, I'm gonna have to, you know, spend four or five hours getting a new phone and the whole nine because like usually because I have clients on the East Coast, usually I'm waking up to like three or four text messages in the morning. So I was super just like uh anxious about that. And it got it got me thinking that you know, everything with technology is just moving so quickly these days, right? So when a lot of home inspectors and a lot of people that are doing like uh real estate and showings and stuff, they're using like uh different types of equipment, like uh drones and different things like that, right? So is there anything like as a service provider or as somebody that's doing inspections, is there anything that we need to like think about with this stuff? Because like all of a sudden these technologies are going crazy and there's been so many new like law changes and different things like that, like where DJI like is not supposed to be selling in the states and whatever. You know, is there anything that you need to think about? And is there anything that uh, you know, anything else in this area?

SPEAKER_05 20:54

Yeah, yeah. I mean, a lot of moving parts with that, especially as anything new comes out, right? The government figures out what needs to be regulated in FAA and airspace and the whole ball of wax. But outside of all that, which is inevitable, you know, ultimately that's a that's a high dollar piece of equipment, even if you have, you know, kind of a low end one off the shelf. And uh, you know, I've seen I've seen a lot. We we've gotten insurance policies for you know companies that use drones, whether it's inspections or builders that are kind of specimen out the site before or drawing up the plans. What are you insuring exactly though?

SPEAKER_04 21:27

You're insuring the the actual drone itself, like are they afraid that like it's gonna fly into something or like someone's gonna shoot it down?

SPEAKER_05 21:34

Or yeah, yeah. So it's a couple a couple of different things. Think about it like car insurance, right? Uh there's like physical damage, so damage to the actual drone itself needs to be insured. Well, it doesn't have to, but I mean we've we've we've got drones insured that are 30, 40, 50 grand and uh uh just like a car, you you'd want to insure that, right? Is it a reaper? 50.

SPEAKER_04 21:55

I mean, those are millions, but like uh 50 grand. I gotta want to see what a$50,000 drone looks like.

SPEAKER_05 21:59

Machine gun turrets and this looks like this thing down on it. Blow up boats. But no, so you know, you you you're gonna want to contemplate like what the cost is, and so you want to get insurance for that. Look, your standard general liability policy, your your liability policy is insuring your business. So whether you're a builder or you do inspections or you're a service company, any damage because of your business operation to a third party would normally fall under the coverages of your general liability. With drones becoming more and more prevalent, most policies include some sort of drone or aircraft exclusion, right? And so you know you normally need to either get a rider on your general liability if you're using. Using a drone for the business operations and endorse that back on, or get a separate policy that covers the physical damage. So any damage to the drone as well as any third-party damages or injury if you were to crash it into something.

SPEAKER_04 23:14

Okay. So the rider piqued my interest. What are some other weird riders?

SPEAKER_05 23:21

Yeah.

unknown 23:21

Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 23:22

Well, I mean, you know, common ones. I mean, I know we've talked about it before, but you know, like uh pop pool that's always excluded under service policies. You know, you've got uh pollution is always excluded under every general liability policy, so hazmat or chemical spills, things like that. You know, and then a weird one is is uh property damage exclusion. So like if you're a carpet cleaning company and you're cleaning carpet and you're you damage the carpet that you're cleaning, your policy isn't going to cover that. A standard general liability policy won't cover that because you know you're supposed to be you know assumed as an expert in your given trade. And so if you damage something because of your work, standard policies don't cover that. So you know that's that's a different example than pools, obviously. You know, I I insured a uh a janitorial company a while back that you know they did that they did that they cleaned the Maserati dealership at night after they closed. And so Maserati dealerships, they get a big, you know, from the factory in Italy, they get a big, you know, Maserati uh kind of matte carpet thing that they put in this in the front of the of the of the stores. So it was dark, he didn't see it, you know, it was after hours, was vacuuming it, got a got a hair or whatever uh uh a thread caught up in the vacuum, and it so it tore up two of these mats, and those things are like 15 grand each. And so, you know, his policy luckily had some sort of endorsement buyback for property damage, you know, up to 25,000. Um, so he had coverage for it, but like 90% of the policies out there wouldn't cover that.

SPEAKER_04 24:57

So, okay, so now let's talk about my policy for a second. We don't have that in our general liability, we would have to get that as a rider.

SPEAKER_05 25:07

Yes, you do have it. So you have you have a buyback there of$25,000 each occurrence up to$50,000 total for property damage because of your work. Your policy also has the pop pool coverage, your policy also has the pollution, the hazmat coverage for chemical spills out of the back of a truck up to 50 grand. So you're dialed. We built the policy like that purposely just because you're not gonna have someone slip and fall and break their arm while you're cleaning their pool. You know what I mean? Like that's just not a realistic coverage that that that you you would need. Or I mean that's part of a general liability policy, but it just isn't realistic that would that would be that would happen. So all the other stuff is way more realistic.

SPEAKER_04 25:44

So that's of course another the reason why I ask that is because they well, they a lot of commercial clients when they when you set, you know, when they s when you go back and forth and you negotiate your contractual stuff, they like you said, it's really lopsided at the beginning, usually, where you know I've had them say to me, you know, if you do something, and they don't even specify what, they just say if we deem that you do anything that's gross, grossly negligent, and like grossly negligent is leaving the water on, or you know, there's a bunch of different things that you could do that's grossly negligent. You're driving around and you you know hit into a parked car because there's places that we have that are clients that rent out Ferraris and Lamborghinis and stuff. So you could be, you know, you could be driving past 20 of them. Um, and it's in like a like a parking garage. Yeah. You know, so if the if you hit something in the parking garage, you know, they're looking to you to to make sure that that's getting paid. Um all right. So you what you're saying is that this stuff is all covered under under anybody's general liability that that is with CPA.

SPEAKER_05 26:49

Yep, our our general service policy covers all of that stuff. Um the property damage portion is optional, but certainly we we we always you know present that to everyone, and I'd say 99% of folks opt to carry that coverage. That's the most realistic. It's it's interesting, you know, when you think about, you know, so is any damage to the pool covered if you're servicing a pool? And so there's an argument with standard policies that don't have this exclude, they don't have this endorsement that says, yeah, I that you're damaging your the property that you're working on, and so there's no damage covered essentially. So I think what's most important is that there's solutions to all these things. They're not, you know, our policy is custom built. We knew that that was in a standard policy. We added this stuff and we included it, standard policy. So just you know, talk to your insurance agent and you know, post some questions and see what kind of answer they give you. You know, the the the funny thing with those contracts too, like, you know, I I've looked at a ton. Really, what you're looking for is like mutual indemnification, right? Because I've seen a bunch that are if it's my fault, it's your fault. If it's your fault, it's your fault. But you want it to be like, you know, if hey, I'm I'm I'm the commercial property. If I screw up, it's my fault, I'll handle it. If you screw up, it's your fault, you'll handle it. And I think that that's pretty common sense out there. But most of the contracts are gonna have that lopsided indemnification for sure.

SPEAKER_04 28:09

No, of course. And I've had it, I've had like really crazy ones because again, hotels, the director of engineering, he works as the director of engineering, and all of the guys that work there all work for the hotel. Yeah, when you get into homeowners associations, now the person that you might be dealing with might be a fucking lawyer. Yep. You know what I mean? And like all of a sudden, like you sit he sends over this like you know, twent 22-page document when like it should be three. Yep. And I'm just like, uh, you're a lawyer? Are you married to a lawyer? Or what like who's a lawyer? You know what I mean? Like, because obviously the way that you wrote this is crazy. And don't get me wrong, like we had lawyers look at our contracts at the beginning too, but it was like one time, you know, and then we've added stuff in from there. Um, and anytime, you know, to be completely honest, guys, I hit up Pat before I hit up my lawyer. You know what I mean? Because Pat is usually as well-versed or more well-versed than somebody, because there's no fucking pool lawyers out there, really. There's guys that'll take on, you know, pool claims, but I don't think there's any guys out there, you know, there's so many billboards in LA like for an accident or for, you know, this type of claim or that type of claim. Like, ain't nobody got a billboard for, you know, if somebody drowned in your swimming pool claim. Right. You know, like nobody's offered that people will take it, but they're not off, you know, they're not they're not announcing that they're offering that. So I don't think that lawyer, you know, you want to get a lawyer that's actually been in this before, and that's like that the eight old age old adage that like uh you know, you want to get the experience, but you've you've you know, they only hire you for exp, you know, when you have the experience, but to get in, you need experience, you know. So I would, if you're talking to any lawyers or anything like that, I would be like, have you done pool stuff before? You know, like uh find out a little bit more. But again, you can always reach out to California Pool Association and they'd be more than happy to help you. Thank you, Pat, for explaining a little bit more about the stuff that's in that's in my policy and in all of the general liability policies for for CPA. Because sometimes it's just like it's really hard to understand and it's really hard to explain. So, you know, I'm really happy that you're able to, you know, do this clearly and concisely and factually and uh you know able to to give our listeners a little bit of a a piece of kind of like the the insider information. Like I almost feel like uh, you know, we're giving we obviously we're giving this stuff out for free, but this is all stuff that uh, you know, is really, really interesting and really, really good, man. So I just really appreciate having you on. Thank you so much for being here every week with us. And uh as always, guys, if you have any questions, hit us up at talkingpools at gmail.com and uh always can hit up California Pool Association for any of your insurance questions. And uh if you get on with them for a one-year, you know, or an annual general liability, they will give you a hundred dollars off just for mentioning the Talking Pools podcast promo. Yep. So thanks again, guys, and we will be talking at you next week. Hope everybody has a safe and happy week. Thank you. So this guy had called me and he was referred to me by one of one of the distributors, because the distributors that I work with, they know that like we teach classes in the area. So if someone's having like a real problem, they'll usually send them to us. So the guy calls and he was like, Hey, I got my pool plastered last March, and it seems like uh, you know, there's like calcium nodules that are coming through and it's doing that crying that almost looks like bird shit coming down the pool, right? Or like someone crying, like a tear coming down someone's face. So he was like, I want to hire you to inspect my pool. And I laughed because that's that's what our website is. My website is inspectmypool.com. I was like, Well, let me ask you some questions here. So I was like, number one, like, what's going on? Who are you gonna have out there? Who takes care of the pool? And I kind of at the end of the conversation, well, not the middle of the conversation, I was like, hey, I'm like, I don't, I'm like, I don't want to come to this meeting. Like, he wanted to hire me to come to the meeting to meet with the plasterer and the person who started up the pool. And I was like, number one, I'm like, they're probably gonna be pretty defensive if some other pool guy is there that's not your weekly pool guy when they already know that you take care of the pool on a weekly basis, like the homeowner does. And I was like, second, if you don't have pictures of when the day that they were plastering the pool and you don't have a record of all of the days after that where you were able to test the water and you can show them that, hey, this is within the ideal ranges. Basically, there's there's no recourse of action that you could take to any of these people because all of those ships have sailed already, right? Is really what it comes down to. So he was like, Oh no. He's like, Leslie, you know, I go to Leslie's all the time and and and check my water. And I was like, Oh, perfect. I was like, okay. I was like, so do you have that on record there? And I was like, the better thing to do, I was like, I'm gonna save you time and money here. I was like, you're not gonna hire me right now. You're gonna have this meeting with those guys, but today you're gonna work on going to Leslie's or wherever it is that he got at, you know, discount mark or whatever the hell it is. And you're gonna get the printout of all of your readings every time you went there, when you know, until the pool got plastered. Back to then if you have. And I was like, print out that for you, print it out for the builder, and print it out for the guy who started up the pool. And you can show them that literally, hey, we have a record of every other week testing the water, and everything's within the ideal ranges. And everything did seem to be within the ideal range. The only thing that was a bit high was the the calcium, which was at like not, I'm sorry, not the calcium, the cyanuric acid, which was at 75. Um, and you know, we do know that when it's over 50 to 60 parts per million, you you start to get diminishing returns with the cyanuric acid. And also the cyanuric acid, it starts to kind of mask itself and look like total alkalinity on the test. So that's why they'll give you like an adjusted alkalinity test, and then they'll also give you like a total carbonate alkalinity test. And I think the alkalinity test was like 78, and then he told me the adjusted was like uh 110 or something like that. So everything that he had was within the ideal ranges. His TDS was like under a thousand, he didn't have any phosphates, didn't have any iron. Um, calcium was under 400, it was like uh three 320 or something like that. And we have notoriously hard water here in California, especially in Southern California. So I, you know, I don't really blink an eye when I see two, 300 with calcium. I just I stop using calcium hypochlorite. So, but this was one of those situations where I I asked the right questions and I totally could have gone out there and met with this guy and made a a good chunk of money, you know, going out there and standing with him. But like I'm also not trying to, and one of the weirdest things when I started getting into consulting, one of the reps from one of the companies who really I had a lot of respect for. And he's one of like the old, not older guys, but he had been a rep for like a really long time. And I like I taught him in CPO like when 2010 or something, and he had like he moved a couple couple companies, but like I always stayed with him, and he was the guy that like would give me a vacuum cleaner when we met when we met once a year. Like they don't do that shit anymore, you know. Like that's now like they he used to be like, Thank you so much for you know always using us and all this stuff. And that's when I was like really brand loyal back in the day. But the brands now like Pent Air, we just got a uh a notice from them. I think I sent it to the talking pools group, they're going up 14 salt, salt generators are going up 14%. Are you fucking kidding me? Yeah, like 14%? So I mean that's just that's just insane. So now I again, if you guys are not out there and checking every single item that you guys are buying, I'm not talking about like two dollar savings you get. Like I bought a light from you know, so and so distributor, and I price matched it against three different distributors, and Wayne, it was sixty dollars difference. Wow. Imagine if you get three lights. That's two like um I I can't just throw away two hundred dollars because I want to shop at at your shop. Like nobody treats us this good, you know. And don't get me wrong, like we we do classes every once in a while at at SCP. So we we really do we do really do love SCP. And I used to do classes at PEP when we when we used to travel the country. But again, like uh, and if you don't ask, like they're never gonna give you a discount. So like once a year, you gotta sit down with the either the manager of the branch or the guy who runs the branch, and you need to sit down and be like, hey, this is how much chlorine I I bought last year. I'm planning on growing this year. Like, what's the best price that you could give me for chlorine? And if if you're not going back and forth with them about this, they're just gonna give you the highest price that they can. And you know, none of these distributors, as much as I love all of them, they're not loyal to us. You know, they're they're loyal to the manufacturers and they're loyal to the money, is really what it comes down to. So you have to just really protect yourselves in a in a certain way nowadays, especially with the internet. Um, and that happened a few weeks ago where I think I got a quote for somebody for a couple parts for a heater, and you know, the client, and this is my regular weekly client. He was like, hey, he's like, I found it on the internet for for this, and it was$30 cheaper than I bought it for. I was buying it for$25 more than it was on the internet. That's but like, how do you how do you deal with with something like that? But back to my point uh for the job, you know, like sometimes it's worth it to talk people through it and find out at the end that maybe this isn't the time for it for you to go out. And what I told the guy was like, look, I will help you because I believe in good karma and I believe in doing good business. So if he calls me back after this meeting and he I told him, I was like, these guys, if you have all these readings and you have all the facts, like you got the butter, man. Like you you have the juice, like they are gonna be willing to help you if you can prove to them that you've been taking care of the pool properly. But 90% of the time when these guys go out to these pools that are messed up and they're saying, Oh, it's your fault from the plaster or whatever, and you do the readings, the cyanuric acid is at 250, the calcium hardness is at 750, 800, the TDS is you know at 4,000, and it's not a saltwater pool, and you're just like, okay, like cool, like nobody's been paying attention to the long-term indicators of this of this pool, and that's an easy, you know, hands thumbs down, you're not gonna get anybody to come back and eat anything because you were in the wrong, but nobody knows this, and that's why like I always tell people if someone comes to me and they want to do a renovation, I basically tell them that I want to renovate the pool for you, I want to start the pool up for you, and I want to take care of the pool for you. And the only way that you're really getting any sort of warranty from me is if you do all three of those things because and you can go with your service guy, you can service the pool yourself, that's fine. But if I come back six months later and there's a problem and we test the water and everything is all crazy outside of the ideal ranges, and not even not even outside of the ideal ranges, like they're not even in the the at you know, any sort of range, you know, where like the health department comes and like some of the states it's 7, 2 to 7.8 for pH, you know, and with the alkalinity, it's 60 to 180. Um, and that gives you like a real wider range to say, okay, we're not within the ideal ranges, but we're we're okay. Where a lot of times this this is you're just so crazy out of whack that it doesn't really make sense to even try and go after people because so many people are like so quick to sue nowadays, you know, because everybody knows a lawyer or you got a family member that's a lawyer. And it's easy to to send somebody a letter to say, hey, you know, this is uh this is a problem. And that brings me to my next point that I've had two different clients that stopped service, and they both said, like, hey, we're stopping service, and that was fine. One of them, it was like a monetary issue. Like I had known like the husband was sick, and like, you know, I kind of knew that that I kind of figured that that was coming. And the other one, I had said this on the show. I don't know if it, I don't know if I said it to you or if I said it when I was by myself. But basically, this guy sent me a text, and this was a pool that like we drained the pool when we first started, but now this is five, six years down the road, like the pool needs to be drained again. He's not listening, he's got black algae. And the black algae is like underneath the plaster because the pieces of plaster are like starting to come up and stuff. 30 30 plus thousand gallon pool, and he's got two three-quarter inch returns that are in the shallow end of the pool. Okay. So, my, you know, I was able to get by with this because I left him one of my super vacuums, you know, that little robotic vacuum cleaners that live in the water. And that was able to at least turn the water over a little bit so he didn't have algae all the time. But anytime it heats up, we were always having problems with algae. And like we used a Blu-ray XL, and that helped a little bit. But like coming to this pool once a week, like and putting in three, four gallons, like we were putting, we were putting in extra chlorine all the time. It was costing extra money all the time. And I understood his frustration, but like it wasn't like we were sending him a bill at the end of the month and we're like surprised. Yeah. We would text him and be like, hey, pool look like shit this week. We put in X amount of extra gallons, like, so look for that on your bill. You know, I'm super open about I never want to have people, it never feels good when you go to the mechanic and you talk about something and then you get a bill and it's three thousand dollars more. Right. And you're like, what the hell was this for? And they're like, oh, well, there was a problem and we fixed it for you. And it's like, well, you should have come to me and asked me first that this was okay. And it's not necessarily that I'm asking the client, I'm telling the client, like, this is what we're doing, like, this is what we have to do to get your pool back in order, but look for this down the road so they're not surprised. So he didn't pay his bill for a couple months, and like we're pretty lenient with our clients. Like, if you get like a month or two behind, like we'll be like, okay, cool, we'll just start sending you reminders and whatnot. But he was like a few months behind and then he fired us, and I guess his pool company started talking shit about us and being like this guy that they don't know what they're doing. And they the way that he said it, he was like, you know, they said that you weren't doing me any favors. And I'm like, okay, cool, of course, because all of your I would think that too if I showed up and tested, did a full panel test and everything was out of whack because everything's out of whack. Like I told you, you need to drain your pull up. But I wasn't arguing with him about it. I was just like, hey, please just pay your bill. And he was like, I sent a check already, and he like shorted us like a thousand dollars. And I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. So if somebody shorts you guys money, the first thing that you need to do is just make sure that you're recording everything. And that means that you send out, if you're gonna send them the final bill, you send that as a certified letter. So you have on record, because then they'll just say, Oh, we didn't get it, you know, once it comes time for that. So now you know for a fact that they they actually got it. And now you can go to small claims court or anything like that. But as soon as we sent the certified letter, um, he basically said, I said, like, I got your check. I was like, You're real short. I'm like, we're not like basically we're not gonna let this go. So I need you to pay the bill by this date, or we're gonna have to take some sort of action. Didn't hear from him, just got a check the other day. And I don't have to talk to him again, but you know, sometimes you gotta go there to to claim the money because if you are just like what blase blah about it, people are gonna try and take advantage of you, you know, wherever wherever they can. So that's one of the things like you really have to be, you know, aware of. And that's why a lot of people they'll do billing. We do it like at the end of the month for the month. So, and the reason we do that is because there's so many pools. Winter here is so different than the summer, with chemical-wise. In the summertime, we wind up using so many extra chemicals because it's so hot here that like we wouldn't every month we'd be coming back and being like, okay, like you owe us, we'd send you a bill, you already paid for the for the month, and then we send you for three gallons of extra liquid chlorine or whatever it is, you know. So have you had any instances, Wayne, where when you were in the corporate world, somebody tried to like take advantage of you guys? And is there an instance where somebody actually did and they got away with it for a while, and then you were like, Whoa. Whether it be like it's probably easier for an employee to get away with some stuff for a while, but I'm talking more like people that you work with. Like, did you ever send out an order and like it had a hundred extra test kits in it?

SPEAKER_06 45:06

And someone was like, you're like, you know, yeah, it it doesn't happen often because of how how our sales would be for our distributors. But we had a distributor who won't remain nameless, they were in Chicago, who annually would over-order on their early buy. Okay, or they would order a strange reagent or something like that. That really didn't make any sense for them to order. And so we'd we do the order, we process it, we get confirmation, we send the order out. And lo and behold, a week later, we get a call or fax or an email. You know, I want to return all these reagents because we're not going to use them. Why did you buy them in the first place? So they were they were buying stuff to make their sales look better, but trying to return what they couldn't do, what they knew they couldn't use. And with reagents, I don't I don't know if you knew this, but as a manufacturer, we can't accept returned reagents we've shipped out if it's under if it's over 30 days because we don't know how the product was stored. We tried to affect the viability of the reagent. If it was under 30 days, we would say, Yeah, go ahead, send it back, kind of thing. But invariably they would wait two months exactly, like like we we have it on our calendars. Oh, yeah, so and so's gonna call today, and sure enough, they call, kind of deal. But but at the level that you're talking about, we really don't see it as we never saw it that often, but when we did, we knew it was coming, kind of deal. Yeah. Particularly when when uh an account would order something that's out of the blue or was not their part of their normal order, or it was just odd kind of deal. And and when those would happen, we would actually contact the the the account and did you really mean to do this? You know, was it a mistake? That kind of thing. But yeah, it it doesn't really happen as as often as it would at you know on a service level or or you know where you're at, but it still happens. It can happen at any level.

SPEAKER_04 47:19

Yeah, I mean, like I've had people try and like pull some like weird stuff before, but again, like when that type of stuff happens, I'm pretty quick to pull the leash, you know. And again, I kind of I'm making sure that I that I vet the clients that we're we're taking on. And you know, with commercial clients, like they don't ever happen that quickly, to be honest. Like I we just closed down another two commercial clients, and I think I went out there six months ago, and we just picked them up, you know, this this week was the first week. And the reason being was they had to figure out their budget for the next year, and you know, and that was totally fine, but like that's just the that's like the how long it takes to close some of these clients sometimes where like you almost forget about them and then they're like, Hey, like you guys ready to start up in two weeks. And I'm like, what? I'm like, okay, cool. Like that's that's awesome. But I've also had you know, companies come out and they want you to come out and do a bunch of stuff for for free. And I I'm continue it now. It's been over a year since the Palisades fire, you know, a year and a couple months. And uh I'm still I still I'm going out tomorrow to go see a pool with a house that got burned. And basically, it seems like it's a slam dunk, but like this is the only one. And there's a bunch of different insurance companies that people have out here. People have like State Farm, people have this thing called California Fair Plan. And what I've found is that California Fair Plan is like the insurance that when all of those people you heard those stories about people losing their insurance, this was the like other insurance that they were able to get in place of that. And I'm not gonna say it's it's bad insurance, I'm just saying like they they're they don't play as nice as State Farm by any means. Um, so most of the time, I'm kind of like, you have that insurance. I'm like, oh boy, like what we're gonna, you know. And I wanna I wanna be helpful to everybody. So I do go out there for for free to kind of assess the situation and then say, hey, like it's worth us, it's worth it to write a report or it's not worth it to write a report. Um, because people don't understand. And like they think she was like, well, we have pictures of the plane coming by and dropping all of that like FOSS stuff on our house. So they were saying that the insurance company is a little more um little more willing this time to kind of because they nobody wants to go to court and have somebody show a video of a house getting pummeled with with phosphate stuff, you know what I mean, from the plane. Um, so I totally understand that, but it's just so it's just it's a weird situation every single time. And I've had um 50, you know, a hundred people call me from the Palisades, and you know, a lot of them are in a crazy situation, right? Because you're losing, you're you've just lost your biggest asset. And for some of the people, it's their second homes, but a lot of people that's that's where they live and that's where they were, that's where they were raising their families and different things like that. So now your whole life is just kind of like turned upside down and and devastated. But I think that this is one where I'm gonna go out and they're they'll be more willing to take care of a bunch of this stuff. But even that homeowner was, you know, didn't really understand. She was like, okay, well, like let's just, you know, there was toxic stuff running through the PVC because the pump was turning on, and like I had to explain, like, the only thing that's gonna catch anything is the filter. Like it's gonna run straight through the pump, it's gonna run straight through the heater. So they'll give you a heater cleaning, you know, especially if it was raining fire. But visually, I would need to see, or whoever was inspecting the pool would need to see that like the PVC was actually burned. It has actual brown marks on it from burning. Same thing with the pump, or you know, and we're not talking about like a little bit of heat here. Like, this is a lot of heat that's going on. So, like if it was that close to the fire where there was like burning embers coming on it, like there's gonna be burn marks on stuff. And that's gonna be a 100%. This is an easy, let's take it out and replace it. But the insurance companies, you know, they're gonna be really wary of people coming out and saying, okay, we need a whole new equipment pad here. And the client was like, hey, I want you to come out and I want you to give me a quote. And I was like, okay, cool. Like I can give you a quote, but if you're gonna submit that to the insurance company, they are gonna be like, Who in the world is Sherwood Pool Consulting Group and what the hell do they know? Right. Like they could be taking you for a ride and saying that something is$500,000 for something that costs$20,000. You know, now the insurance company is gonna say, we're gonna hire an expert to come out and give our own quote for you, you know, because they want to make sure that it's something they're always looking out for their own interests. They're not just gonna let you hire some Joe Schmoke pool company to come out here. And that's how I have to kind of explain it and say, like, uh, you know, if you just get a quote, then they're like, okay, you could get seven different quotes, and all seven of them are gonna be different. But if you have someone come out and do an inspection report for you and they write an inspection report and it tells the story of, hey, this is what was wrong. It needs a new surface. This is about how much this surface should cost. And the goal is that they could submit this to the insurance company, and the insurance company could give this to five different contractors and say, Hey, could you look at this for us? And all five of those contractors should say, Yes, that seems like what's wrong. And yes, we can fix it for that, is really the goal. But that's why it's so so much different how you pose it to the insurance company that this is my pool expert here, and they're telling you a story as opposed to just uh, you know, again, Joe Schmoe pool company coming out and saying, Hey, this is gonna be 60 grand or whatever it is, you know. So I'm constantly learning with all of these different cases that come up because sometimes the house is there, sometimes the house isn't there. One of my clients, I feel so terrible for him. He I did a pool inspection for him and it was in a different part of town. And it was just like the pool inspection, I was like, dude, I'm like, this thing's pretty messed up. So, like, if you're not getting a bunch of money off of the house, like you are gonna have to pour in a bunch of money into this pool. And the home inspection came back so bad, he was like, We're not, we're not getting that. So instead, he bought a pool, he bought a house with a pool in the Palisades. And no more than six months after he bought this house when this fire happened. So, like, he's like he's at the point now where he's just like, I wish the thing had burned down to the ground because there was you know toxic stuff that went inside. They had to clean it, it came back that they still had lead inside. So, like, he's still not in the house. And this is over a year later, right? So for a while, we didn't do anything with the pool because all of the pools that had like the really expensive covers on them, the ones that are in the tracks and like really closed the pool down, those pools, nothing underneath. So it was amazing. His pool looked great, and then after a while, it started getting algae and you know it got hot, and he was like, Hey, like we gotta do something about this. So we drained the pool, we filled it up with fresh water, and then all of a sudden, the cover stopped working. And it wasn't just the cover, it was like the electrical, like to that whole part of the house, and there was a garage over there, and the garage had burned down and the cover wasn't working. So he was like, All right, I'm gonna get an electrician out there, and this like a month goes by every week. I'm like, hey, are we back on schedule? Did this guy come out? And he's like, No, the electrician's being you know shady. But he was like, But can you come out and it's it rains, so can you take the water off of the cover for me? So when when it starts working, we can open it. So Carlos, my service manager, goes out there and he puts the pump onto the, you know, drains it off of the cover and then opens the vault where the cover is or where the motor is and where the cover ties up, and that's like underground a little bit. And it's got a drain on it. So it should, when there gets water, because water gets in there when you open the cover. Sometimes it rains, it goes in there. Like it's it's common for water to get in there, but it goes directly to the street. He opened it up and Wayne, the motor was underwater. So what had happened was the drain to the street got clogged up from the other from the street with like clay and like leaves and like toxic shit and stuff, which we had no, we had no idea. And that was actually plugging the water. So we had to go in and put like a snake from the street, and that actually drained it out. But there's no way that we, there's no way that we we would have known that. And it's one of those instances where it was just like, wow, that escalated quickly, you know. And now not only does the guy he's missing his ADU garage, now he has to have like the cover company come out and probably change the motor for him. And like that's that stuff costs Buku Bucks. So I just feel really terrible for him. But it's just like with these fires, it's almost like one thing after another, you know. But that's why I'm trying to do my due diligence here and be as helpful as I can, you know, and going out and like giving people telling people, hey, this is what you should do, because there's a lot of people out there that are doing bad business, obviously.

SPEAKER_06 56:53

So don't do bad business. That's right. So I think that's a good stopping point for today. You're heard Steve talk a lot. Thank you, Steve. Save my voice, you're trying to save my voice. Um, as always, we welcome your comments and and critiques and suggestions. Uh your email is talkingpools at gmail.com. Send us something. And if we happen to use it on air, we'll send you a nice little thank you gift. Steven, thank you so much. Thank you for putting up with this. You sound great. Someday I will be better. But take care, guys, and have a good one.