37 Years Later: Advice I'd Give My Younger Pool Guy Self
If you could hop in a time machine and give your younger self one page of business advice, what would you say and what would you beg yourself to stop doing? I take that question seriously and go back to 1988 when I started pool service at 16. What comes out is a set of lessons that every pool technician, pool service pro, and pool route owner can use to build a calmer and more profitable business.
First, I talk about a mindset shift that sounds risky but is actually freeing: most customers don’t care about their pool the way we care about their pool. They may not notice early plaster changes, small cosmetic issues, or the little things that can occupy our thoughts all week. That doesn’t mean we get lazy. It means we stop obsessing, stop carrying unnecessary stress, and focus our attention on the work that actually protects water quality, prevents algae, and keeps equipment running.
Then I get practical about what not to do on a weekly pool maintenance visit. Cutting corners like skipping brushing, doing a half-vacuum, or assuming an automatic cleaner will finish the job often boomerangs into a worse pool next week and a customer who’s rightfully annoyed. I also share why your service truck is not just transportation but a key part of route efficiency, comfort, and reliability.
Finally, I dig into customer service in the age of online reviews. I share a frustrating hotel story that reframed how I deal with complaints, pricing pushback, and tense conversations. The point is simple: winning the argument can mean losing the account. If you want your pool service business to last, build thick skin, stay professional, and make it easy for customers to feel taken care of. If this helps you, subscribe, share the episode with another pool pro, and leave a quick review so more techs can find it.
I go back to 1988 and share what I’d tell my 16-year-old self about running a pool route without driving myself crazy. The big theme is balancing pride in your work with practical habits that protect your time, your reputation, and your customer relationships.
• realizing most customers do not notice pool details like you do
• avoiding obsessive thinking while still keeping high standards
• cleaning with diligence instead of shortcuts that create next-week problems
• using modern spot-cleaning tools to keep pools polished
• treating your service truck as a reliability investment
• handling complaints without arguing to protect reviews and retention
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1 SPEAKER_00: Hey, welcome to the Fool Gang Podcast Show.
In this episode, I'm gonna go back in time and I'm gonna give
myself advice.
When I started out in the business, I was 16 years old
back in 1988.
And things these are things that I would tell my younger self if
I can go back and tell myself some advice, and maybe I would
have listened, maybe I wouldn't have listened.
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I get that everyone has a different personality and
there's different levels of conscientiousness.
This is the care you put into what you do in your business.
And the first thing I would tell myself if I were able to go back
and just speak into my younger self, I would say that the
customers don't really care as much about their pool as you
think they do or how much you care about their pool.
And I think this is an important aspect of pool care that you
realize.
Now, I'm not giving you the green light to be lazy or to do
poor service or to cut corners.
This is not what I'm saying here at all.
And I would not tell my younger self to do this either.
But I would say that I thought too much and I I spent too much
time thinking about problems at a pool.
You know, there was pools with certain stains in it, pools that
had issues, and I would not I wouldn't say I was obsessed
about it, but it would occupy a lot of my thought.
I'd be like, oh man, this I I gotta get this working for the
customer, or this looks terrible, and the customer's
gonna be upset, you know, or you know, there was algae in the
pool, and you know, I should have treated it, I should have
taken care of it better.
All these things were kind of going through my head, and I was
thinking a lot about this when I was, you know, younger, and
everything kind of stuck with me.
And I realize now that I'm older, and it's not because I'm
cynical, it's not because I'm burned out, none of that is a
factor.
It's just the reality that the pool in most cases, most
customers they don't really like their pool.
They don't even they would not probably build it again if they
had the choice.
They bought a house at a pool sometimes and they wish they
bought a house without a pool.
The kids grow up, don't use the pool anymore.
All these are factors that I realize that are in play out
there.
And yes, you do have the the customers that do care that look
at the pool with a fine-tuned tooth comb.
There are those out there that do that.
But the majority of customers, they don't even notice things.
Like there was one pool in particular, I was really
obsessed about the modeling that started developing, and it was a
gray plaster pool.
I started getting these weird modeling stains in it, and now
I'm older and I know that nothing I can do to prevent
that.
So I was trying stain removers.
I was like concerned they're gonna come out one day and say,
Hey, what do you do to my pool?
But I had this pool for years, and the customer never even
mentioned it, they even noticed the modeling.
I was the one that was like noticing it and looking at it.
Now there are customers and you know that will turn on their
pool light at night and look at the plaster and be like, hey,
that doesn't look great.
I'm gonna have to call the builder or talk to the pool guy
about it.
I don't really like how this looks with the reflection, or
it's a cloudy day and they see like the discoloration of the
plaster.
Yes, that does happen.
There are customers that will get on your case about things,
but I found through the years that the majority of people
don't even notice things.
There was a member of my group that hired someone to replaster
a pool, and I guess this is something that they do in other
states.
I haven't seen it done here.
Really, I haven't seen it done here in my area, where they'll
they won't even take the old layer of plaster off, they'll
just plaster over the layer of plaster.
I'd never seen it happen, but they did this to this pool, and
he noticed that it kind of left kind of a gap from the tile
line.
You know, it was like kind of and he hired them and he made a
mistake of like actually doing all of the kind of contractor
work.
He hired the company, he supervised it.
The customer was not using the house, they were like it was
like a vacation home, they weren't there that often.
So, you know, the company that he hired didn't, you know,
jackhammer the whole plaster out.
They use what's called the bond coding method, where they
actually are supposed to cut back the pool light and the tile
line, and then they put the layer over the other, but they
did a poor job of this, and you can see that there was like two
layers of plaster.
So the customer finally came to the pool and he was there, and
he was kind of fidgeting and really nervous about it.
And the customer looked at it and said, Hey, that looks great.
It looks much better than before it looked, and that's it.
He walked away, and he never heard anything from the customer
again, and he was obsessing over really nothing.
So the takeaway here is that don't be lazy, of course, don't
cut corners, don't skip the pool.
But maybe the customer is not sitting there all day long
thinking about their pool like you are, and just let things go.
I mean, if there's a problem with the pool and you feel like
you are obsessing over something, don't do that because
chances are the customer is not even thinking about their pool.
Half the year they're not even looking at their pool, and half
the time when the kids are growing up and out of the pool,
they don't even know they have a pool back there.
It's one of those things where you are the one who's obsessing,
you are the one who's caring more about it than they are, and
maybe don't do that to yourself.
On the same line of thinking, I would tell myself not to be lazy
out there.
Now, when I first started out, yes, I was learning the rope
tonight, you know, I was not I was a hard worker, that's for
sure.
But I was also young and I cut corners a lot.
I would get to a pool and instead of vacuuming the pool
because I was kind of lazy, I guess.
You know, that's kind of the word I put it, I would just kind
of put it in the main drain and brush it to the main drain.
That's not really effective.
I don't recommend doing that.
Or if there was algae in the pool, I wouldn't go back to my
truck necessarily to get some liquid chlorine and sodium
bromide to treat it.
I would just brush it, you know, maybe add a bag of calhypo and
call it a day.
So those kind of lazy kind of things that I did really came
back to hurt me because when I went back to that pool the
following week, it definitely was full algae bloom, or the
pool just didn't look clean, and sometimes I remember a few times
where I would vacuum the pool and I was in a rush and I
wouldn't brush the sides down, and so there was like little
streaks of dirt sometimes left behind.
You've probably done this before, especially when you the
pool has a lot of dirt.
And I remember customers calling and saying, Hey, did you vacuum
the pool?
Because there's still streaks of dirt everywhere.
This was before I had automatic cleaners in every pool, by the
way.
They were popular back then, believe it or not.
They were, you know, the navigator and the creepy
crawley, but they weren't in every pool, and so you were
doing a lot of manually vacuuming.
Probably I would say 20% of the pools had automatic cleaners in
the 80s and 90s.
They became more it became more prevalent later, and there
wasn't a huge amount of choices out there.
There was just the Hayward Navigator, there was the creepy
crawley, Zodiac.
I think they had the G2 out and the G3.
So there was like a small amount of cleaners that you can pick
from.
They were effective, yes, but they weren't as plentiful.
So I was doing a lot of manual vacuuming.
So that showed when I didn't brush the pool after I vacuumed.
So little things like that, you know, if I were to tell myself
now, you know, just really be diligent about cleaning the
pool.
I think brushing the pool is really critical, you know,
regardless if you're gonna vacuum it, making sure the pool
looks great.
You know, there's been there were times when I had automatic
cleaner and I just kind of skimmed a few leaves out the
bottom, and I figured, oh, it's gonna just get the rest of it.
But then, of course, invariably the cleaner would get stuck on
something and then the pool would look terrible, and the
customer was like, hey, need to show up this week because the
pool looks really bad.
This happens a lot.
And so, you know, you you think you're gonna have the automatic
cleaner take care of it, it doesn't.
So you want to leave the pool polished every time.
And the great thing about this era is that there are so many
different tools you can use to spot clean a pool.
You can use the bottom feeder, you can use the coquito
cleaners, you can use the water tech cleaners to kind of just
vacuum out certain areas of the pool.
And there's no need to drop a full manual vacuum in there and
clean the pool.
So that's the great thing about being a modern pool pro is that
you have a lot of tools to like get those spots in the pool.
But I would just tell myself to not cut corners and not be lazy
because it's gonna come back to hurt you later.
And I learned that lesson fairly quickly anyway.
But this is something that I would tell employees, of course,
if I had employees, I would make sure that they knew that cutting
corners is gonna come back to hurt them.
I remember I took over this account one time, and there's a
still was a sign-in sheet, and I took over this pool because it
didn't look that great.
And so I looked at I opened the timer and I saw the sign-in
sheet, and and the person signed in for the whole month.
Like it wasn't even it was like the beginning of the month, and
the whole month was signed in, and he had the the chemical
readings and the dates and times in there, and I kind of laughed
because that's kind of a good method if you are kind of a
slacker.
Just fill out the sign-in sheet for that whole month, and
whether you show up or not, you signed in.
I won't spend too much time on this one, but I think it's kind
of important.
I would tell myself, of course, that your truck does matter.
I started off in a Dodge Rampage, cool truck, stick
shift, a real hassle with hills and driveways, and then I
thought I would upgrade to a Toyota Tacoma, again, another
manual transmission truck, uh, big problems on certain aspects
of that.
There was no power steering, and you know, it was kind of a small
bed, but it ran well.
Toyotas are really good, and then I moved to a Nissan
Frontier, and I also got a manual transmission because I
kind of liked it, even though it's a bit of a hassle in
traffic, a bit of a hassle on steep hills, but I like it
because you know it had good acceleration and it had really
good horsepower.
It was a 2005 Nissan Frontier with 270 horsepower, so it had
power, you could load that truck up, no problems, had a big V6
engine, but it constantly broke down on me.
I had so many problems with engine codes and timing chains
and you know starters, batteries, everything was a
problem with this truck.
They had such an undersized battery in this thing that they
would wear out very rapidly.
18 months, I think I got out of the batteries.
So there were drawbacks to this truck.
Now I have a Honda Ridgeline, great truck.
So I would tell myself, just go for the better truck right away
and stop struggling through the years with a bad vehicle.
So the truck does matter, full size, you know, compact,
whatever you want to get.
Really research your truck to make sure that it's reliable.
That's the key.
Number one thing is reliability of the truck.
Comfort, yes, it's you know, got to be comfortable.
The ridge line is really comfortable, but I really think
that focusing on a good truck and not having to switch later
is important.
So if you're thinking about vehicles or upgrading, go for a
really good truck because I think it's gonna really pay off,
you know, for a lot of factors, reliability, comfort, makes
it'll make the day much more enjoyable when you're driving a
really good service truck versus a beater.
This last one I think is really important for business now, more
than it was ever before, and that is that the customer is
always right, and you don't want to argue with customers.
Now they'll leave a bad review, or they're you know, they'll
they'll leave a bad review on like every site for you.
They'll leave one on Google, they'll leave one on Yelp,
they'll leave one on, I don't know, TripAdvisor, whatever.
They'll find sites to leave reviews on that will damage your
business because people are touchy, they're probably more
touchy than they were in the past, maybe because of I don't
know, social media or we're more divisive than we ever have been
before.
But regardless, people will report bad customer service and
it will damage your business.
There's no doubt about that.
Bad reviews do hurt you, even if you go on there and respond to
it, it does hurt your overall algorithm.
So the customer is always right when even you kind of think in
your head they're not right, and you know, just put yourselves in
their shoes.
I had an incident where I got a hotel room, it was in Chicago, I
was going to a conference, and I booked it like months in
advance.
It was like a I you know, I took my son, so we always get like a
suite.
And I got to the hotel and they gave me like a just a double
bedroom, so I was like, I was it was a courtyard by Marriott, by
the way.
And I I'm a Marriott member, and it did me no good because they
had sold out all the rooms and double booked.
Apparently, I I realize now that if you book a room, maybe verify
that it's there because they'll overbook hotels all the time
when there's a conference or something.
Anyway, I got the room.
I I paid for the room with Expedia, a third-party site, and
I tried getting and I just went to a different hotel because I
wanted a different room.
It was$178.
Never I could never get the hotel to answer their phone, I
could never get the manager to give me my money back.
I called Expedia, I spent hours on the phone with them, they
could never give me one my$178 back.
So basically, till this day, that was like a year ago, I have
never gotten my money back from either the courtyard Marriott or
Expedia because they have really, really bad customer
service, and there's just no way to get a hold of anyone with any
authority.
So just a word that if you do have to cancel your hotel room
on the spot while you're there, chances are you're never gonna
get a refund because no one can actually do this.
It's kind of weird.
You do they feel like it's a no-show basically, or once you
cancel, that's it, you pass the cancellation time.
I'm saying this because I won't stay at another courtyard
marriott, you know, because of the bad experience.
It's just something I won't do ever again.
And it's because they just didn't handle it correctly.
I mean, how hard is it to refund someone's money when they're the
ones who gave my room away?
It's not that difficult in my mind.
And the same thing with pool servers.
If a customer is telling you that, you know, you got you gave
me this pump basket and I found it on Amazon for$9, you charged
me$20.
Is there a way that you can match that price?
And I usually tell them, you know, order the basket and I'll
put it in and I'll just return you the money.
Little things like that go a long way.
Or if the customer is complaining about the fact that
you're just not cleaning the pool well, there's algae in the
pool, whatever.
I mean, it could be even minor things.
Really just let the customer have their say and and they're
correct.
Because I've experienced bad customer service, and it's
really frustrating and irritating, not just this hotel
incident, but at other aspects I've experienced bad customer
service, and it does really leave a bad taste in your mouth,
and you don't want customers to have that about your business,
and just put yourself in their shoes.
You have a pool, you've spent $100,000 to have it built, and
the person taking care of it, in your opinion, is not doing a
good job, and how would you approach it?
You'd probably be upset, you'd probably be like, I spent all
this money on this pool, and this pool doesn't look the way I
want it to look, and they would you would get upset probably or
a little bit irritated, like they're getting with you.
And I think reversing things really helps you put it in
perspective, and you just don't want to argue with the
customers.
I've unfortunately done this before where I want to make my
point, and if you win the argument, great,
congratulations, but you've probably lost the battle because
they're gonna leave a bad review or cancel service.
So winning the argument is not really winning the argument
nowadays.
Just fall on the sword, let the customer have their way.
Even if it's something that is you know that they're completely
wrong and off base on, it's just better to let it go.
And so, yes, I've argued with the customer before.
I I remember I think it was there was a windy day or
something, and the pool didn't look that great.
And so I cleaned it the best I could.
When I got back there the next week, they were upset, like you
know, they left the pool really dirty last week.
I didn't appreciate it when I went out there after he left, it
just didn't look good.
And I tried to explain to them, you know, the wind cleanup takes
a couple weeks sometimes, and I did the best I could with the
time I was there, I was there extra time, and he just wouldn't
take it, and so I lost my temper and I just left.
And this was in the era where there was no Google reviews or
Yelp reviews, so I was lucky, but I lost the account, and it
was regrettable because I did the pool across the street, and
so it was like they were like right next to each other, and I
regret it now that I lost my temper.
And if you do that and you lose your temper, it's human, it's
not a it's not something that you should beat yourself up
about.
But I think if you learned this lesson that you know you're
trying to provide the best customer service, best pool
service, and just let the customer win, you know, if any
situation, they're right, you're wrong, and you know, it's just
the way it is in business.
Any business that's successful will have good customer service.
If you've been an in-out burger, Chick-fil-A, you know that
they'll bend over, they really help you to have a good
experience there.
And it's just a burger, I mean, or a chicken sandwich.
So why can't you replicate that in your business where you're
taking care of pools that cost hundreds of thousands of
dollars, and the customer wants a good service, and you even may
be providing good service, and they may not think you're
providing good service.
So you see how this can be like a rabbit hole and go endlessly
until you blow a gasket.
So just let things go and kind of have thick skin out there.
I think that's the key.
Have really thick skin and don't let these things bother you.
You can vent in groups and whatever, and like that customer
deserves, but just don't vent to them and let the customer win
the battles.
Looking for other podcasts, you can find those by going to my
website, swimmingcrawl learning.com, clicking on the
podcast icon.
There'll be 1900 podcasts for you there to listen to.
And if you're interested in the coaching program that I offer
can learn more at poolcoaching.com.
Thanks for listening to this podcast.
Have a rest of your week and God bless.