To an outside observer, Justin Pinson’s resumé prior to 2014 might look a little random. As he describes it, he tried “all kinds of stuff—vending machines, lawn mowing, whatever I could” for years. But while his various ventures may have seemed arbitrary, they were anything but. In fact, Justin took on each of these jobs in pursuit of one lifelong goal: to own and run a successful business.
“If you’re working for another person,” he explains, “you’re putting a lot of blood, sweat, and tears in for someone else.” That idea never sat right with him. When you’re working for yourself, a 12-14-hour day doesn’t seem so bad. At the end of the day, all that hard work is for you.”
That mindset ultimately led Justin to the pool service industry. A friend of his in Dallas, Texas had recently bought his own pool route, and it sounded like exactly the kind of new venture Justin had been wanting to build. And so, with no prior experience in the pool service industry, Justin decided to jump into the deep end.
Learning the ropes (and discovering limitations)
Getting his own pool route was the easy part—Justin found one for sale in Round Rock, Texas on Craigslist. After meeting with a broker and making the purchase, he had his own business, along with 40 accounts he was now responsible for. Now, he just needed to learn how to run it.
As he describes it, the first days of Round Rock Pool Pros felt like “getting thrown into the fire.” The pool service professional who sold him his route provided some quick and dirty training over a couple of weeks, but beyond that, “It was a lot of YouTube, a lot of Googling.” Before long, he knew his way around the technical side of pool service. But if he was going to build a multi-million dollar company, he’d need to think big-picture.
Justin decided to be proactive and reach out to other pool service owners in the area. Rather than consider them competition, Justin saw an opportunity. Together, they could create a network of local experts who could both mentor and learn from one another. Looking back on this decision, Justin says this was “probably the biggest thing that helped me get to where I am today.” Rather than stumble through his first months purely through trial and error, he could learn from the best and accelerate his business.
While this move allowed him to mitigate many of the usual rookie mistakes, it also led to a rude awakening: Justin’s days with the admin system he’d inherited were numbered. The initial pool route he’d purchased had been managed entirely with pen and paper. Initially, this wasn’t a huge issue. “When it was just me, I would clean the pool, check the chemicals, then put a note on the customer’s front door.” But as his list of customers grew, it became clearer every day that the pen and paper system had to go.
For one, it was a logistical headache.
“[With pen and paper], you’d have a list of customers that you had to write in order [by site],” explains Justin. “When you got a new customer, you had to sift through all your papers to find out where they could go next week. Then you’d put the address into Google Maps to find them and make sure you were getting to them on the right day. With a couple hundred pools, that’s just not doable.”
More customers also meant hiring more help, and without a way to track his employees’ work, there was also no way to ensure accountability. “For all I knew, my guys could stay at home all day, and I wouldn’t know,” says Justin. Without GPS tracking or a digital trail of work completed, all Justin had as a record of work completed was the technician’s word. If he wanted to continue to grow his business rapidly and reliably, he needed swimming pool business software that could help him do it.
Solving expansion challenges in an instant with Skimmer
Justin wasted no time trying to find the right solution. Besides route and technician management, he also wanted something that could help with accounting, budgeting, and scheduling. “I was always searching ‘pool service’ in the App Store to see what was out there, and I did find a couple of options that seemed promising,” he says.
But none of the options stuck. Justin remembers one app in particular that looked great —until he tried it out. “It advertised features like inventory management that actually just didn’t work,” he says. “It was obvious that the company had bitten off more than they could chew.” When Justin finally came across Skimmer, he was both intrigued and a little skeptical. “Just looking at it, I knew I liked it. It looked great. But at the time, it also seemed expensive.” That skepticism didn’t last long, however.
“As soon as I bit the bullet and purchased Skimmer, I realized that it pays for itself.”
For one, the problem of not being able to track or optimize work was solved in an instant. “Just by looking at [the route dashboard on] my phone, I could see the day’s progress,” he says. He also used Skimmer’s Route Management and Route Optimizer features to assign routes to his technicians easily and efficiently. Route Optimizer, in particular, quickly became Justin’s favorite feature because of how easily it increased his technicians’ efficiency. “Everyone starts at the same spot and comes back to the same spot, so you can have your main location at the start, stop, and finish points; press one button, and you’re done,” he says.
Skimmer also directly influenced Round Rock Pool Pros’ reputation as a reliable and accountable company. The route features helped Justin’s team to show up consistently, and the service reports and text features let them communicate with customers like never before. Gone were the days of a note on the door—now, customers received a detailed report of work done, complete with a photo. And if Justin’s team couldn’t get to a site as expected, he could easily send out a message to keep customers informed.
Before long, Skimmer was helping Round Rock Pool Pros’ business soar. “Weekly service is the entry point for a lot of new business,” says Justin, and when several weekly service customers started asking about what else his team could do, Justin realized that “a $200 a month pool customer could turn into a $50,000 renovation really fast.” Before long, it seemed like it might be time to level up once again.
A detour leads to six months of headaches
Round Rock Pool Pros soon expanded into repairs, remodels, and new construction. From a revenue perspective, business was better than ever. “In our first year, we did $60K of revenue. Now we were doing that in a day,” says Justin. But this rapid expansion also introduced a new challenge. “Our techs were using multiple apps to complete their work,” he says. While he loved using Skimmer for the weekly service side of the business, “I really wanted to find something that could help us do everything.”
After searching for a while, Justin found another app that seemed like it might be able to do it all. “It had nothing to do with pool service, but it had some extra features I thought I could work with,” he says. And so, with the ever-present intent of growing his business the right way, Justin ended his Skimmer subscription and moved over to the new app, hoping it would help him do just that.
That hope didn’t last long. In fact, Justin soon realized the app was actually making things harder for his whole team. “We had to do a lot of extra work to make it work for pool service,” he says. “It was hard for everyone—office people, the technicians—to do the actual service on the hundreds of stops they needed to do each week.” After six months, Justin admitted that the app just wasn’t working out. It couldn’t support the backbone of the company—weekly service—and without that support, Round Rock Pool Pros was in danger of suffering.
But it wasn’t time to return to Skimmer just yet. Justin wanted to be sure he was making the right choice. He tried another pool service app for a few weeks, which brought about a moment of clarity: “I realized how easy it had been with Skimmer. With this new app, we were trying to manipulate it to work more like Skimmer, and it just wasn’t.”
Justin talked to his technicians, who all agreed that their jobs had been easiest with Skimmer. And while he had been an avid user of Skimmer’s weekly service features the first time around, Justin was the first to admit that he hadn’t been using the app’s other features. He suspected that if he went back to Skimmer and really tried to maximize its features for his business, he’d have an easier time managing his company’s growth. And so he made a decision: “We’re going back to Skimmer, and this time, we’re going all in.”
Going all in on Skimmer
While Justin was “pretty hands-off” during his company’s first stint with Skimmer, today, one of his main priorities is to maximize the solution for his team. And he’s getting more out of the app than ever.
For example, Justin actively tried each feature outside the weekly service part of the app and found that they helped his business immensely. “We’re using shopping lists now, which is the biggest feature we weren’t using at all before,” says Justin. Not only does it keep everyone accountable and informed regarding inventory, but it also gives Justin a clear picture of exactly what’s been used, which makes invoicing a breeze.
And while Justin had initially been excited about the app’s invoicing, quoting, and billing features, he didn’t get around to trying them until coming back to Skimmer a second time. Now that he’s using them, he loves the ease of each feature and the way they interact with others on the app.
Now that Justin knows the specific pain of being without Skimmer, he’s not willing to go through another stretch without it. “If we lost it again, there would be a lot of scrambling and teaching and training,” he says. “After spending some time in that space and going through countless hours of trying to manipulate this other program into doing what Skimmer does… it would not be good.”
Ultimately, doubling down on Skimmer has given Justin a renewed sense of purpose on how he’ll keep growing his business. Round Rock Pool Pros’ current roster of 250 recurring weekly customers would have been unfathomable back in the pen-and-paper days.
“We wouldn't have been able to get here without Skimmer helping with our day-to-day stuff. It just wouldn’t be possible.”
It’s more than possible now, and in fact, Justin wants to double that number in the near future. With Skimmer, he knows he will.
