After a high school teacher recommended Eric Cassidy for a sales manager job at a friend’s pool store, Cassidy left his post at a potato chip company and never looked back. “I love growth, I love challenges,” he says, “and love seeing those around me grow and succeed with the ideas I have had on…
Brittany Puryear strives to bring in the most five-star Google/Yelp reviews possible to her company. Her nominator says, “Brittany is one who gets it. She had taken customer service back in time to the days when it was all providing a next-level customer experience. She may just have rediscovered the tool that enables an industry…
When Kelly Michael Skelton started in the industry, he didn’t know if he’d be staying for long, but he says opportunities have continually opened up and he’s enjoyed it. Skelton started at South Shore Gunite Pools as an admin assistant and eventually started the company’s marketing department. He says hard work and being in the…
Sitting in a cubicle 40 hours a week at an engineering firm quickly lost its appeal for Rance Schindler. He saw his brother, Reid Schindler, find success in the pool industry and work on exciting projects, and thought he could potentially do the same. In 2018, he found a sales/design job at an established Dallas/Fort…
Jamie Braddy and her husband started Parrot Bay because there were no companies building fiberglass pools in their area. “It was a long road to convince people that fiberglass may be better for them over a vinyl pool,” Braddy says. They started the company out of their garage and have grown to two retail stores…
Mark Jones told himself that he was young and smart enough to figure out how to maintain his own backyard swimming pool. It took him a full summer, he says, to understand the basics: He made a lot of mistakes and asked a lot of questions at the local pool store. In 2017, Jones’ neighbor…
With zero experience in the pool industry, Justin Pinson bought a 39-pool route in 2014 and began spending all his extra time learning how pools worked and how to fix them. He joined the local IPSSA chapter “and had some great guys who helped me when I was new to the industry,” he says. He…
Steve Crowley began his career in the pool industry on his 16th birthday, as a stock associate at a local Namco Pool and Patio store. He worked there part-time until he graduated high school, moving to a full-time position through college. He held positions as a sales rep, key-holder and assistant manager. At 19, Crowley…
The pool industry first intrigued Gregory Balderaz in 2010, when he began working for a landscaping service company that also maintained pools. He ran a 50-pool service route there before moving on to a company that focused solely on pools. It was there that he learned the repair side of pool care, which he says…
Josh DeRoche became a certified systems engineer at 17 years old, while still in high school. In 2015, he purchased 20% of his father’s small pool service company, Pool-Aid, as an investment. Three years later, in January 2018, DeRoche stepped in as president of Pool-Aid. In just two years, DeRoche has taken Pool-Aid from a…
In 2007, Matt Lensch began cleaning the pool and performing simple maintenance at his apartment complex in Columbus, Georgia. Along his career path, Lensch was a lifeguard for a Boy Scouts of America summer camp and at a local YMCA, moving from lifeguard to head lifeguard, assistant aquatics director and landing on aquatics director. During…
In high school and college, Julie Kazdin worked retail at her family’s pool business, Kazdin Pools & Spas. After graduating from Bryan University with a bachelor’s in business administration, she took a stab at the corporate world, with the dream of climbing the ladder to become an executive of a Fortune 500 company. “Unfortunately, I…