The First-Year Mistakes Every Pool Service Owner Makes
Underbidding can feel like the fastest way to grow a pool route, until you realize you are working harder for less money and dreading stops you used to feel excited about. We walk through the business-side rookie mistakes that quietly wreck a pool service business, starting with the most common trap: quoting a pool, cleanup, or service call without accounting for the real variables that drive time, chemical cost, and effort.
We get specific about what makes pricing tricky when you are new: pool size differences, heavy bather load, hidden debris from trees, and the true cost of green pool cleanups that require extra filter cleanings and a lot more chemicals than you expected. You will hear practical language for fixing an underbid the right way, including how to be honest with the customer, explain the reason for a rate change, and be willing to walk away rather than stay stuck in a bad deal that damages your mindset and your service quality.
We also share a simple framework for pool repair and equipment installs using a baseline hourly rate, realistic time estimates that include parts runs, and the “headache factor” for tight equipment pads and unexpected plumbing. Then we zoom out to route efficiency, covering why outlying pools and problem accounts can drain your day, and when dropping them is actually the move that increases profit per hour and makes the work feel fun again. If this helped, subscribe, share it with a pool pro friend, and leave a review so more service techs can price with confidence.
We break down the most costly rookie mistakes pool service pros make when building a pool route, especially pricing errors that quietly crush profit. We share practical ways to bid smarter, correct underbids without panic, and design a route that feels lighter and pays better.
• Underbidding weekly service and getting trapped at a low rate
• Spotting workload drivers during a bid like pool size, trees, and heavy use
• Fixing a bad bid by owning the mistake and giving the customer options
• Avoiding losses on green pool cleanups by pricing for time, chemicals, and filter cleanings
• Setting a baseline hourly rate for installs and repairs
• Adding a headache factor for tight equipment pads and surprise plumbing
• Dropping outlying pools to reduce drive time and tighten the route
• Letting go of problem accounts once replacement income is in place
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1 SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Pool Bay Podcast Show.
In this episode, I'm going to talk to you about some rookie
mistakes you can make with your pool route.
Specifically on the business end, I'll cover some of these.
And I've done several on the chemistry and maintenance end.
And I think the business end is something that a lot of people
make mistakes on.
And if you can avoid these, you're way ahead of everyone
else.
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This first one I've made myself many times, and it's something
that really affects your business in a negative way for
sure.
And that's when you underbid a pool or a job or service call,
and I've done this, I've been guilty of it.
Sometimes it's really hard, and I'll admit it's hard to price
things when you're doing something if you don't have if
you don't know all the variables behind it.
And there's also some baseline pricing that you should develop
in your business, of course, so that you can avoid these
mistakes.
For example, a 14,000 gallon pool cannot be you cannot charge
the same for a 30,000 gallon pool.
It's just there's a lot more going on, it's a bigger body of
water, and you have to charge more for the pools based on
sizes in your area.
Thankfully, there aren't too many of those pools in my
service area.
But if you do get a pool that's big or difficult, you have to
charge accordingly accordingly for that pool.
So I've been guilty of taking on pools before where they have
heavy usage.
I'm not really aware of it because you don't know.
You know, there's some signs that pools heavily use, but you
may not see them when you're new to the business.
There's also some signs that the pool is going to have a lot of
leaf debris in it.
You may not notice that either when you're doing the bid.
And it's really hard to take a pool, service it, and then tell
the customer, oh, you know what, I underbid the pool by$50 and I
have to charge you more money.
That's not really good business, a good business practice to get
into.
And it doesn't go over too well with the customer.
Now, I did have one of my members in the group that was
really savvy about making adjustments into situations like
this, and he would tell the customers, and he had the
situation, particularly where he took a pool on, didn't realize
how much more time it would take the employee to do the pool
because there were so many trees that he wasn't really paying
attention to when he did the bid.
Honestly, he missed a lot of stuff, and the pool just took so
long to clean every week that he told the customer that he pretty
much put it this way.
I understand that if you know you if you don't want to
continue service, I completely understand, and it's my fault
entirely.
When I bid the pool, I didn't realize that it would take an
extra 25 minutes to clean it each week because of all the
other trees around it.
And I'll have to raise the rate by I think it was like$50 or$60.
And I understand totally if you don't want to go for it, and
it's my fault for bidding it too low, and it's okay, I understand
if you want to cancel service, but I can no longer continue
doing the pool at the price I quoted you.
And believe it or not, the customer actually took that
nicely and raised the service rate for that pool.
And of course, he was willing to walk away at that point, so he
had nothing to lose except maybe his little bit of his business
face for underbidding it.
Another one of my members bit a pool, I think it was like 25,000
gallons, had like a slide, and he saw all these pool toys
around there, and he bit it, I believe he bid it for like 160
or something, and it should have been more than that, of course.
And after he actually left the stop, he texted me and he's
like, I just left the place and I severely underbid the account.
I'm not exactly sure what I was thinking at the time, but now I
realize that this pool is gonna be killed in the summer and it's
bigger than I normally would service.
You know, I I don't I would quote for that size pool.
I wasn't thinking, what do I do?
And I basically told them, you know, just let the customer know
that you made a mistake in your bidding, and you understand if
they want to get another bid from someone else, but you can
do the pool for this amount and apologize to them and do that
because otherwise you're stuck doing the pool at a low rate,
you're gonna get frustrated, you're gonna be upset with
yourself, upset with the customer for not really a good
reason because you're the one who underbid the pool, and it's
just not a good situation for yourself mentally.
And really, it's you can walk away from the pool at that
point, lose face with the customer, or just let them know
you made a mistake in bidding.
But I was not really experienced enough back when I started to do
these things.
I'm telling you this now because I have more experience and I can
give this advice to people as well.
But when I first started, I was under bidding and I didn't
really know a strategy, or be able I was not able to talk to
anybody that gave me a strategy to fix the situation or to even
understand why I'm so frustrated doing this pool and I'm not
making good money on it, and I'm really upset going there.
To save yourself frustration, needless anguish, and of course,
you don't really care for that pool because you're not getting
paid for it or paid enough for it.
Go ahead and either let that pool go on your off your service
by letting the customer know that you no longer service the
pool, or you can ask for a raise because of the situation that
you pretty much underbid.
So you want to avoid underbidding as much as possible
because it is kind of a gray area and a sticky situation to
ask for more money.
This happens with green pool cleanups too.
I've been guilty of this too, where I look at a green pool, I
think it's gonna be easy to do, and I'm not really paying too
much attention to the details because I was new to the
business, and I really didn't know what a level three or four
or five pool looked like, that there was a difference in amount
of chemicals and time and filter cleanings.
And so I think I bid like a level five pool.
It was really a really bad pool where they had tadpoles and
mosquito larvae in there, and I bid it like at least three or
four hundred dollars under what I should have bid it, because it
was took two more filter cleanings and a lot more
chemicals, and I really lost money on that pool.
I didn't make any money at all, and maybe I was even upside down
on the chemicals and the time spent there and the filter
cleaning charges.
So that definitely does happen.
So to avoid that, you you can't, of course, get experience
automatically, you know, it's not something that you can do.
I mean, if if I was working in a in a business where I didn't
have a lot of insight or experience in, I really wouldn't
know how to bid the jobs.
I remember I was at my mechanic one time, and he was having to
do the timing chain on my Nissan, and he actually went
onto this website, and I'm sure you can go to chat GTP now, but
he had this website that all the auto repair stores paid for, and
it would actually give you an estimate, you put the vehicle
in, the job that you were gonna do, and it would shoot out an
estimated amount of time to do that job, and of course, that's
how he was able to bid that and realize that he's not gonna lose
money on labor, and he can get the part for whatever price and
sell to me for whatever markup, and all this information was
there, and he was showing me this program like this is how
long it's gonna take to do this timing chain.
This is why I'm gonna have to charge you, I think it was$1,800
or something like that, because it was like a 10-hour labor job.
Well, when you're starting on pool business, you don't really
know that screen pool is a level 5 pool and you're gonna have to
clean the filter three times and you know throw in$200 worth of
chemicals.
So I would say that the best thing you can do to avoid
underbidding is to bid higher than you think it's gonna be.
Now, this is pretty good business practice anyway, but if
you get to a green pool and it looks like you know you were
gonna bid 600, go ahead and bid 800.
Because then you have a little cushion built in there, and that
will cover any kind of miscellaneous things that you
may have missed.
Same thing when you're doing like a cleanup, you know, like
when you're doing a general cleanup for a customer, always
bid a little higher, and you have to factor in the hourly
wage into that factor.
So if you don't know what to bid, just kind of come up with
an hourly rate that's good for your area.
Let's just say that your hourly rate is$130 an hour.
So if you're gonna do a motor install and it takes you two
hours to do this because you have to calculate, you're gonna
pick up the pump, I mean the motor at the shop, bring it over
there, take off the old one.
I can do it probably myself in about 45 minutes when I'm at the
site carefully, you know, removing everything, putting
everything back, getting everything running.
About that much time would take, but just figure in an hour and a
half, two hours because there may be things you run into, and
plus you have to go pick up the part and bring it back there.
So that's two hours, or that's $260 would be your minimum
charge to do the motor install.
Then you have the markup on the motor itself, and you know, it's
one of the easiest things to get started doing it that way, just
get an hourly rate and use that rate as your install rate.
And of course, you can learn how to add flat charges in there
when a situation calls for it.
You know, maybe the there's pipes over the motor and pump,
and you have to actually cut some plumbing to get to it.
It's not unheard of in California, believe me, it's a
pretty tight equipment area.
So there was one pool I remember in particular where the builder
had built the pool and the pumps were facing outside from the
wall of the house.
So if you look at the back wall of the house, the pumps are like
facing you forward.
But then if you look at it carefully, the pumps and the
motor behind were right by the wall, like with a quarter of an
inch or half an inch of space.
So there's no way to take the bolts off, take the motor off,
get the diffuser out, the impeller, and take off that
motor.
The only way to do that would be to cut the pump off, remove the
plumbing, pull the pump forward, then take the motor off and
change it.
That's not a$260 job at that point.
That's like a$500 job because of all the extra time, effort,
re-plumbing to do that.
So you have to kind of be wise and understand that you have an
hourly rate, but there's also the headache factor you add into
that when you look at a job.
One of my members was starting out and he was gonna do a pump
and filter install on the same day.
And he told me, you know, he would give the customer a
discount, or he gave the customer a discount because he
was gonna do the pump and filter on the same day, and he figured
that he can give him a break.
I said, that was a mistake because when you're doing two
pieces of equipment, chances are something's gonna go wrong, and
you're gonna have a problem, and it's gonna cost you're gonna be
there for much longer than you think.
And that came to pass that he was out over there doing the
plumbing.
He was out of a certain fitting, I think it was he missed an
elbow or something, he couldn't have one, so he went to go get
it, came back.
Then he realized that he he didn't have another part, had to
go back to the store and get it.
By then the supply place had closed, now he's going to the
Home Depot to get parts.
It was a big mess.
And he said that he started the job like around nine in the
morning and finished it when it was dark out, and he charged him
a discount for doing both the pump and the filter together.
So he realized I learned my lesson.
You have to just calculate the time plus headache factor, and
realize that it's not simply just your hourly rate, it's also
other factors involved in that.
So get an hour hourly rate though, so you kind of have a
set rate to work off of as your baseline, and then add to that
depending on what you think the job's gonna entail.
You may not know this starting out what you're gonna run into.
So you may lose a little bit of money at the beginning, but you
learned the lesson, and that lesson will allow you not to
lose money again on the next job that you do.
So don't think that you're gonna go out there and be able to bid
everything perfectly.
You won't be able to, but you can certainly learn from
underbidding, and then next time when you go out there, you're
gonna know how much to bid for that job.
Same with pool service when you're bidding on pools.
You will know more or less your base rate that you work off of.
You let's say it's$160 a month, and then you go up and down on
that base rate depending on factors when you get to that
pool and you're doing the bid.
But again, it's really hard when you underbid service to raise
the price.
It's always better to overbid service and get the job.
If they don't give you the job and you don't really need the
job, but if you do need the job, then you can if they want to
chisel you down a little bit, I would say it's fine to a certain
point.
But you really want to bid accordingly so you don't lose
money because you're out there to make money, of course, and if
you consistently underbid, leave money on the table, you won't
survive in business long, and it's really cutting into your
profit, and it may not make the job worth doing if you're not
getting paid for it.
I'll touch on a couple other things that were mistakes I made
that I learned from this this next one.
Here is when you have an outlying pool, and I was driving
about 15 minutes out of my way, maybe a little bit longer to get
to this pool.
It was a really easy pool, nice pool, nice customer, and then
driving another 15 minutes back to the regular part of the
route.
Now, of course, it's unavoidable when you're starting out, you're
gonna have pools spread out everywhere, and it takes years
and years to tighten your pool route up.
I understand that.
But if your route is fairly tight, going 30 minutes out of
your way, one way and back, total of 30 minutes out of your
way to do one pool isn't completely logical.
And once you get a pool in your area that's tighter, I would
highly recommend dropping that outlying pool or maybe giving it
to a buddy, selling it to a buddy, or giving it to them, and
they could take that pool.
But going out of your way for one pool is really a strain on
your day, and it's eventually gonna wear on you, and you're
like, why am I driving all the way out here to this pool?
And once you get a customer again that's gonna replace the
money you may lose from the one you're gonna drop, or the
outlying pool, I should say, that you're planning on
dropping, go ahead and drop that pool, and you'll be you'll be
happy.
And there's no reason to hang on to it, it's just kind of one of
those rookie things where you're like, I can't lose this account,
and I don't want to, you know, drop this thing, but you're
better off dropping it, getting a pool closer, and then getting
another one closer, and you're gonna make more money and spend
less time driving.
So the sooner you learn that, the better off you're gonna be,
I think.
And the last one is a pool that's a problem, you want to
get it off your pool route as soon as possible.
You know, if the pool has a ton of leaf debris in there and
you're spending 45 minutes cleaning it, and you're only
charging the rate that you would charge for a pool that doesn't
look anything like that, or the pool, the customer is not the
friendliest person, and they're picky and they're always causing
trouble, and you're getting you just dread going there or
running into the customer, you time it so that you hope they're
at work, so you never see them.
Once you get another pool that you replace the loss of income
from that one, I would recommend dropping it immediately.
Because really, there's it's your business should be
something you enjoy doing.
You should enjoy the customers, enjoy the pools that you're
servicing.
And when you're in a situation where you don't like the account
and you're doing it, you're dreading it, at that point that
account needs to be eventually dropped.
And believe me, the freedom from letting go of a bad account is
really liberating.
You're gonna, you know, if it's a Thursday morning, the next
week you're gonna be so thankful that you don't have to go out to
that pool anymore, and you'll be relieved and you'll have a smile
on your face when you wake up in the morning.
It's that you know invigorating when you do something like that.
So I definitely recommend that you drop a problem pool as soon
as you can and pick up another nice pool to take its place, and
your life will be much better.
Those pools you have to drive really far to get to, unless you
have to, because all your route is spread out.
Once you drop that pool, you're also gonna feel a lot of relief
and you're gonna enjoy your day out there much more.
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Thanks for listening to this podcast.
Have a rest of your week.
God bless.