When Dustin Maherg’s friend Ryan Pope was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, Pope was no longer able to operate his pool service company, Integrity Pool Solutions, located in Alabama. While Pope was undergoing chemotherapy, Maherg and another friend stepped up to do the work for him. Fortunately, Pope recovered and returned to his business, and Maherg…
When Kelli Clancy started her pool service company, Legacy Pool & Spa, she knew education was going to be important. She’d grown up in the pool industry, helping with her parents’ store, route and repairs, and worked at Leslie’s for a season during college. She joined her local IPSSA chapter right away to learn as…
Michael Gesmond was 8 years old when he sat in his father’s lap inside an excavator as his father dug a new swimming pool. Gesmond spent years helping at his father’s construction company: running for parts, holding a string line, connecting pipes. “I was soaking up all the information I could,” he says. “The most…
After serving in the United States Navy from 2008 to 2012, Jay Brakefield wasn’t sure what his next steps were. He moved to Denton, Texas, to be near family and started working for a property management company. Brakefield overheard his boss speaking to someone about a large pool company that had been out to his…
Brian Schoen started in the Haviland labeling room at 16 years old. It was a summer job that turned into several summers in that role, followed by transitions to maintenance and liquids. In college, Schoen worked at Haviland on school breaks, graduating with a teaching degree in 2010. That December, he was promoted to inventory…
In 2006, Michael J. Baker was a jack-of-all-trades: He was a bartender, selling gym memberships and cleaning pools. His ambition was to be a business owner, so while he worked his other jobs, he started building a pool service company. By 2009, Baker had 50 service accounts and quit his other jobs. In 2011, he…
When Vic Garcia wanted to build a pool in his backyard, he started calling different industry companies. But the operational issues he encountered — high-pressure sales, flakiness, lack of follow up and low design creativity — made him realize change was needed. As an engineer for the Department of Defense, Garcia manages fleet readiness of…
In 1982, the year Brooke Rossi was born, her parents Mike and Michelle DesRochers started DesRochers Pools. She spent her adolescent and teen years heavily involved with the business and has since taken over as second-generation owner, alongside her brother Brian DesRochers. After graduating from Illinois State University in 2005 with a degree in kinesiology,…
“The pool industry is surprisingly lucrative and complex,” says Brian Fernandes, business development manager at Poolwerx. Fernandes oversees multiple Poolwerx franchise partners, helping to enforce best practices and coach business growth via technical excellence, customer service, local area marketing, profit-and-loss management and organizational strategy. Fernandes began working in the pool industry as a retail associate…
As president and founder of Patriot Pool and Spa, Hal Denbar has good things to say about Robert Johnson and Travis Spearman. “Having the two of them on the team for more than four years each has absolutely brought Patriot to where we are now,” Denbar says. “These two are the model of what swimming…
Joshua Buzzell cleaned swimming pools for about three years and started learning pool repairs before he found his calling. And while he still loves maintenance, Buzzell says his real passion is in the swimming pool design/build aspect. Regal Pools builds about 120 pools a year and averages between $100,000 and $150,000 for full backyard build-outs….
Rosenberger started in the pool industry as the general manager at Pennsylvania-based Fronheiser Pools, where he got to experience all the industry had to offer from retail, sales, marketing, service and hot tub deliveries. “While working at Fronheiser Pools, I helped bring in new products and introduce a CRM system with email automation campaigns, which…