Diving into Excellence: The Story Behind Smart Aquatics with Johnny Nalepa

Join us for an exclusive one-on-one conversation with Johnny Nalepa, the owner of Smart Aquatics, as we delve into the fascinating world of "Lamborghini Pools." As a second-generation aquatic professional, Johnny brings a wealth of experience and expertise to the table, having spent his entire life immersed in the industry. With over a decade of design, engineering, and consulting experience, Johnny's passion for aquatic innovation shines through in every project. Tune in as we explore Johnny's journey, from his family business roots to his college degree in aquatic engineering technology, and discover how Smart Aquatics is revolutionizing the customer service experience with unmatched creative design and expert-level skill sets. Don't miss this deep dive into excellence with Johnny Nalepa.

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one time. What's up guys, Chris Bowen here with Level Up the Podcast. I am here with Johnny of Smart Aquatics. Johnny is a badass designer, architect, engineer, you name it, the man can do it all. I've known Johnny a long time, I've been very blessed to get to know him over the years. He is truly one of the best in the pool industry and he's gonna kind of talk to us today about how he has grown his business. how he has developed relationships and how he's blown up on social media. So Johnny, why don't you take a minute to introduce yourself, man. Well, first of all, I appreciate that. That was a hell of an intro, Chris. That was probably the best introduction I've ever received in my life. I'm gonna save that and play it back a couple of times after this. So, well, thanks for having me. This was awesome. What was the question again? Sorry. So introduce yourself, man. What do you do? How did you get to where you are? So my name is John Inulepa. I am the owner of Smart Aquatics, which I started five years. This is year five for us now. I started at the... Yeah, man, it's been a roller coaster. It has been a literal roller coaster. And you know what? This was not the plan at all. We just briefly talked about this, but I mean, I started it at the end of 2019. I just purchased a car. I just... I've got a new house and then COVID happened three months later, like in March of 2020. And I was, you know, I was already kind of, you know, trying to figure out what I was going to do next. But, but yeah, it's been a roller coaster, man. So I've just been blessed, you know, it's been it's probably been the hardest thing that I've ever done. You know, you hear it, you hear it a lot. Starting a business is not easy and all this kind of stuff. and working 20 hours a day and no sleep and not eating healthy. But that's all, I went through all of that. I mean, I think I worked myself into burnout, essentially, where I just kind of, yeah, I found myself sitting at the computer in the morning, and after like two years, and I was just like, you just feel unmotivated. You just like, why? I've been doing this for two years. It's like every day, 20 hours, like day and night. All you do is eat, sleep, and work. with a lot less eating and sleeping and taking care of yourself. But it was good. But so anyways, so well. you're doing a lot more site visits as well. Is that kind of helping with the burnout a little bit from not being behind a computer? Well, yeah, definitely now I have a grasp on everything. I mean, the first couple of years are certainly the hardest. Now we're really gearing up to start growing and now we have the right people and the right team to do that. So, yeah, that's just, I don't wanna say it gets easier, but it gets, no, it doesn't get easy. Well, you know what, it's interesting because there's days when you wake up and you're like, dude, I'm killing it. this is awesome, money's coming in, projects, and cool projects at that, not just like, many projects, and so, and then there's other days where you're like, how are we gonna make payroll? You start to really, what I'm realizing now, and I'm reading a lot of books now because I have a lot of colleagues and friends that just send me books. It's funny, because a business consultant that I work with, he was saying, well, people usually send you books for one or two reasons, either they think you could use the help, because you're... Yeah, because you need it or they see potential and like, yeah, they think this can take you to the next level. So I'm hoping it's the latter. That remains. We'll see that remains to be seen. But anyways, I'm realizing, you know, it's interesting. A lot of the I was doing a lot of the work at the beginning of this stuff, right? It's like now I'm realizing, I need to learn more. I need to learn as much about business as I do about as I know about. you know, water features and pools and stuff. Yeah. And it's, it was actually a great. that's how you go from Sorry, I didn't mean to interrupt you, but I was gonna say that's how you go from working in your business to on your business. Yeah. And you know what, that's an easy thing to say a lot. And I would say it for a while. And I grew up in a family business. So I kind of got to see that and I didn't even realize what it was until you started hearing that. And then you're like, oh, what does that actually mean? Most people are self-employed and they don't even realize it. There was a great book that I read. Have you read the E-Myth? I've heard of it, but I haven't read it, but I've heard good things about it. a really, it was a really popular business book. And it's really, it's one of the first, it's the first book that I read as far as business is concerned. And I'm not a big reader. I hate reading, but I like, I realized that I like to learn. And so that it gives you like practice. It talks a lot about, about what being a business owner actually means instead of being like self-employed. You know, a lot of people have their own businesses. But yeah, a hundred percent. My parents and my, and I kind of grew up knowing that, but just like it was unconscious thing. Like my, both of my parents were, were self-employed for four years, but we could never take a family vacation for longer than a week or so, because if they weren't working in the business, the business would go out of business. So that's the, that's the difference. There's a big distinction, you know, in that. So. Yeah, there's a difference between working to, you know, owning a business and having a job within the business versus being the, you know, the real owner of a business and being the CEO of that business and that business being able to run without you managing it day to day. sure in any industry, but especially ours, because it's so specialized, and you know this, I mean, it's hard to find and trade. You know, even if we find somebody who has 15 years of architectural experience, which by the way, our senior architect does, he still has to learn about edge conditions and we're NAIPs and all this stuff. So there's a big learning curve regardless, unless you come from this industry and you have experience in it, it's, you know. It's... and even then a lot of what you guys are doing is so advanced that even people from within the industry don't know about it. You know, I mean, a lot of the stuff that you guys are doing is just now being considered more mainstream. You know, it hasn't been on residential projects in the last 10 years. You know, that's when we started seeing it pop up was maybe about 10 years ago. Yeah, I think, you know, I always say like we're like the pool industry is kind of its own bubble. And we're always last to the table as far as like technology and being progressive and everything. And it is it's a result of like the market right now. Look what happened during COVID. Everybody, you know, this market exploded our business. I mean, we did we increased 140% in 2021. And I think 2022 was another like 157% like those two years of COVID. We just exploded. And now we're back to like a regular. 40% was what we grew last year, you know, which is more, which is more along the lines of standard. Yeah. Oh, yeah. No, it's great. incredible to grow 40% year over year. But you know what, you ever hear one of my favorite quotes, it's like, success can ruin a business that's not ready for it. So you get in the habit of, and we've seen this, we know a couple of builders that have probably done this, where you bite off more than you can chew. We were getting products in left and right, and I just needed, I needed bodies. I have a hard time saying, at that time, at that time, we're like, that's what we needed. We're trying to build the business, it's like, oh my God, here's all these opportunities to build this business. Problem is, If you just say yes to all these projects, it's like, well, now how do I get them done? So I had to hire a bunch of people really quickly. And I didn't know the first thing about hiring. So that was like the first thing I had to learn. And I learned it the hard way. I seem to learn everything the hard way. But you just talked a little bit about this. If you don't know how to hire, you don't know how to hire self-managing people. And you probably don't even have the money to hire those type of people. So at first, you know, I just, I hired bodies that because that's what we need. We need some, anything was better than nothing. And then you quickly realize this is creating more of a problem for me. Then I'm doing twice as much work now because I'm going behind me. Right. Yeah. I've, I've experienced that firsthand myself of where you get to the point where you're like, well, I can't fire this person because I have to have somebody. Otherwise I have to take on the entire workload, but at the same time, I can't not fire this guy because I'm doing my workload already and then having to come back and correct theirs and that's not cool. and you know what, man? I forget who asked me this at one point, said what's the hardest thing about running your business? And obviously, it's been five years now. So where I'm at today is like, I've grown a lot in the last five years, just personally, and you kind of have to do that in order for your business to grow. But it's funny, because I went home and I thought about that, and I was like, man, because there's so many obvious things. that are tough, but when you peel back all the layers, managing my emotions in those times was probably the hardest thing because it makes you want to yell at your people and snap and just curse and yeah, push them out of the way. All do it. I did that a couple of times, you know, and it just makes you bitter and then you realize you're sending emails to clients and you're upset and just, man, so that was like, you got to... But really, that's a bigger problem when you don't have the right people. You know, when you have the right people, there's a lot. It makes a world of difference. So that's... got to check that ego and that emotion at the door a lot of times as a business owner. And it's not an easy thing to do. I mean, there's a lot of times that you want to email clients back or email somebody back and get snippety with them. And you just can't do that as a business owner. You shouldn't. yeah, no, no, you always have to, unfortunately we have to always, for the most, I say always, but for the most part, I would say 99% of the time, we have to respond with just professionalism and all, yeah, yeah, and trust me, there's clients, especially when we're dealing with these clients that have more money than God, some of them feel that way, and yeah, they just have unreasonable expectations, and just, you send them, we just had a client the other day, we sent them. you know, our renderings are pretty damn near perfect. And we've even had architects, yeah, we've even had architects say, oh my God, your rendering is so good, can you do rendering for us? They're better than ours. And we had a client who's just one of those types of clients that there's no pleasing him. And we sent him a really nice rendering for free, by the way, because we figured that would help ease his decision-making and he's one of those guys. But his response, his only response, by the way, he didn't even bother responding to the actual thing, is this what he wanted to do? He's just like, the rendering is not good. And so just, yeah. Okay. I mean, the last one we did was, we rendered the dam, the whole island of St. John. And I mean, it was beautiful. That's Simon, by the way. He's our community specialist. He's the man. He pumps out those renders. So I've seen a project of yours blow up on social media recently. To walk us through this Lamborghini pool, man, I see you got the matching Lamborghini in the background right there. That was not on purpose. That was just, it's been there. We're actually going to do it, you know what? We, I'm, you know, I just, I have a sense of humor for better or worse. And, and so when we were doing that fool, we're like, I don't know why I saw these, these little mini toy cars for kids. And I think one of my friend's daughters just got one for her birthday. So I was like, Oh man, we should get, we should get the little Lambo and do a video with it. And we did one why it's pretty funny. is... But we're actually going to give this one away on our social media soon. But no, that was a dude, that project. I think everybody was super. Oh yeah. You know what? It is super cool, man. And, um, I think that that's the first time for the best of my knowledge that that's ever been done, you know, except for like project, the movie project, expert in driver car into the, but that's the first time like an exotic car has been. of you who haven't seen it, walk us through kind of, for those listeners who haven't seen the project, walk us through kind of what the project was. So we're calling it the Lamborghini pool or the Lambo pool. And essentially part of the pool has a deck level perimeter overflow kind of landing strip, whatever you wanna call it. It's just a very narrow area that's made specifically for the client to drive his Lamborghini into the pool. That area only has like an inch of water and some bubblers. And so he wants to park it there and lead it to parks for events. He's just a big car guy. He's also got a... a Ferrari in his movie theater room. He's got like a Ferrari on the side with a big panel of glass in front of it. So, but that project, man, you know, I always have to, yeah. So, but there's a lot of people involved in that project. You know, it was like Fox Territ Design, they did the actual design of that, Custom Pool Systems built it. So we just, you know, developed their design and engineered it. But yeah, man, these are all a team effort. We obviously. You know, we, we always want to give credit to the team, but it's a very exciting project. And I actually, when we did the photo shoot, I got to drive a Lamborghini in and out of the pool there. I'll send you some, I'll send you some videos and some of that. But it's a really unique project. And so I just love, I just want to do cool projects, man. You know, at the end of the day, did all the business stuff and yeah, but it's just like, we just want to kind of make a name for ourselves and just do cool stuff. Yeah, you know, that's what I kind of that's that kind of for me is what it boils down to look, man, I used to be a pool boy, I used to clean pools for a living and work out in the sun and just I hated it. You know, I'm a creative type and I'm a kind of an entrepreneur. Yeah, I did that for 20 years. And by the way, but I wouldn't be where I'm at today. If I didn't do that. That's got me all my experience. I mean, so So now it's funny because my dad jokes, go don't you miss it? And I'm like, absolutely not. No, not even a little bit, not even a little bit. I feel you there, man. That's where I cut my teeth was cleaning pools as well. So I don't miss that one bit. especially in Miami, dude, in the summer months, forget it, forget it. I mean, there was days when I thought I was getting heat exhaustion because it gets so hot. And now just like, I didn't even know this industry existed on this level at the time. And so being able to do what I do now, my God, I mean, I love what I do now, like literally. I mean, and I hope, you know, you- I meet a lot of people, you see what everybody does. Man, I really hope everybody loves what they do, man, because this, like, what more could we ask for, especially from comparing this to cleaning swimming pools? I mean, this is a dream come true. So, you know, that's just exciting to see what's next and what's, you know, we're always trying to, you know, see what's next and what we can do to make stuff cooler and everything, so. How can you one up that project? What's the next cool project that you can do? Right, right. When a lot of the stuff, you know, we've got to give credits to a lot of these architects and designers and stuff because, you know, we do design stuff, like we're designing an entire resort right now in the Bahamas. But most of the jobs that we're on with architects who are responsible for the design of the house and the pools and even, and we're just, we help them develop that design. with our technical knowledge of all of the concrete, steel, and MEP stuff, the plumbing and everything. But there's another one that we have coming up. Yeah, exactly. Right. They send us like, it's sometimes funny. It's like they send us just kind of an outline and it's like, okay, well, yeah, we need to, we need to work on this a little bit. You know, they send us an idea and we have to like make that. we're gonna have to work on that just a little bit. Right, right. Well, we had to do a little bit of that with the rainbow. We do. Well, go ahead, go ahead. Oh, I'm sure. Yeah. I mean, how do you take that from a design to make that a reality? I'm sure the process there on that was less than easy to do with all the detail, especially, you know, how do you get that edge perfect when you have an inch of water on it? Less than an inch. Like, that's not an easy thing to do by any means. So. had to contact Lamborghini, you know. Yeah, oh, I'm sure. So let me ask you this, man. You have managed to blow up on Instagram in a big way recently, I feel like. And for the most part, you've handled all of your social media up until, I think, recently when you guys have started looking for somebody, correct? But yeah, more or less. So how have you managed to do that? What have you found? I know there's no magic like, hey, do this and your Instagram's gonna go crazy, but what has been probably the biggest part of that success in that? Well, that's a really good question, Chris, because we're doing that recently, right? That was kind of the start of this year. One of the goals for the company this year is to develop our sales and marketing pillar, which we currently don't have because most of our work, and we've just been blessed up to this point, very fortunate, most of our work comes through referrals. But we don't want to rely on that because... So in any good business, there's like five pillars and one of them is sales and one of them is marketing. So one of our goals for this year is to develop those pillars. And I've tried a couple people, we had a couple different people trying to help us with that at one point. But I learned that the hard way, I thought that you could just hire somebody to do something like marketing or your social media and then they would just do it better than you. I kind of learned that I didn't realize it was going to be as much work or I was going to need to be involved as much. So after going through a couple of different, yeah, I don't know why I thought that, but I guess it just seemed like, okay, if I need somebody to do our engineering or something like this, like, okay, well, I'll just hire an engineer or just hire a social media marketing person. But, and just let me that person and then they'll check in with me weekly. But that's not how it works. Unfortunately. If it did, I mean, anybody would probably have their own business. I think a lot of the videos that you guys are doing plays a big part in that because you're so prominent in them, which I personally like by the way. You know, that was something that, you know, we used to emulate as well is have the face of the business be at the forefront of a lot of this because it helps build the brand. Well, you've been doing that longer than I have too. But so the biggest thing, what I finally realized and a lot of this stuff is trial and error. Like, look, if you don't know how to do it, you just start doing it and you kind of figure it out. That's kind of just how I've done everything. And at this point in the business's life, we're just at the sales and marketing. So we tried stuff for a long time. We've been posting on social for a little bit. It just, you know, we weren't getting anywhere because we just didn't know what we were doing. Now that I'm reading books, and learning more. Now at night, I'll stay up nights, man. I'm looking at social media to learn how to do social media, and just marketing in general, by the way, not just social media. And so I'm much more hands-on. And for right now, I am the one, I reverted back to, okay, let's start over, let's start fresh. I started managing it. Right now, I'm managing 99% of it. I do have somebody now that's helping me do the video editing. It's a part-time student from UM, and she's been a great actor. But you know what, it just goes back to the same, it goes back to the same thing where if you have the right people, it gets easier because now we're working together. She's a marketing student at UM, much younger than, I think she's 26 or something like that. Like I'm 35, so. different generations she kind of has an idea. And so we're trying stuff. We're posting stuff. There was a video that we posted that didn't do very well. And we go back and we realize, okay, the intro was a little bit slow. So let's shorten the intro. Let's put some words on it and let's see if this, and it did, we reposted it and it did better. So now we're trying different things. We're having meetings about these posts. So there's a lot of work that goes into it. I'm surprised how much work. It is, you see all these influencers and all these people posting and it looks super easy. They make it look super easy. And it is not. I mean, there's a reason that companies hire that company that people hire companies to do this kind of stuff. It is not easy at all. because it's a lot of work. I mean, it's a lot of... not only is it a lot of work, it's expensive to buy all the equipment to do it. I don't think a lot of people realize that aspect of it either. Does it cost money to buy these cameras? Can you film all of it from your iPhone? Yes. Is it best to do that? Probably not. But... you gotta kind of figure out, you gotta figure out what you wanna say and what you wanna, what your, you know, what your value, you gotta figure out your core values, what your message is essentially, you know? And we've kind of just, yeah. So it's a lot of work, man. That's really the, there's no substitute for that, unfortunately, and that's in all aspects of the business. There's no substitute for it. So I saw a photo shoot of you recently where you were able to do some photos underwater to kind of help brand a little bit. Man, I loved it. Walk us through kind of how that came about and really the thought process behind that. Wait, sorry, you cut out there. I think my internet's a little slow. So I saw recently you had done a photo shoot underwater. I remember a couple of years back you had done something similar, I feel like, but this I felt like was quite a bit different. What was kind of the thought process behind that and how did that come about? Yeah, you know, the first one we did that you're talking about a long time ago, man, we did that in one of the pools that I used to service over at Eastern Shores. That was when I was still cleaning pools. And I'm just, I've always been the creative type. I was a creative kid growing up. And that mostly got me in trouble in school. But what came of that seemed to work out pretty well. So I just, I don't know why, where the idea came from. I just thought it'd be cool to do like an underwater photo in like a, in a suit. And I went out there like actually with my girlfriend at the time and it was it was during winter time too So it was it was freezing cold. Obviously didn't plan that very well But we took an underwater photo on the steps like with that when the go pros first came out So I was taking the gopro over and so that's I think that's kind of what prompted it The gopro was out and I was like, oh, let's see what we get some underwater stuff um And so we got a cool photo underwater But then recently But that one looks it looks a little bit old now. So Now that we're actually working on the new business and everything, we were out of the photo shoot for that project, which is actually that product's awesome. It's the only private island in Palm Beach. It's like it was, oh yeah, it was one of the top 10 on the Rob's Report, top 10 most expensive pieces of real estate for sale in the world. Yeah, the properties, it's crazy. So we were doing a photo shoot with Jimmy Smith. And It's hot, man. It's just, it's hot down here. So after the photo shoot, I thought it'd be cool to do like an updated photo. We didn't plan it though because we took it, we ended up taking it with the iPhone. We took it with my iPhone. So we just kind of hopped in the pool because we did a cool ending to the video. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You have to use the side buttons. So, but Jimmy was taking, he was taking screenshots actually. So he was taking screenshots. It wasn't actually a true photo. It was a screenshot of the image that was displayed in the camera underwater. And then Jimmy edited them and they came out sweet. But so we're gonna do, we have plans to do some new ones but actually plan it where he brings his underwater housing and puts the actual big camera in there. So yeah, that's. something we're working on. really cool. That's, that's see stuff like that's just so unique though, in my opinion, that it really helps kind of build that brand of, Hey, this is our underwater specialist. Even his company photos are of him underwater. Like that just goes to show you how specialized these guys are. I think that's cool. think it's, you know, for us, it's just like, you know, yeah, a lot of the work that we do is very serious and we have to, we're selling reliability and that we're experts to clients and everything. And we are, but at the same time, I mean, on a personal level, like we still like to have fun with this, with this stuff. And I think that's kind of where it comes from. It's like, you know, if I had to be serious all the time, I mean, that would probably kill me. But, you know, I just enjoy what I do. And when we're doing these things, we're we're just, oh, what can we do that's cool on this one or something. So we just kind of try to have some fun with it. Yeah, you gotta have fun with it, man. Gotta have fun with it. So, well, Johnny, I really appreciate your time today, man. I... Oh, okay. You froze on me for a minute. know if you're getting it on your end, but I'm getting some internet stuff on my end. Yeah, it's all good though. We'll go ahead and wrap it up, man. What is one piece of advice that you would give to inspiring, uh, young entrepreneurs that are wanting to start their own business? Oh man, that's a good question that I was not prepared for. It's hard, I mean, just keep going, man. Just keep going. Just keep your head down and work and learn, man. Just keep learning and keep going and you'll come out the other side all right. It's not supposed to be easy, you know? But it's worth it and it's entirely doable. The more the... And it's interesting, one of the things I'll preface that by saying, I was watching a podcast and they were talking about like self growth and they were saying that you can only take your business as far as you're able to develop personally. And I think that's very, I'm noticing that now. Oh shit. Well... Can you hear me now? Yeah, I can hear you now. No, we're good. We got everything. We're good, man. So we'll go ahead and say goodbye for now, brother. But it's been an absolute pleasure for those that are interested in working with you. What's the best way for them to get ahold of you? Is it through social media or through website? Oh, we're frozen again. God damn. Sorry, I think you can hear me now. We're frozen. I think you were asking what's the best way to reach me. So our website is smart-aquatics.com. Our Instagram is at smart.aquatics. smart aquatics is the company name. He's on Instagram. He's on Facebook. I think I cut you off on accident. It stopped on my end, but appreciate your time today, Johnny man. We'll go ahead and wrap up the recording on it and call it a day, brother. I appreciate your time. Thanks, Chris. I appreciate it, man. Absolutely. We'll talk soon, man. Bye.