yeah the pool business is shifting and a lot of people are getting out of the business, selling their routes, retiring and moving out of cali to somewhere more affordable. but if you can push through these tough times, it can be a pretty good profession. just know your worth and walk away from anybody who tries to haggle down the price of your service. if they say you're too expensive, they're prob right. you're too expensive for them, so move on to someone who can afford you.
Ive been working for a pool shop here in Australia for 7 years now and get paid $75k per year as a level 3 service technician. I do equipment installs, light installs and general servicing. They let me drive the company vehicle as well as pay for fuel and maintenance. They also pay for my phone bill. I did think about starting my own business but the perks are so good right now. But do wish I was my own boss.
Seems like the Golden Years for the pool service industry are well behind us. You can only raise your fee modestly while expenses continue to climb. The cost of chemicals is at a historic high. So is the price of gas, used trucks and health insurance. Kind of hard to get excited about starting this business when net income is on the decline and recession/inflation is just ramping up
Agreed. It seems we will have to push our way into higher end markets that will bear pricing double what it was a few years ago. A lot of people are at their upper limit for what they'd be willing to pay for weekly service. New people in the business will undercut pricing just to get the job, and bleed off as they find out there's a lot more to maintaining a pool than just cleaning and throwing chems. The attrition rate has already been around 30% and likely will rise as even experienced service people watch their margins dropping. I have raised rates on weekly service but that just barely covers increases in costs. But I did increase pricing on filter cleans and all repair work.
yeah i had one customer stop service because she didn't want to pay the $10 price increase. prob the easiest pool i had on that route and in 1 months it was destroyed. she called us back to fix the mess and restart service. People don't understand that just because it looks easy doesn't mean it is. its because we know what we're doing 😤
@@tylerjallred3080 I have no employees, been solo for many years. The companies that have multiple trucks are having hell trying to get service people in them and working. I was a service manager at an outfit before. We ran about 250 pools a week. a few guys were really good, others would quit at the drop of a hat. If you had a pulse and a drivers license, I'd put you on a route with 2 days training. These days it's worse.
The company I work for currently has a flat rate of $200 a month for residential pools. At least, from what I remember being told, I’m sure there’s different variables that can affect the monthly rate, especially for a residential pool here in Texas though it’s not uncommon for a monthly rate to go that high
I agree with most of what was said but I’d have to disagree with it being easy to scale. In the last four years I have hired six or seven guys and they were all just terrible. Even after lots of training and handholding on my part they would lose accounts left and right. Nobody cares about your business as much as you do. If I could clone myself it would be easy to scale. But because it’s hard to find good employees and when you do finally find a good one they only stay a couple years till they start their own business which I’m all for, but just makes you have to hire again and start all over It’s a very difficult business to scale. If it were easy you would see large corporations in the industry, but they are nowhere to be found in the pool industry. They are just starting to get in it now it’ll be interesting to see how that plays out. I finally just said the heck with it and stopped hiring and slowly downsize. I now service 130 accounts and do all my own repairs. About half those are weekly and the other half or every other week. I gross right around 24 to 25,000 a month and net 16,000 a month. All in about 35 to 40 hours a week. It’s a great gig for me but as soon as I bring an employee on board it just feels like I’m spinning my wheels
Yes, the recent labor pool has been terrible. But I think that is across the board in every industry right now. NNP is trying to scale things on a giant cooperate basis and I think they are also running into labor quality issues as well.
That has been my issue over the years, use to have 80+ accounts, 3 people working for me. Over the years, have dropped down 1 one guy working for me, does about 70% of the pools, I pay him very well. Np more than 30 regular clients. I do the other 30% and all of the maintenance and repair work, service calls
My question is, were or how to learn the pool equipment repairs??? Because In this industry there is no schooling like there is in other common trades.
Would you recommend knocking on doors to get new clients? I am currently stuck at 35 clients and as the summer ends i’m on the fence on whether to spend my ad dollars now or in March/April of next year when the pool season is getting started.
After I clean my filter and add DE a lot of cloudy water returns back into the spa/pool. Am I doing something wrong? Are my filters ripped? My spa is always cloudy now. Thank you
