Hear from veteran pool professionals as they delve into the realms of leadership and accountability. While business leadership has been extensively discussed across various platforms, what does it specifically entail in the context of the pool industry?
Workforce development may well be the biggest challenge facing the pool industry today.
Since its modest 1947 beginnings in founder Al Whittell’s Southern California garage, Raypak has manufactured all manner of heating products, including high-efficiency residential and commercial swimming pool heaters. Now headquartered in Oxnard, California, the company has been a subsidiary of Rheem Manufacturing since 1985. Last December, Raypak introduced the AVIA pool heater, which the company…
Austin Smith is passionate about the water. The financier from Salt Lake City, Utah, spent his childhood swimming in pools and lakes, and later took up scuba diving. Now he is diving into a very different aspect of the water: the learn-to-swim industry. Smith has big plans to open 21 Big Blue Swim School locations…
Wildfires in December. Hurricanes in November. Freezes in Texas. Drought in California. Record-breaking heat in the Pacific Northwest. These are some of the severe weather events experienced in the past year in the United States. In one way or another, they all impact water, the lifeblood of the pool industry. While the future is hard…
With the industry-wide shortage of trichlor tablets, more pool professionals are left with little choice but to switch customers to alternative sanitizers, especially liquid chlorine and calcium hypochlorite. Since it involves volatile and corrosive chemicals, changing sanitizing methods comes with a host of concerns, from proper dosing and pH levels to safe application, transportation and…
For many pool service professionals, the question of whether to raise prices can be tricky. The biggest concern, of course, is losing customers, especially if the company operates in a competitive market. Unlike building a pool, where the rising cost of materials is more readily apparent, raising service prices may not be palatable for customers….
It’s pretty much a given these days that pool builders are running way behind schedule. The surge in demand for new and renovated pools during quarantining has been historic, and pool builders, subcontractors and manufacturers of materials and equipment are struggling to keep up. Clients will be waiting months, or even a year or more,…
“Liability, insurance and licensing. That’s why my price is my price.” Joe Wilmot repeated this statement many times during the 11 years he operated H2Joe Pool Service & Repair in Fountain Hills, Arizona, northeast of Phoenix. He said it when giving bids on service to board members of HOAs; to owners and managers of small…
The August fire at the BioLab plant in Westlake, Louisiana, did not cause the current chlorine shortage in the industry, but it certainly contributed to it. Since the beginning of the pandemic and subsequent shutdown, the pool industry has been grappling with shortages of all kinds, including building materials, supplies and labor. With many consumers…
In this time of great uncertainty, swimming pools are in high demand. The closure of many public pools, the disruption of vacation plans and people spending more time at home have meant pool builders are swamped with orders. Before the current health crisis, a good day of sales leads at Bi-State Pool & Spa in…
When Bob Moore started out in the pool business 42 years ago, paper maps were the way managers devised efficient service routes. Personal computers were still several years away, the internet and smartphones much further in the future. pagers and pay telephones were the most high-tech ways available to contacting technicians in the field about…