If you’ve read a Skimmer customer story before, Kyle Peter’s name might look familiar. In 2023, we shared the story of how he started—and rapidly grew—his pool service company Nevergreen in its first five years of business.
As a brief recap, those five years were a whirlwind of rapid expansion. While Kyle came into pool service with no industry experience, he was also no stranger to building and selling successful businesses. Before spending years in a sales role in the outdoor industry, he owned and operated a business that raced in multi-sport racing events around the world, a role that required intense logistical planning and execution. “I love building systems—my expertise is in making systems and flows, and I spent most of my time doing that,” he says.
Starting Nevergreen with a knack for systems and a strength in sales, it didn’t take long for things to skyrocket. As Kyle describes it, that first year started with “Just doing my 12 pools alone on a Friday” and ended with a customer roster of 100 pools. Before the year was up, Kyle was able to quit his sales job to focus on Nevergreen full-time.
That upward trajectory continued uninterrupted for years. As Nevergreen became well known for exceptional service, Kyle parlayed that reputation into continued rapid growth. But in the fall of 2023—not long after Kyle spoke to us for his first customer story—things started to shift.
Hyper growth leads to growing pains
By 2023, Nevergreen had more customers than ever—around 650. Some of these came by way of a recent acquisition, which brought the business to a larger territory than ever before. While the company had always been growing, this was the first time that Kyle felt growing pains. “We were spread a little thin for the first time ever,” he says.
Kyle suspected that the organizational structure he’d been building since the beginning wouldn’t be able to continue to support this many customers. It was time to change things up. He promoted a manager to general manager, then three other employees at the technician/assistant level to middle managers. “This was a big cost,” says Kyle, “But it was necessary for us to keep growing the right way.”
By the following summer, however, a new problem emerged. From April to June, Nevergreen was gaining about 50 new customers a month—and losing 15-20. “Up until then, we had never really lost a customer due to poor service and were known for giving the best service in the world,” says Kyle. “This was the first year where we lost some customers, and it was scary.”
This churn wasn’t due to any technical failure on Nevergreen’s part. Kyle’s team was still providing excellent service, but cracks were showing up in communication. “Some balls were dropped that year, and the customers that got upset about it left,” he says.
Kyle had to pivot quickly and to do so, he’d need to return to his superpower: building systems.
Using Skimmer to balance growth with great service
While Kyle had leveled up Nevergreen’s management, it was obvious that the company’s organizational structure was still missing a key role. “We needed one person who was solely focused on the customers we already had,” says Kyle. He decided to change the role of one of the recently promoted middle managers to Customer Service Manager, which would help Nevergreen formally recommit to excellent customer care.
Next, Kyle turned to Nevergreen’s tech stack. He’d been using Skimmer since he hired his first employee in 2018, but it was time to dial things up. “I wanted to make sure our service techs were getting a solid checklist of what was expected of them,” he says. That meant ensuring there was an easily accessible list of which parts were needed, what any job entailed, and what details technicians would need to do the job well.
To provide the right level of detail for service jobs, Kyle developed an innovative way to use work orders in Skimmer. While there are work orders for each individual task technicians need to complete, Kyle also realized he could use Skimmer to build a library of SOPs for his team. “For example,” says Kyle, “We have a work order for gas heater installs that shows exactly what the gas pressure needs to be. We also have one for different cleaner installs. This really limits the chances for mistakes.” Now, Nevergreen has 150-200 types of work orders captured within pool business software Skimmer, which are color-coded and alphabetized for technicians to access.
With the necessary internal changes made, Kyle set his sights on Nevergreen’s communication systems. “Especially when you’re trying to provide a high level of service,” he says, “There are lots of touchpoints. I’m sure there are some companies where there’s not a lot of communication. We’re constantly telling customers what they might need to upgrade or fix. It’s a lot of communication.”
Now, for example, if a technician sees an issue on the job, they can create and finish a work order within Skimmer, which triggers an email that the customer can reply to directly to follow up. Additionally, Kyle asked all technicians to “alert the office” any time they submit a note, which allows the admins to organize and address all service notes via email, where all other service requests are already kept.
“We rely heavily on Skimmer to close that loop from tech to office to customer and back,” says Kyle. The result? “We turned that ship around pretty quickly.” By repairing the weak spots in Nevergreen’s customer service, he slowed churn enough that the company is now ready to embark on its next chapter.
Slowing down for long-term success
While Nevergreen’s reach as a company looks vastly different than it did even one year ago—today, there are 22 employees on payroll and 940 weekly service customers—Kyle insists that the near future will look more like a voluntary plateau than the meteoric rise of years past. “We’re going to reset this year and next,” he says. “Instead of seeing 30-40% growth, I want 15-20%.”
On a strategy level, this means focusing inward rather than outward. “We’re not going to do any acquisitions,” says Kyle. “We want to make sure the foundational processes and systems within our middle-level management are really dialed in so that we can give a great customer experience.” This will require continued careful analysis and a close eye on numbers. Luckily, that’s what Kyle lives and breathes.
A self-described “data freak,” Kyle currently relies on a KPI list of 339 data points to paint a monthly picture of Nevergreen’s health as a company. Much of that data comes directly from Skimmer and informs Kyle’s decisions on costs, sales tactics, and processes.
For example, Kyle keeps a close eye on Nevergreen’s chemical cost, which comes directly from Skimmer. “We noticed this year we were using 50% more liquid chlorine per pool than last year, by month. For us, that translates to $15,000. So we started using tablets, which has saved us a lot of money,” he says.
He’s also been monitoring Nevergreen’s close rate by tracking the service quotes his team sends out through Skimmer. “We can go through our finished work orders by month and tell how many service quotes we did, as well as how many we closed per salesperson,” says Kyle. Keeping a close eye on this metric—and others—has given Kyle a new level of insight into how Nevergreen is doing and what could be adjusted to help the business do even better.
A new era for Nevergreen
This year, after careful analysis, Kyle increased Nevergreen’s prices for new customers. Given the recent stress of customer churn, this felt like both a risky and necessary move. Luckily, it paid off in spades. “When we did that price increase, we went from a 35% close rate to 32%, but the revenue and profits were way up,” he says.
Kyle is certain that he wouldn’t be able to make changes like this without Skimmer. Now that he has the right data, he can make informed decisions, which is shaping an entirely new future for Nevergreen.
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And as for future challenges, Kyle is confident that his team is well-equipped to take them on, especially with Skimmer’s help. “The foundation of what we set up is solid,” he says. “As Skimmer brings out new features, we’ll adopt them rapidly and make our workflows better.”
If that means continuing to be in the weeds in terms of data and systems, Kyle couldn’t be happier. “I love making plans and forecasts to see where we’re headed,” he says, and he loves seeing that hard work pay off. One of his favorite Skimmer features of late has been the customer list view. “I like toggling over from all customers to customers with route assignments and seeing that number climb. I probably do that every day, just to see our growth.”
Overall, Kyle is happy that he’s made the right adjustments to navigate whatever comes next. “If we continue at this pace,” he says, “I really don’t see an end to our growth. I’m excited about having a large influence over this area and beyond as we grow and continue creating jobs in the areas we’re in.”
As for Kyle’s feelings about the recent growing pains he’s steered Nevergreen through, he’s relatively unconcerned. As he sees it, this era prompted a necessary reset for the next phase of the company’s life, and he sees nothing but smooth sailing ahead. Or, as he puts it, “From here on out, everything is gravy on the biscuit.”
