Ten Things Wrong with the Pool Industry

This episode is intentionally abrasive.

The pool industry wants the respect, credibility, and compensation of a skilled trade. But are we willing to establish, demand, demonstrate, and charge for skilled-trade standards?

Rudy asked pool professionals what they believe is wrong with the industry, and the responses came flooding in: inadequate training, nonexistent licensing, bargain-basement pricing, oversized egos, unqualified technicians, social-media experts, bad installations, fragmented education, private equity, manufacturers selling around the trade, and customers who expect luxury service at Dollar General prices.

The individual complaints may differ, but they point to the same contradiction: We demand professional respect while too often accepting mediocrity as normal.

This episode examines why certification should be the beginning of professional development, not a declaration that someone never needs to learn another damn thing. Rudy challenges companies that send barely trained technicians into the field, veterans who mistake repetition for expertise, businesses that confuse pool count with profitability, and professionals who perform additional work for free and then wonder why customers do not value them.

The pool industry has tremendous people, knowledge, innovation, and opportunity. What it lacks is consistent standards, clear career pathways, and enough professionals willing to say the three words most terrifying to an oversized industry ego:

“I was wrong.”

If the pool industry wants respect, it is time to earn the fucking thing.

In This Episode

• Why pool service should be treated as a legitimate skilled trade
• The difference between inexperience and unsupervised incompetence
• Why certification is only the beginning of professional development
• How fragmented education leaves new technicians without a clear career path
• Why decades of repetition do not necessarily equal decades of experience
• How confidence and social-media visibility get mistaken for competence
• Why pool service companies chronically undervalue their work
• The difference between revenue, profitability, growth, and craftsmanship
• Why staying small does not mean failing
• The true cost behind professional equipment installation and service
• How manufacturers, big-box retailers, franchises, and private equity affect the trade
• Why customer boundaries and clearly defined service agreements matter
• The responsibilities companies, employees, customers, and professionals owe one another
• What the pool industry must do if it genuinely wants professional respect

Memorable Line

“The pool industry does not have a shortage of opportunity. It has a shortage of consistent standards and an oversupply of confidence.”

#TalkingPoolsPodcast #PoolIndustry #PoolService #SwimmingPools #PoolProfessionals #PoolEducation #SkilledTrades #WaterChemistry #PoolBusiness #ProfessionalStandards

Transcript

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SPEAKER_03 0:53

Welcome to Friday. This is the Talking Pools Podcast. I'm Rudy Sankwitz. I hope your week has been going well. Labor Day. Holy shit, this summer went fast, didn't it? It seems like every year they go quicker and quicker and quicker. Listen, there is a lot that is right with the pool industry. We have great people. We've got good work. There's a lot of solid companies. There's a lot of great products. There's some fantastic education, and there is opportunity out the ass. And thousands of men and women who take tremendous pride in what they do. So naturally, I asked a group of folks what was wrong with it. Because apparently I woke up and thought, you know what my week needs? Several hundred emotionally loaded opinions from pool professionals with smartphones. Like walking into a family reunion, placing a loaded handgun on a dessert table, and asking, So, who thinks grandma was kind of a bitch? I told him I don't care if they name drop. If it's all good, say it's all good. Guess what? Almost nobody said all good. Apparently, the pool industry is about as all good as a Waffle House parking lot at two in the morning when somebody has already taken off a shoe.

SPEAKER_05 2:12

Pull up on Monday, tailgate down, test the kid out, PH back, C S P I H. Run around star metals, do a balance of the chlorine by car calcium, throw it in the stack, the management staff, the liquid pick, pick up. Turn it swamped in the pool, I getting green to clean.

SPEAKER_02 3:11

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SPEAKER_04 3:23

The 2026 Top Ten Mentors, Jeff Hamp, Chris Kavanaugh, Tim McDowell, Lacey Davis, Jerry Wallace, John Poma, Greg Beard, Terry Tammanin, Peter Widerman.

SPEAKER_03 3:40

I've been getting Service Industry News since I first stepped into this business, and every time it landed, I did the same thing. Flip straight to the horror file. The weird installs, the absurd finds, the stuff only pool pros ever see. Then I'd go back and read the articles. Service Industry News is a twice-monthly trade publication for pool and spa service text, 24 issues a year, emailed free to over 10,000 texts and available on their app. Every issue covers nationwide industry news and real technical content you actually will use.

SPEAKER_02 4:13

Get your free subscription at serviceindustry news.net. Again, that's serviceindustry news.net.

SPEAKER_03 4:20

Do it now. The responses were overwhelming. Licensing, education, ego, pricing, builders, manufacturers, big box stores, private equity, unqualified technicians, cheap customers, cheap companies, social media influencers, franchises, bad installations, free labor, old information, no standards, no respect. And Pentare. One person just said Pentare. No explanation. No supporting documentation. Just fired the name right into the room like a smoke grenade and crawled out under the comments. But when I read everything, the responses weren't random. They were symptoms of a much larger problem. The pool industry wants to be respected as a skilled trade, but too often we refuse to establish demand, demonstrate, or charge for skilled trade standards. We want that HVAC money, electrician respect, plumber licensing, engineer credibility, surgeon level trust, and the entry requirement in some markets is still a pickup truck, a poll, and the confidence of a man who has never read the instructions. That's the contradiction. Today, we're going to talk about it. Not because the pool industry is terrible. It's not. We're going to talk about it because this industry is too damn good to keep accepting mediocrity as normal. Several responses pointed to the lack of licensing or minimum competency requirements for residential pool service. And I understand the resistance to the regulation. Nobody wakes up excited because the government has developed another form. Government paperwork is the only known substance capable of making a colonoscopy seem efficient. But there is a legitimate question here. We are handling concentrated oxidizers, acids, electrical equipment, gas heaters, circulation systems, and trap and hazards, and water that families put their children into. Yet, in many places, the professional threshold is basically have you ever seen water? Yah. Can you operate a motor vehicle? Yah. Congratulations. Here are 70 pools. Someone watches a pool professional work, goes to Walmart, buys a pole, an OTO kit, chemicals diluted to the strength of LaCroix, and suddenly he's underbidding the company that has 20 years of training, insurance, calibrated test equipment, and employees. He has no business plan. No chemical understanding. No insurance. No clue what cyanuric acid does. But he made a logo in Canva featuring a cartoon dolphin wearing sunglasses, so now he is the chief aquatic officer of Splash Daddy Luxury Water Solutions. This is not an attack on new people. Every one of us was new once. Problem's not an experience. The problem is unsupervised inexperience disguised as professional competence. One respondent described large companies hiring people off the street, training them for a week or two, and then sending them out alone. That is not training. That's abandonment with a company shirt. The technician is not necessarily the villains. Somebody handed that person a route, a test kit, and a schedule designed by Satan's regional logistics manager. They are trying to learn water chemistry while Mrs. Henderson is asking why one wet footprint appeared near the gate, adding four stops, and a German shepherd named Cupcake is determining whether the company dental plan covers reconstructive surgery. Then, when something goes wrong, the industry points at the tech. Maybe we should point at the company that decided 14 minutes of orientation and a branded hat constitutes an apprenticeship. One of the most thoughtful responses came from someone who wished comprehensive pool service and repair education were available locally through community colleges. That comment makes sense because we do have excellent education. We have certification courses, manufacturer schools, trade shows, association programs, online instruction, podcasts, books, mentors, and hands-on training. But it is severely fragmented. The aspiring professional is handed a bucket full of puzzle pieces and told, Somewhere in there is a career. Good luck, asshole. There is no broadly recognized path that says, here's what an entry-level technician should know. Here is what a competent service professional should know. Here is what a repair technician should demonstrate. Here is what a builder, installer, or renovation specialist must understand. Here is supervised field experience. Here is continuing education. Here is accountability. Instead, we sometimes behave as though taking one class means the student has absorbed the instructor's entire career through osmosis. The certification is evidence of education. It is not a papal declaration of infallibility. I teach certification courses. I believe in them, I know their value. But passing a course does not instantly make someone qualified to perform every repair, redesign every equipment pad, rewire a control panel, and argue with an engineer on Facebook at three in the morning. Certification should be the beginning of professional development, not the graduation ceremony from ever needing to learn another fucking thing. And manufacturer education can be outstanding, but understand what it is. We spoke about that last week. A manufacturer class teaches you about equipment through that manufacturer's perspective. Strangely, the seminar rarely ends with the instructor saying, after examining the evidence, our competitor's product is clearly the better option. Please enjoy the complimentary donut. That doesn't make the manufacturer education dishonest. It makes it manufacture education. Use it. Learn from it. Then continue learning from independent instructors, field experience, technical literature, and people who are not trying to guide every problem toward the same item number in a catalog. Gregory Wilker wrote what may be the best thesis of this entire episode. He said, The greatest problem in the pool industry isn't that technicians don't know enough. It's that we've taught them to stop questioning what they think they know. That's it. Not ignorance. Willful ignorance. Ignorance can be fixed. Ignorance simply means you have not learned something yet. Willful ignorance is when the information is directly in front of you, supported by evidence, explained by qualified people, and you reject it because accepting it would require admitting that something you said in 1997 might have been wrong. The official mating call of the willfully ignorant pool guy is I've been doing it this way for 30 years. Congratulations. People smoked on airplanes for decades. Longevity does not convert stupidity into best practice. If you performed the same procedure incorrectly for 30 years, that is not 30 years of experience. That is one year of experience repeated 30 times with tremendous fucking confidence. Science changes because our ability to measure, observe, and understand improves. Equipment changes, products change, standards change, materials change, instructions change. Water does not read your resume and say, well, he's been there since 1989. I guess equilibrium no longer applies. The best professionals I know question themselves constantly. They can say, I don't know. They can say, I need to look that up. They can say, I used to believe that too, but better evidence changed my mind. They can say, I was wrong. Here's the correct information. That's not a sign of weakness. Those are signs that the person gives a shit about being accurate. Meanwhile, the least informed person in the Facebook group arrives with the confidence of Liam Neeson, except instead of a particular set of skills, he has a screenshot from a YouTube video and a cousin who once worked at Leslie's. He will fight to the death over chemistry he cannot spell. He has never performed a controlled comparison, never opened the technical literature, never investigated why his method supposedly works. But he has capital letters and seven exclamation points. So the scientific community had better brace itself. Several people named ego is the problem. They're right. A lot of times it seems like everybody thinks they're an expert. And this industry has some colossal egos for a group of people. We all have egos. I have one. You have one. You need some ego to start a business, make decisions, and stand behind your work. The problem begins when confidence becomes a substitute for competence. You are not always right. I am not always right. You do not always have the best design. Your plumbing is not automatically beautiful because you posted 17 photos of it from flattering angles. Sometimes that equipment pad looks less like hydraulic engineering and more like the blue man group had an orgy behind a Home Depot. Social media has changed the hierarchy. Visibility can look like authority. The person who posts the most becomes the expert. There are highly knowledgeable people producing excellent online content. There are also people whose primary qualification is that their ring light has never challenged them. I say that as a person with podcasts. I am standing in the blast radius too. Do not trust somebody merely because they have a microphone, a following Apollo shirt with a logo or the ability to say hydraulics while pointing at PVC. Research the speaker. Did they learn through field experience? Did they investigate the subject independently? Can they explain the mechanism? Can they tell you the limits of what they know? Do they revise their position when evidence changes? Or are they repeating their employer's approved talking points with the emotional warmth of an airport evacuation announcement? The answer does not have to be one or the other. Book knowledge matters, field knowledge, laboratory research, manufacturer knowledge matters. What matters most is honesty about where the information came from and what the person actually knows. Michael Rodart made a point that this industry desperately needs to hear. Swimming pools are giant, unnecessary luxury items. Pool service is a luxury service. That does not mean every pool owner is wealthy. It means the pool itself is not food, insulin, electricity, or shelter. Nobody has ever kicked in the door of a UN meeting and screamed, We have a humanitarian crisis. The Baja Shelf has calcium scale. Yet service and repair companies sometimes price the work as though every pool belongs to a struggling orphanage operated by a sweet elderly nun who has only $12 and a coupon. We drive a vehicle to a private residence four or five times a month. We carry insurance. We purchase equipment. We test and treat the water. We inspect circulation and safety conditions. We communicate with the customer. We absorb fuel, chemicals, payroll, training, software, credit card fees, workers' compensation breakdowns, and callbacks. Then somebody charges a monthly price that would barely cover for DoorDash deliveries and wonders why the business has no money. We include filter cleaning. We include specialty chemicals. We include minor repairs. We include green to cleans. We include therapy for the homeowner's divorce. We include a Saturday morning consultation because the Polaris made a different little wiggle. At this point, we're not pool professionals. We are an aquatic concierge service financed by our own declining credit score. Then we blame the customer for not respecting us. Who taught the customer what our service was worth? We did. Every time we performed work for free because we were afraid to send an invoice, we taught them. Every time we apologized for a legitimate price, we taught them. Every time we let somebody speak to a technician like hired help, we taught them. Every time we accepted a terrible account because at least it's revenue, we taught them. Revenue is not automatically good. You can lose money at tremendous volume. Casinos call that a customer loyalty program. Pool companies call it growth.

SPEAKER_00 17:28

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SPEAKER_06 17:58

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SPEAKER_07 18:33

That is amazing. I can actually go out and make money doing filter cleanings if you were like this. If they were Aqua Star filters out there, then I could be a filter cleaner girl.

SPEAKER_01 18:41

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SPEAKER_07 18:53

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SPEAKER_04 19:29

Blu-ray all day.

SPEAKER_03 19:32

The pool industry is obsessed with arbitrary numbers. How many pools do you service? How many trucks do you have? How many employees? How much revenue? How fast are you growing? You have 100 pools? The guy with 200 must be better. You have 300? Better get 400. You reached 400? Apparently 600 is where enlightenment begins. At 1,000 pools, the Dalai Lama personally appears at your equipment pad and gives you a skimmer basket made of pure consciousness. Pool count is not a measure of craftsmanship. Revenue is not profit. Growth is not quality. Being busy is not the same as being successful. Sometimes we grew 40%, means we found an even faster way to exhaust everyone while producing work we would not put our name on. The industry advice is always grow. Hire good people. Pay them well. Systemize. Scale. Terrific. How do I hire the right person? What questions do I ask? How do I train them? How do I measure workmanship? How do I know whether a route is profitable? How do I prevent my best technician from leaving and keeps treating him like a Roomba with a driver's license? That's where advice becomes foggier than a hot tub at a swingers convention. Maybe, maybe we should hear more from the person gluing the pipe, the technician cleaning the filters, the employee handling the customer who swears the pool was perfect until the pool service company arrived, despite the security footage showing three Labradors, a birthday party, and what appears to be a half a sheet of cake entering the water. The CEO has a useful perspective, but so does the person doing the work. And a company with 80 well-priced, tightly routed, beautifully maintained pools may be a stronger business than one with 500 pools, 12 exhausted technicians, non-existent margins, and an owner who has not slept since Obama's first term. Staying small is not failure. Craftsmanship is not lack of ambition. Profitability is not determined by how many logos you can fit into the staff photo. The response is also named manufacturers, wholesalers, big box stores, apps, franchises, private equity. This is where the working pool professional begins to feel like the last organism in the food chain. The manufacturer sells the product, the distributor makes its margin, the big box store sells equipment directly to the homeowner, private equity discovers a fragmented market and starts buying companies like a drunk monopoly player. Then the service professional supplies the labor, the truck, the insurance, the expertise, the chemicals, the callback, and the customer's anger when something fails. And everybody looks at the service company's markup like they just found cocaine in a kindergarten cubby. Why does it cost more than Home Depot? Because Home Depot is not driving to your house, removing the failed equipment, correcting the plumbing abortion installed in 2006, setting up the replacement, programming it, testing it, warranting the installation, and then returning next Tuesday because you changed your Wi Fi password to Pool Guy Sucks. The box. Is not the job. The product is not the service. And a warranty that reimburses a $12 part after three unpaid trips is not support. This is a scavenger hunt sponsored by accounting. Private equity is more complicated. Investment is not automatically evil. Capital can improve systems, it can provide resources, and it can create opportunities. But when the primary mission changes from maintaining pools and serving customers to manufacturing a financial event, something important can get lost. The spreadsheet does not smell chloramines. It does not see the leak. It does not know that Mrs. Alvarez has been a customer for 18 years. It sees route density, labor utilization, acquisition cost, and exit multiple. Those numbers matter, but when the numbers become the entire business, the craft becomes an inconvenience. One response summed it up perfectly. Customers not respecting the position and guys in the position not respecting the position. That's the mirror nobody wants to look into. Yes, some customers are unreasonable. Some think owning a pool is a constitutional right. Maintaining it should cost less than Netflix. They purchase an eighty thousand dollar backyard luxury and then react to a filter cleaning charge as though you repossessed grandma's oxygen tank. They call on Sunday because there is one leaf in the shallow end. They text at ten forty seven PM because the water looks wet in a different way. They accuse the technician of leaving muddy footprints on an outdoor driveway. An outdoor driveway. Apparently the pool professional was supposed to levitate from the truck, float over the garden, and service the pool dressed like a fucking tooth ferry. But boundaries are a part of professionalism. Clear scopes are part of professionalism. Written assumptions and executions are part of professionalism. Charging for additional work is part of professionalism. Firing abusive customers is part of professionalism. And delivering work worthy of the price is absolutely part of professionalism. We cannot demand premium rates for splash and dash. We cannot call ourselves a skilled trade and place trichlor tablets in a skimmer because walking twelve feet to the feeder was inconvenient. We cannot demand respect while leaving equipment pads that look like PVC was installed during an earthquake. We cannot condemn uneducated newcomers while refusing to mentor them. We cannot complain that young people do not see this as a stable career while offering them poor training, brutal schedules, weak pay, and a management philosophy developed by a plantation owner with QuickBooks. Respect travels in both directions. The company must respect the employee. The employee must respect the craft. The customer must respect the professional. And the professional must respect the customer enough to provide competent, honest work. So what's wrong with the pool industry? The short answer is us. Not all of us, not equally, and not because we're bad people. It's because we have allowed contradictions to become culture. We want skilled trade respect without universally demanding skilled trade competence. We want premium compensation while apologizing for our prices. We want better employees while rushing their training. We want better information while rewarding whoever speaks most confidently. We want craftsmanship while worshipping volume. We want customer loyalty while treating some customers like account numbers. We want manufacturers to support us while we continue to absorb their failures quietly. We want young people to enter the industry while presenting with them with a career path drawn in crayon on the back of a chlorine bucket. And we want respect. Everybody wants respect. But respect is not something you declare on a Canva graphic. You cannot add professional to the company name and make it legally binding. You earn respect through competence, through education, through honesty, through pricing that supports good work, through training, through accountability, through admitting when you are wrong, through refusing to tolerate practices that harm customers, employees, or the reputation of the trade. That means establishing minimum competency standards. It means building clearer educational pathways. It means training technicians before setting them loose. It means charging for the work we perform. It means measuring profit and quality, not just pool count. It means listening to the people in the field, holding manufacturers, distributors, and ourselves accountable. Questioning information even when that information came from somebody we respect. And every once in a while, it means looking another professional in the eye and saying three words most terrifying to a pool industry ego. I was wrong. And guess what? Maybe the pool industry is not ready for that just yet. Maybe when you say I was wrong, you will be dragged. But that's okay. Because you have to be strong to ensure the correct information is out there. The pool industry does not have a shortage of opportunity. It does not have a shortage of great people. It does not have a shortage of knowledge, innovation, or products. It has a shortage of consistent standards and an oversupply of confidence. This is a great industry. That is why we should stop making excuses for the parts of it that are not great. If we want homeowners to respect us, manufacturers to value us, regulators to recognize us, and young people to see this as a legitimate career, then we have to earn that. Not with slogans, not with follower counts, not with truck counts, not by screaming professional louder than the guy underbidding us, by doing professional work, by charging professional prices, by developing professional people, and by having professional standards. The pool industry wants respect.

SPEAKER_04 29:27

Good.

SPEAKER_03 29:28

Now let's earn the fucking thing. That's all I have for you this week. I'm Rudy Stankwitz. This is the Talking Pools Podcast. Until next time, be good, be safe.