Welcome to the Full Nation Podcast where it's all full talk and we ain't talking about netting and jetting or splashing and dashing. We're talking about becoming a nation of pool pros. We talk about the latest products, trends and training in the pool industry. Now let's welcome your host with over a decade of industry insider experience and still the reigning champion of Marco Polo, Edgar Dejazuz and his co-host John J.J. Flawless, the fastest netter in the West and Zach the full-boy Nicholas. Today, we're talking to Adam Beach founder and CEO of Pool Brain along with Kevin Embrie, CRO of Pool Brain. We'll talk about the latest products, trends and training in the pool industry. We're talking about the latest products, trends and training in the pool industry. and I ended up here. - Yeah, so I wanna say it was 2006.
bought my first house and had a pool, didn't know how to take care of it. I really did that before. And I figured it wouldn't be too hard to just have a company come in, keep it clean. How hard can that be? Right. And long story short, as seven companies later, I realized there was a systemic problem like all these companies within weeks, a couple of months at the most would turn the pool green. And that would be that. And I just thought they weren't good to their jobs. I didn't realize how hard it was. So I at some point found a company that did a great job. And I went out and talked to him in the backyard. And I was just kind of like, yeah, thanks for doing a good job. All the other companies sucked. What's your secret? Ultimately, it was one man operation. So he didn't have to rely on other people to control the quality. He could just do it consistently and he took pride in it. And that got me talking once I found out who's the owner. I started talking to him in more depth than what is your numbers? Can you make money as a one man operation? Do you want to grow? And I had a little bit of money in the bank, not a ton looking to invest in something. And I ended up offering to buy his route. And I convinced the buddy to go in with me on this route is about, let's say, it's 60-ish pool, 70 pools maybe. And the deal was he was going to train us to be pool guys for three months and then walk away and then we were going to be millionaires and just conquer the industry. That's what I'm super small. So we all know how that ended up. And the training, not to say this guy was bad at his job, he obviously did a great company. That's why I bought it. But the education was so hard to get back. Then it's still hard in some ways now, but very near impossible to get back. Then there's so many rumors and myths and he said she said, "We did it this way for 20 years, so it's fine." And we didn't get taught about a lot of the things that we needed that were just basic. And I always remember this when he was teaching us how to do chemical readings. He's like chlorine this pH that. And I go, "What about all these others on the strip? What is that for?" And he goes, "Dissregard." [laughter] And so that set us up for failure all the money we had. And we lost almost all of those properties within the first 90 days. It was in the middle of summer we took it over. The peak season, trying to, yeah, it was just a set up for failure kind of situation. But we didn't give up. We just kept going. We tried to learn on our own through the internet. There's just nothing. So we learned as best we could like everyone did at the time. And we ended up at least figuring out how to do it on a basic level and growing the company to about 20 trucks over the next six years. Yeah. So what was your buddy that way? Is he still in business with you? Your buddy that bought their pools? No, he hates pools. [laughter] He lasted a couple of years and he's like, "This is for you, how did this is for you?" And I'm out. Yeah. No, that's awesome. Now obviously, and we know your journey, but along the way, you became very successful at what you were doing. Exactly, and I were talking about it. Obviously, you've gone through all the stages that we always talk about in pool nation, right? Like the foundational that doing it all, that scaling, that enterprise. As you grow your company, pool agency, it was the name of it. What were some of the successes within that company that you started to see once you lost the pools, you come back, you start to figure it out? What were some of the successes that you started to see? Do you mean the four pool brain came around? Yeah. Just when you were with pool agency. Okay. So some successes would definitely be just in the systems that were early that weren't pool brain, but they allowed us to get those efficiencies. We were really first to the table on software in general, among the first, obviously. The original platform we used, I want to say it was in 2008, it was called service CEO. And if the cloud wasn't really a thing, then it was just like a concept, then it was just starting. So you had to maintain a server room and really know what you were doing and have all the wires connected throughout the building to serve everything. And it worked very well for us compared to what we were doing. We started out with map quest and a big map on the wall with pushpins and the whole nine. So that was huge for us. And from there, we realized we had a problem that everyone has with quality control. And he said she said he didn't do this. Yes, I did. What do you do at that point? So we convinced a company, I think it was called motivity, could be around there based out of the UK. There was a third party integration company to develop an app for Windows phones, which was the only like real computer-based phone at the time and take pictures. And I remember they were like, why would you want a picture? And they tried to push back hard on that. But we convinced them to do it. And that alone was really huge for us and gave us a big edge over everyone who didn't have photo proof and any of that stuff. And then eventually service bridge came around, which was basically the cloud version of service CEO. It was like 2009, maybe 2010. And so we switched over to that. And it was a generic form of what you kind of see today is just an early version. That was huge. Also switching everybody to credit card payments. I did that in 2009 or 2010. It was basically the same time we did service bridge. I basically just fired anyone who wasn't willing to pay with a credit card or a CH automatic withdrawal. You know, some people at the time got upset because that was really early. Like you had to have an email. I was going to say so I was back doing pulls 2007, 2008 and nobody wanted to put a credit card anywhere. It was like the big fear of a no no back then. Exactly. And so we lost, I want to say maybe 15%, which was smaller than I expected. Ultimately, and of course there's some grumbling, but it was one of the best decisions I ever made. You just take that whole payroll or payment collection process off your plate. We didn't have the money back then to hire someone to do a full time. And that's what you'd need. And so it was just great. It was just auto everything and allowed us to focus on the field and the improvements and everything you can take off your plate just opens up whole universes for you on other things that you need to be working on that you might not even know about. Yeah. At that stage, kind of how many pulls did you have? 2009 was probably a few hundred. So did you ever buy more pulls in addition to the 60 initials? Or did you just organically grow them? Just grew it. We didn't buy any. So in getting to talk to you, it's like your mind is very much driven on problem solution. What's the problem? What's the solution? And a lot of that is in like processes and procedures. And I think a lot of the people that we talk to that are going through the four phases. It's like they're not quite thinking that way. Like what systems, what processes can I put in place? I'm curious to know as growing a company as large as you did, what were some of the challenges that you faced? And like how did that force you to come up with a process or a system solution to curb that challenge? I mean, where do you start on that? There are so many. I already talked about the collection issue. That was a big deal going to credit card that really reduced our accounts payable and just the overhead for it. But another really big deal is at the time, even before pullbrain, we developed a custom platform to do automated follow up on those invoices based on how pass do they were. And so it would send different email templates out to customers based on the pass due date. And then also send internal emails to us saying, now you need to call this customer here's the details. So we didn't have to think about it. We just did what we were told. And that took our accounts payable down by 80% alone. And we were able to reduce office staff to do that. And that was huge. Another one is just education, just trying to get the training and education into people's hands or even into my own hands was virtually impossible. And you just had to sift through a bunch of myths and old beliefs that aren't accurate and go to all these classes at trade shows and a lot of them were manufacturers. And sometimes they give great information and sometimes they're just sales pitches. And so you're wasting a lot of time and still trying to have to figure out who's telling the right information going forward. Definitely another challenge here is just trying to get the right information to education and training auto insurance. It was honestly a huge challenge for us because as you can expect when you have 20 plus trucks in the road and this not their truck, they get paid by the pool. So they're just driving fast and they don't really care. Constant accidents. And we were kicked off of insurance carriers towards the end before I sold the company. We were almost in a place where we were uninsurable and we were paying insane amounts. I ended up solving that towards the end and it was brief because it was right before the transition. But we had maybe like a year and a half with the AI cameras in the trucks and that kind of gamified it number one. And it just gave us all the data immediately if they're rolling through a stop sign or texting while driving or whatever you want to set up for alerts. And then you can incentivize and have the best score. And as long as I have score over this, they get X amount of bonus and it really genuinely just stopped the issues because you can see the drivers that are just going to be problems immediately and just be like, that's not worth it. And so that was great quality assurance. That's huge. Probably the biggest pain point in the industry is you have a company you've built it. You care about it. You pour your heart, soul, every dime you've made into it and you're trying to scale it. And then you give it to someone who doesn't have that same motivation or tie and they're completely unsupervised. They're 120 degree heat with a thousand different variable combinations with only so much knowledge or motivation potentially. And at some point, a tiny mistake will be made if nothing else. And that tiny mistake means a green pool. And a green pool means a lost customer means a bad review, which means more lost customers. It's this chain of reaction of terrible that starts and that's always fun to do with. That's the chief reason I developed pool brain is that problem right there. Yeah. I want to ask you. So it seems like you're very much kind of process oriented and there's a problem and you're going to go find a solution to it. And I think most people as they're going through the stages and growing the company and scaling and customer turnover and truck issues and stuff like that, I think a lot of people would just patch holes and just try to figure it out from there. When you were going through that, what was the thought process? What was your kind of engineering process to be like, okay, here's a problem. Here's how I'm going to solve it because a lot of people don't do that. A lot of people just patch and move on, patch and move on. Yeah. I guess I don't understand exactly where you want me to go with this, but I'm going to take a shot at it. And I saw the problem. My initial instinct was to incentivize people into doing better work or train them better. Maybe they just don't have the information. So let's train them for eight weeks. None of that solved it. we need to follow up on them and do tons of quality control checks random follow
and things that did not solve it. So I thought maybe we just don't have enough of that. So I heard enough supervisors that we were losing money as a company, 'cause I just wanted to see if that would even solve it. That didn't solve it. And I went through every possible wrong answer to then finally arrive at, well, I'm probably gonna have to solve this with software and it's gonna be very expensive. Is that something I wanna do or do I sell the company because I can't keep spinning my wheels for five years plus it's not my mindset to just sit in one place and not grow and be fine with it? - Yeah, absolutely. - You reached a turning point and a crossroads. Usually as a business owner, you figure out, okay, look, I have a problem. I need to find, I'm sure there's a solution out there where somebody else who already has this figured out for us. And what we do is sometimes we throw money at it and go, okay, great, do you have a program or do you have something that I can use that's gonna be able to take care of. The surely there's something out there to do that. At what point did you realize that the software that you needed or to utilize to help give you structure or to create the system that you wanted for your company didn't exist or at least not tailored to what you needed for your company. At what point and where was that turning point at where you just said, hey, look, most people would be like, oh, it doesn't exist. I'm just gonna deal with it. - I'm gonna, right, you just patch it. - You know, okay, I'm just gonna deal with this. And I guess everybody has to go with this problem, but obviously you're built a little bit different. Likewise, I feel I'm the same way too. If it's not available, then let's just create, let's figure out our own way and do what we need to do. And I gotta imagine that was the genesis or the birth of pull brain, right? Or at least the start of it. Talk about that. And when you realize what you needed or that need that you had, couldn't be fulfilled by something else out there in the industry. - Yeah, and what's crazy about that too is what is unexpected and what we see consistently when we talk to these large companies that are signing up with us, is they've all built their own software as well. Like everyone around the same time decided there's nothing out there, no one's gonna build it. We need to build it. And so this was not a problem unique to us. But to answer your question, I'd say probably 2013 is when some of the other pool-specific platforms came out. And I knew from the beginning, it didn't solve what we needed to do. We couldn't track our chemical costs. We couldn't automate anything chemically. Custom fields only go so far, especially if it's not attached to a body of water or a specific equipment set that you can classify at the system level. So I knew it didn't exist immediately when we started using the software and looking around. But what I always expected is that those companies would fix that problem or pool-specific platforms would spring up that then address these core industry problems. But what we consistently saw for all the platforms that were out there, a lot of them are still around, is they solved the problem of making it easier to set up because you don't have to set up the custom fields. You can do some body of water stuff, but it didn't actually address the core pain point of how do you control the quality of your product? How do you make sure you're profitable on chemicals? How do you build actually all these different specific things were not there? And I went to those platforms early for a couple of years at the trade show, specifically the International Pool Spot Expo we went to every year for four or five years. And every time I would go to those same software platforms and be like, please build this, please build this. And they all looked at me and either they were like, ah, I don't get it or we don't have a lot of requests for that. That sounds like a really big company problem. And I realized that I was going to have to do something or it was just not going to happen anytime soon anyway. - You obviously have that moment of aha, I got to build something. And that's a big difference from servicing a pool company to go, hey, I'm going to go into the software industry and I'm going to create something. So at what moment did you do that and have that realization, hey, in order for me to scale, there's all these pinpoints and all these problems that I got to have and I have to take this on my own to start building. And my other question is when you started that, was your thought process to eventually sell it or were you just focused on your company and building something that was going to help you solve your problem? - Well, I was definitely just focused on solving a problem for the company. I wasn't sure we had the capital to even build it when you needed to build. And even if we did, I wasn't sure if it would work as well as we thought it might. I was really experimental and we didn't nail it on the first try for the second or the third. We had to really dial it in over a couple of years at least with our company, seeing what worked better or best for ownership, the office, the field text without slowing them down, but also getting maximum benefit and proof of service to the customer and consistency and all that stuff. So yeah, definitely did not intend to be here. When we first started it, definitely didn't intend to sell it, but after two years of using it, like I said, I started it because I couldn't scale it past 20 trucks no matter what I tried for years. And then once we got this thing dialed in, we almost doubled over the next two years. And I knew that was much more valuable to have that solution and to be able to get it out into the industry to potentially change the industry honestly because once you can scale it, it changes everything. So that's why we went that route. But there was no master plan to be here. - Yeah, a lot of it is what I keep talking about, right? Like your focus of, I'm not gonna patch it, I'm gonna just go fix this problem. But it's true, there's a lot of other software programs out there, but they're really not built with things in place to be able to issue certain quality controls and to do certain steps that have to be done that pull text can't jump and can't move on and can't do. And then that allows you to have the control, right? And obviously we talk about customer turnover, we talk about it all the time. It's one of the most incredible metrics you gotta watch as you scale and as you grow, 'cause you could pick up 40 pulls, but man, if you're losing 40 pulls on here, you're just in that hamster wheel. You build this thing to fix your company, you get it to a point where you're able to scale, now you're double that size and you're being able to fine tune your machine. At what point do you take the leap of faith and you go, wait a second, what I've done with my company is I've been able to put all these things, I've been able to build this software. This could really benefit a lot of pull pros in the industry. At what point do you take that leap of faith? - Well, I guess that after about two years of having it dialed in and realizing, 'cause on one hand I could say, oh great, I solved this problem. Now it's scaled to the biggest company in the nation. But at that point, if I knew this worked so well, it was only a matter of time before someone else found out, copied it, et cetera. And also there was a real drive truly to bring this to the industry to help other people because I had experienced the pain personally and I'm not just talking about pain from growing a company, or not growing a company that you're trying to grow. I think people can probably relate to this that have employees in the field, especially over a certain size, but I woke up every morning with just anxiety boiling in my stomach. I'm gonna look at my phone and there's gonna be another truck accident. There's gonna be people screaming at me about their pool being green and you told me you were good. You told me this would never happen again. You're a liar and I'm gonna blow you up all over social media. You don't deserve to have a business. It was just angry people all day long. My staff had blown morale because it's just angry people all day long. Even if it's only 10, 20% of your company are more or less, it still feels like everybody because when you get to a certain size, it's still 30 people a day screaming at you. It's 30, 40 fires a day that you have to put out. And when you're in that cycle, you don't even have time to then improve operations or figure out your profit margins or any of that stuff. You're just surviving. So when I realized we had an answer to that, that's when I decided it was much more critical to do this than have a pool company. It's funny that you say that 'cause I'm at that point where I'm having that conversation where I have to tell them, like think of it in percentages. It's a small percentage. I know it feels like a lot of fires, but it's true. As you grow, it just continues to compound. - Yeah. I want to talk really quick about something that you did specifically with a KPI, with chemical cost. But before I do that, I want to make sure that I acknowledge some people out here. They did ask John, how did you get Zach Efron on the show? (laughing) - What a crowd. - Right off the bat. And then I'm getting such a cool background story. Insurance is a pain, obviously expensive. Manning Sanchez is out here going, love the brain. Love that tagline, right? Love the brain. - I don't know how to keep my mouth shut. - Hey, John, this is a clean show. Let's keep it clear. Favorite thing about pool brain is actually made by pool service pros. Absolutely 100%. I do want to ask you. So you shared a story with me specifically, you know, when we started talking about some of the things that the software could do that I think are completely game-changing in the industry and everybody that's listening and is going to listen, make sure you listen to the rest of this podcast because we're going to drop some amazing stuff here. But you talk about the savings with regards to chemical cost with your company. Can you talk a little bit about that? - Yeah, so when we first built pool brain and we were using it in the field, we really had only three main software features and that was the trifecta that we thought would solve the issues. One was guided workflows. You have to make sure people are doing the right things at the right times and the right order and not skipping it for getting it or cheating it. And that's a lot easier said than done, especially without slowing them down unnecessarily. So we had to get that dialed in and then also the custom alerts. So the system's looking at the data, it analyzes it in real time, provides you with alerts on the back end so you're no longer chasing people around saying, what'd you do? Is it good? Like basically not trying to find problems, or potential problems are just finding you and then you just decide how to react to them and you're proactively presenting these issues. You have a list for your office, it's just easy. And then the automatic chemical dosing, we had a very basic version of it in my company on version one because that was critical to me because it was such a huge part of training, like a really big, the lion's share of the training and the easiest way to turn a pool green and the most difficult thing to understand. So we took as much off the plate for the technician as possible, automated as much as possible,
And just on those three features, and mostly I credit this with the chemical dosing, we saved like almost 40% on chemicals. It was almost 70 grand the first years. This is before we even really dialed it in. This is just like, "Hey, let's just see if this does anything." And when you think about it, it's obvious because even as someone, I don't know, what do most people do when they go out in the field? You can train them with the best chemical course and they get out there in 120 degrees and they're rolling through it and they'll just walk up to a pool and be like, "Big pool, big pool, little pool, little pool." And that's the extent. It could be brutally honest. And I'm sure people out there listening are like, "Yeah, that's what I do. I did it." You get moving, it works, you just do it. And so overdosing, obviously very possible in that situation. Overdosing is just straight waste. Underdosing is also waste because then either you have to put in a lot more next week to compensate or more likely algae forms and then you're putting in algae sites and you're shocking it. It's way more than you would have had to use if you did the correct dose. And then misdosing, it doesn't get really, doesn't get talked about a lot, but it definitely happens to where new tax or whatever they're using the wrong chemical. And so they think they're doing the right thing, but they're putting in bicarbon, they should be putting in shocker or whatever it is. So all that's waste. And not to mention the customer loss because of these problems. So it was huge and that was the easiest thing to do is just automate the things. So how did it work back then in that first version you're dosing? So we went off of the CPO handbook formulas just as cookie cutters, you can get. And we did range target dosing. Ellis, I would can obviously talk about that all day. I do think that's probably a superior dosing method. But when it comes to automating or just being sure that they're going to do it, I never had confidence that we could tell them to do all this stuff. And then each tech would faithfully do it. And so I would rather just get close enough at least back then with some automation. And then I know what's going in there is at least sanctioned by a CPO and all that stuff. So we just did CPO formulas and desired range targets that we could set. And that was it. And then of course tabs work back then were a judgment call. Yeah. And so the app would just tell them here's this pool. Here's what it's at. This is what you're going to add to the pool. Yeah, I mean, it's how it works today. Obviously, you integrate with the RINDA now. There's a lot more options and more sophistication and some things you can do. But you just set your desired targets. You have a gallonage saved for the body of water. And if there's not, there's a built-in calculator in the app. So you just quickly enter the measurements based on what the guide is and then get saved once you never do it again. And then all you have to do is enter the reading. The reading is forced based on what you're controlling through your workflows, like requiring it how often and which ones that all happen. So they have to do the readings. And then they get to the chemical screen and it just fills it all in the field for them. And they don't think or do literally anything except for say I confirm I'm putting these chemicals in and they move on with their day. And even if it's not dead accurate, it is far more accurate than letting them just go wild. It overpower. I mean, it's crazy because we talk about the hidden factory of costs, right? And death by a thousand cuts. And that's just one element of running a business and to have that much savings. It's like, that's a significant amount of savings. Yeah. Are you kidding me? Yeah, I'm curious, is there any day from your past or from when you're in your business that's burned into your memory? What feels you to keep going today? What is that driving force? Thinking about a single day on the flight is always fun. But one that stands out my mind that I do not tell this story a lot for obvious reasons. But there was a time where I got an email from a customer and basically it was their young daughter, I think seven or eight years old. And it looked like she had second degree burns on her face and skin. And apparently she had a skin condition according to them and they said that while we warned the office, she has a skin condition, the chlorine can't be high or this happens. And the chlorine, I took it into the Leslie's, it's like a 30. I'm like a 30. Sure about that strips. We even go that high and you know that kind of thing. And so sure enough, we went down and we have to obviously go through extra measures to get it measured beyond 10. And sure enough, it was way too high, like way way too high. And so I went to the technician and I'm like, how did this happen? And he's just like, I don't know, high chlorine is not bad, low chlorine is only bad. And we trained them like we trained everybody else, but what can you do? And thankfully that was resolved in a way that was good. But it could have been very bad. And so these types of things are fully preventable. It's just math at the end of the day. And a lot of people will push back on that because of old myths and the environment matters so much. And yes, the environment definitely plays a role in the maintenance dose. But for break point, it plays almost none. And either way, it's math. And if you know the variables, which is complicated, but it's doable, if you know the variables, you can automate it. That's kind of scary. That's first time here in that story. And it puts into perspective, again, how important it is to have these processes and these procedures in play because accidents like this could happen. And it could have been a lot worse. And not just a lot worse for you as a company, right? Because if they went after you legally or whatever it may be, but more importantly, if the younger was actually really hurt, you know, or so was some long lasting effect that happened to them. And it puts into perspective us as company owners or in the backyard. And what we preach every single time, it's you're not just a pool boy or a pool girl, right? We have a very important job in that backyard. And when you start to grow, it's hard enough to get as a pool owner or as a one-man show or a one-woman show to understand the importance of it. But then when you start to scale and you have multiple employees to get them to have the same type of buy-in or to have the skin in the game to get that reaction to me, it's slapping the face, but to them, it's no big deal. I don't really understand it. And it's hard to really train people or your employees to do things right or to be able to verify these types of things because you can't be in 50 different places at one time. The importance of having these processes and these procedures are just hyper-critical. What I want to do real quick, and I think we skipped over what we did in, but you drop something, and you said, "Hey, you had a hard time scaling after 20 trucks, right?" And I think you alluded to some of the problems that you were having on why you couldn't, but if we can backtrack just a little bit there and maybe go a little bit more into detail of the walls that you ran into or why you couldn't scale or why you were waking up with that anxiety, it was simply because you were just all day instead of focusing on growing the business. You were just putting out fires constantly. And it was getting to the point where if moving to 30 trucks is just going to mean that I'm going to have 50% more issues than I'm having currently and I just don't want to do it. And you were at that brink of burnout or is it that you were just physically, you just couldn't do it because you were just constantly losing 10 clients a month and then you were gaining 10 clients a month or however, maybe or you were hiring three employees and you're losing two employees. And it was a turnover thing. But maybe go a little bit more into detail of what those roadblocks were and how you faced them and you know, why you went through them. Yeah. So I definitely never ever considered that I shouldn't scale bigger because it would be a pain in the ass. I don't really have that in my D&A. But I definitely can relate to the first thing you said where it's just you're putting out fires nonstop and you can't focus on anything else because you're just putting out fires and trying to survive. And it's just treading water. It's just infinitely treading water and it is a nightmare. And most of it stems from your product and your product at the end of the day, at least for us, the main product. We did service and repair and remodel and all that. But the main product, the money maker that then drove everything else was the recurring revenue of weekly service or whatever frequency we were doing. And that when you say what is my product there, your product is a human being that's unmotivated in the field on supervised. And some of them are great to be clear. I'm not saying that these people aren't good people. They're great people. I loved my employees. They worked very hard and they were very good. But they're set up for failure. Ultimately, is what I realized is you have thousands of potential variable combinations between everything that can be on a site. There might be a quick skim. There might be a main drain. There might not. You might be able to pull from the main drain. You might not. You might have a spa. You might have a detached spa. You might have multiple. You can just go on forever and then the different combinations there and the settings and all the things. Nobody, almost nobody who's cleaning pools has all of that under their belt, especially since a lot of them are new to the industry. And that's where you start, right? So to be successful, if you have to have all of this knowledge and you're just starting, you won't and you're set up for failure. And so if we can, the idea is if we could take that knowledge, that tribal knowledge, that specific knowledge for that unique body of water because everybody of water is like its own personality, right? You got to learn it and just put it in a program to where it just says, hey, don't worry about it. I got you. I'm gonna tell you when to do these things and you're gonna go through it. And then for some reason, you can't, at least then you know you have to do it. You can call someone, get walk through. You can make a decision, not just forget it and then catastrophic failure, pool green customer lost. Just imagine, especially because I think your only as good as the people that work for you, right? And I would imagine initially there might be some pushback from the employees because the hardest part about learning is unlearning. I always preached this and they've taught a certain way and now you introduced this new program and everybody's, oh, you don't trust me or I got to be baby or whatever it may be. But in the long run, I can see how it increases employee morale because now they're not constantly being berated or yelled at or told that they're not doing a good job or getting customer and how that snowballs into such a wonderful thing and how that alleviates all these fires that are unnecessary or self inflicted wounds, right, that we create for ourselves, not because we purposely do it, just simply you can only do so much as one person or even if you have a manager or service manager, there's only so much you can do. So I have another question but we're gonna jump off to break right now. So let's just get to break and then when we come back, I'll continue on.
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Nitec, heat exchanger technology, is RayPak's latest solution to superior strength and maximum efficiency when it comes to residential pull heating. With 900% more nickel compared to Cooper-Nickle in critical surfaces, Nitec creates an ideal service to protect against scale formation and erosion, without compromising on a VIA's 84% thermal efficiency. Learn more at RayPak.com/Nitec. The next evolution in lighting is here, universal color logic 2.0 from Hayward. The latest in pool and spa lighting was designed with you in mind, making installation of breeze. Upgrades include a detachable cord and first of a kind adjustable lower catch to overcome variations in plaster thickness. As always, universal color logic lights retrofit into virtually any in-ground cool or spa while delivering industry leading vibrant color. Visit hayward.com to discover more. Welcome back everybody to the Pollation Live Podcast. We continue our conversation with Zach Efron. Have you heard that one before? That's not sanctioned. Is there a big watch too? Is there something that somebody's trying to tell us that we don't know about? I played the fifth. There is something. I was trying to figure out because that was really kind of left field, right? That was really it is. It is what it is. Yeah. So, anyways, Kevin is also joining us here at John. I know that you. Yeah, before we went to break, we were talking about how you had the subiphany and how you kind of realized that you needed to rebuild your company and in order to do that, you needed to create, pull brain the software, these processes, right, in order to be able to grow and scale. But in order to do that at the same time while you're trying to run a successful business and we know how demanding that is and how expensive that is as well, it's not an easy feat to jump into building a whole new company, right? Or to build a whole new software program, especially coming from being a pull guy. How did you do it? Was it self-funded? Did you find partners? Did you go out looking for investors? Did you talk about how you got the finances or the money in order to do it and how it went for you? In the beginning, I remember that I definitely wasn't trying to make this a commercial product. I was just trying to solve a problem. So, we weren't really going for outside investors and we weren't really trying to go to this big, expensive solution. We're trying to do it as cheap as possible and it's cute and hindsight. But I had a business proposal laid out for my partner and my mom and some other people to get a loan from or investment from on what it would cost to do it and what the payback would be and when I could afford to do that. And I think I told her the whole thing, start to finish would be like 150 grand tops. If I had known the actual expense and effort before doing it, I would have been like, oh, there's no way I'll be successful or that's way too big of a risk. I'm glad I didn't. But I just did it one step at a time. We got to this point and we're like, we need more money. So now let's do this. Now I get to this point. Now we need friends and family investors and things like that. But mostly it was self-funded and then we eventually sold our company June of 2020 and put every dime back into this product and then also went in debt at least half a million. Then got some more friends and family investors once we started picking up steam. You know, eventually we took an angel investor on fairly recently and we turned down a lot bigger offers and just other options because I was very set on having control of the product. To me, that is important and the quickest way to ruin a product is to take outside money or you see a lot of these people coming in from outside the industry trying to do it right and they're telling you what they think you need or what other industries have done. And so they're going to come in and show you the way. But if you're in this industry, this industry is very unique and we have unique pain points and the software has to match that. For example, generic platforms like the one I was using prior to this service bridge service CEO etc. Now you've got a million names that are generic where they appeal to a wide range of industries. They're kind of one size fits all. They don't work period because just off the bat, you have the wrong hierarchy and the wrong structure, the wrong architecture. So the all the generics have it set up to where you have customers, you have properties and then you have a bunch of custom shit for the lack of a better word. And that would be whatever you want. And that doesn't solve the main problems. What you have to have is you have to have customers, you have to have properties, you have to have multiple bodies of waters for those properties. Then you have to have system provided equipment sets for those bodies of water. And then you can have automations and settings and interaction and all of that stuff. It opens up the door for all of the problem solving for that. But without those distinctions by the system from scratch, you cannot do it. We won't. Make sense if you think about it, we talk about scaling, right? And it takes a lot of effort, obviously, in time. As an industry, us being a small little niche, right? We had a problem and there was a lot of different software programs or people out there doing it. But they were coming from a different perspective, right? Because they need to figure out, hey, how do we scale this and not be solely just stuck in the pool industry, right? They got to figure out, okay, so here's like a generic type of template, right? It can work, maybe not work perfectly for you, right? But good enough, and it's better than what you got. So it made it hard because I know some of the frustrations for us, because we tried multiple companies, were multiple different softwares. And every time we gave feedback, it was always like it fell on deaf ears because it's like to them, we look at it like, dude, why doesn't this make sense to you? This is what we need. And to them, it's dude, if I pour all this money into this, it's just for you. And I can't apply it toward anybody else. So as a business, it doesn't make sense for us to be able to make that investment into that software and actually make it as useful as you need it to be where you come from the bottom up building it. And that's what makes pool brings so unique. He knows all the pain points, right? And it's a pull pro who's doing it. And when we're talking about the scaling, we talk about each one of those phases, he's gone through all of them and he knows the pain points at each one of those. I have an unrelated, really quick question. Obviously, you look at the software industry and I would say back maybe 2008, 2009, you saw a lot of software companies come out and they were all very niche, right? At the beginning. And then all of a sudden, I think a lot of VC money came in and stuff like that. And then it was like, oh, we have to make a lot of money. So we have to go after every market that we can, right? Now we can't be a pro at one. It's because you're trying to do all that. Do you see those industries nowadays going back and going, oh, no, we do need to provide very specific products for these or no, you just see as a software
industry in general, you just see them just going, no, we're just going to stick to the big. So it's both ways. Like the overall trend is without a doubt vertical is it because every industry, it's to serve an industry best, you have to build something for an industry. And ours is more true than most and on that vein. I do see the trend to where there's acquisitions being made to where they're acquiring the vertical leaders and throwing them under their brand, but they're still keeping them vertical. They're not just sticking generic and they're not going vertical, but they're using their big money platform to acquire the vertical leaders and they understand vertical is probably the future in some cases from what I'm saying from the outside looking in. Yeah. Yeah. And our industry and it's funny because people just don't understand it. It doesn't matter how much you explain it to people. We are a very unique industry. And it doesn't matter how many times you tell that to a lot of the big players and stuff like that, people just think, no, you're not. You're just kind of like every under industry that we could just come in rolling in and then it's not the case. Yeah. So I want to start getting into some of the specifics about what pull brain is today. And we had a conversation a while ago and you presented it as an accountability tool. And to me, that is stuck in my head because of all the things that we've talked about today. Can you talk about some of the biggest advantages of pull brain for service companies? It's the ability to control your product full stop. If you think you can control your product as a cleaning technician without a platform specifically designed to do it. I'd say you probably haven't grown enough to experience that pain point in the beginning when I had a smaller company and I was the one in the field in the trenches with these people. They were my friends. And we all had each other's back and it was this pride thing. But once you go to like more employer employee relationship, that friend bond goes away at least diminishes to some point. It just unfortunately has to over time. And that's not enough anymore to carry their motivation. We had about $30,000 a month in marketing. We were putting in customers in the top of the funnel all day long. We had no problem with getting new customers. But once we got the customers, we were losing them out the bottom. And so that's why we weren't scaling. We were putting tons in the top, losing them out the bottom. How do you do that? You have to control your product. And the way you can control your product is these systems. Guided workflows, customer words to catch anything, built in customer feedback on top of that. So let's say there is something that the customer is not unhappy about for any reason. They can tap one button or click one button on the proof of service email or the customer portal. And then that's going to come right back to you. It's going to be logged to their account, logged the technician record. It's going to be easily searchable and viewable and dashboard. And more importantly, if someone clicks a thumbs down button like I'm not happy for the service for any reason, your office can immediately call them up and just be like, hey, what can we do? The guys down the street, we can fix this immediately. Talk to me. And it prevents the bad review. They just think you're awesome because you're on top of it. All they had to do is tap one button and you're there making it right. And that's rare when you have a guided workflow system, making sure everything is being done. That's correct anyway to keep the pool from turning green. Ultimately, that's the holy grail. If you didn't have green pools, sure, it might not be perfect, but you wouldn't lose customers. You lose customers when you, the algae is there, that green pools there. That's the biggest source of revenue. Full stop. And when you can control the chemistry automatically and you can control the actions that lead to like flow restriction, then you're solving green pools. And ultimately, that's what we can do with pool rain is we can take 90% of the things that can turn a pool green and just eliminate them off the table in a really automated fashion. It goes into the proactive versus reactive. We talk about customer experience and that's the difference, right? That's the big difference in the companies that are doing it well and they have that retention. They're very proactive about it. You went over and you talked about the feedback thing and I think that's just genius, right? And most business owners immediately want to be like, see no evil here, no evil. If I'm not hearing any issues, I don't want to know about it or whatever. But the reality is this is the type of stuff as a business owner you need to know and get ahead of and get the temperature of what's going on. And I personally had an experience. We had to let go one of our employees and we've built such loyalty over the years with our people and just having casual conversations with them after we let one of our employees go and hearing some of the things that, oh, okay, it makes sense. This is what he used to do or this is what he did or whatever. And it's like, oh, why didn't you tell me this? And then that was my first reaction. But the reality was shame on me, why didn't I know about this? Not because I know I can't be there verifying all these things, but why am I not or why don't I have a channel open to where we get that type of conversation or feedback from our people before it turns into a fire? And it might be maybe initially, it might be something that will cause a lot more work or maybe a little bit more heartburn or some of that anxiety or whatever, but once you have visibility of it, then how do you fix something you don't know? And if you have that visibility and you're able to figure out what your people are actually asking for, what your customers are because we have two clients. We have our internal customers and our external customers and sometimes we forget if this customer has been great, we've had them for years, they've never complained or whatever, we're not going to give them any extra attention or figure anything out. But I just think that having that included what your software, I think, is just worth its weight and gold. Like you said, internal customers and then the feedback, right? It's the same thing, the people that are doing well don't take any of your time and attention. So you tend to the 20 rule, your focus over here and you're not given. But if you have a prompt that is constantly reminding you that they're doing an excellent job, now you can be proactive about that to your team, your internal customer and give them recognition and give them praise. Hey, before we jump into the next thing, I do want to jump in here because we've been chit chatty and forgetting about everybody that else that's out here. Great show. Somebody's asking, I got to know what's the next big thing coming from the software we should be watching for. We got that in store for you. Wait for a couple minutes. We're getting there. I do want to come over to Instagram and apologize to all the people that we left out here in Teladadi Todd, Blue Tide pools, Big shout out and Parapult Services, Big shout out to you out there. Rodolfo, Lackobaldista, Jen, Big shout out to you out there. Coltrane pools, Big shout out to Tulay, Mac out there. Johnny, the great game is on listening, Big shout out to him out there. Ovas, Sienna, Stefan, Chaps, what's going on? Penn Valley pools. Wow, that's a mouthful right there. That two zero zero pool guy. That was a hard one. Power concrete, Cali pools, AS Services, pool side with Brian. What's going on? Jay money, Big shout out to you. I owe you a phone call and Jay's going to be coming out, John. We've got the dates for Jay to be coming out. Pool Rangers. Let's see here. We are switching over to pool brain. The husband loves the built-in features. A big shout out to everybody out there. They're from Florida. Welcome, cool Rangers, come family out there. We need to have her on too. By the way, she's a kick ass. She runs a company. So Macy Denise, Big shout out and Pineapple pool boys, Big shout out to all you and Makayla Pineapple pool boys. What's up boys? Signed up five new accounts this week. All referrals in their out near Arizona. That's a big shout out to all these guys out there. Mr. flawless. Yeah, so let's get nerdy here. So when somebody starts with pool brain and they look at some of the reports that are generated, what are some of the aha or shocking moments that or realizations do they get or the feedback that you've gotten and what to have the offer from the data and the metrics that you guys track and keep for them. Chemical costs, profit report and the alerts they see that they had no idea things were happening and now they're seeing like the sky doesn't start until 11 a.m. What's going on with that? Or he's spending an hour on every property to milk the clock or things along those lines, but profit report costs. That's overwhelmingly the biggest advantage in what people are surprised about because everyone thinks they know their numbers. Even I did when I first started out, I'm like, uh, chemical is there about here and this is about there and it was wildly different. And when you can actually see in a clean report that these are the pools that you're losing money on and why? Was it pay? Is it chemistry? Is it this? Are you not charging enough? These are the pools you're making low money on and why and you can set that custom variable to say I want a 40% profit margin or whatever and show me anything that's less than that. You can really get in the weeds surgically and start making some changes. And I think people are very afraid to raise prices in general and that's understandable. I get it. But when you can clearly see that you're working for $10 a month and you're working your rear off to the leisure. Yeah, exactly. You have the ammunition to go in and be like, you need to be paying. And it won't hurt so much if they, you know, it's okay. They leave that. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. But I got an atom was a good guess. They're like me back in the day. Are you a good guesser? But Zach does this to me all the time. He's like, I'm a good guy. I'm a shut up dude. But what I'm scared of. And you know what? Pool brain is built on not guessing. They give you your number. And I'm going to be that one in shock when I see the dead. I'll tell you what I'm going to cry. Bad guesser at I thought I was a good guesser is body of water gallon. Yeah. I used to be able to be like, oh, that's a 15,000 gallon body of water right there. And after I actually had the calculator built into the bathroom, we were doing it. I'm like, man, these are like half the size just way smaller than people think. So we had a request. And I think it's time to go down there. Let's get into what's coming next because when you talk about game changing in the industry, there are some things that are coming that are going to be just that. So let's dive in. All right. What the quickest thing coming next is actually one of our most requested features. And I'll be honest, I didn't really understand this when I first saw the overwhelming request for it. But it's a surge charging. The ability to automatically pass on credit card fees to customers that are using credit cards basically. And that is a normal series of requests that I do understand now. I've got a chance to talk to a lot of people, but I was always like, just raise your prices. But now I get it. It's a great feature that's coming in a couple weeks. And then right after that, maybe a week after that is going to be inventory. And this has been a long time coming. I think I stupidly announced on a podcast three years ago. Like, oh, about to happen. I didn't understand.
- Yeah, quite how difficult this is. It takes time. We now have an inventory module built out where you'll be able to create locations and sublocations like a warehouse, room A, I/O6, bin, D or whatever, and many combination of that and then have your inventory. So you can track it as simply as you want, like just this closet, what do I have in there? Or as complex as you want. You can also create trucks, which are also inventory locations. So you can keep track of your whole fleet and all the critical information and what is on the truck, which is something I always wanted never had. It's a complete game changer to bring the industry where you can know exactly the dollar amount. That's on the truck of product or tools 'cause you can also create tools now in pool brain as of this update launching in a few weeks. And those tools can get assigned to trucks or locations, products can get assigned to trucks or locations and then you can assign trucks to technicians. So you can see which technicians have which trucks, what's on those trucks in the form of tools or product and then as jobs get completed, it'll prompt the technician to say, hey, these are the products that are on the job that you should have used according to this. Please make sure this is accurate, change anything that's not or add whatever. And it's strictly for inventory. And once they go through that confirmation screen, it will automatically pull inventory quantity off their truck to keep that inventory accurate, which is just another game changer for the company in general and even technicians knowing what's on their truck and are they running low and what they need to buy, et cetera, et cetera. So that's phase one inventory that we're gonna launch. And obviously that's a very quick blitz on it, but it's super cool and phase two, which is already in progress, is going to involve a couple things. One is gonna be a shopping list in the app. So you end on the web so you can manage it, who needs to buy what and you can do that manually, but we can also do a lot of automation with that. Some really cool stuff to wear just as you can set things to where as you're running low on chemicals or whatever you're consumables, we can automatically add that to the shopping list or have office manager, whatever you wanna do with your company. And then another big part of phase two is going to be integrating with Heritage Pool Supply. So all the ordering will be directly integrated. And to be clear right now, we do have an integration that's great with Heritage today. That's super valuable. And it's the ability to sink your prices automatically. So back in the day with my own company and what everyone does with their company to this day, is if they need to adjust pricing, then they go to a book or a website and they just drill through and compare manually for days. And if they see the difference, they're manually updating that for the cost. And then they have to go in and say, what's the profit margin I want here and how does a price change based on this cost? And it takes days. It's a full time job for days. And so now we flip that on its head to where it's automatic to where you can map the products you want to sink. And then it's gonna check every night. Did my cost change? Cool, then I'm gonna sink that cost change to Pool Brain. And we have a feature for Markup in Pool Brain so you can set it by category or product. And so if this category has a markup of 120%, for example, in the cost changes, it's gonna also mark up the price based on that markup. So everything is fully automatic. And in this day and age, especially with just like the chaos and uncertainty in general, we need to protect that profit margin because things are always changing. You just pissed off a whole bunch of people in the room when you said that. I know with all these price changes. I mean, our industry, it's a shit show with all these price changes. But that's a game. But how critical that is. I can't tell you how many time now is so important, right? We get phone calls and, "Hey, can you come out? "I'm not happy with service. "I need somebody to come out." And we're busy and we might be booked out. If we can't get out there that day, we have to make it a point to be out there that day at the latest tomorrow, but more importantly, be out there right now. Otherwise, what ends up happening is, "Oh, we ended up going with another service company." And I didn't have the opportunity to sell our services. Same thing too when you go out and you quote for equipment and you're doing an equipment pad or you're doing a bunch of work in the backyard. How great is it to be able to log in, do what you need to do and then to be able to actually get real-time prices as you're doing things and give people an idea and not have to say, "Okay, hold on real quick. "I'll get you a quote tomorrow, email you a quote tomorrow," or whatever it may be. And then you get tied up, you forgot or you did whatever and you don't have the prices. Want to make you look a little less professional, right? And two, chances are you open yourself up to the not closing deal right there and then, you know? The other thing, John, if you think about it, and this is one of our biggest pet peeves, right? Prices go up and if you're doing a repair, it's a little bit easier to pass it on to the customer, right? Because it's just a product, it's an install, it's a repair. But when we talk about chemicals and all these constant price changes and one of the challenges for the pool pros knowing what their cost of service is and the number one variable being chemicals and having to go back and do that and let's be realistic. Zach, you do a lot of the stuff manually. You don't do it once a week. You guys don't go and update the prices once a week. But to be able to have something that's updating automatically and automatically seeing real live numbers when you see those price increases is critical. Yeah, and like years ago, it was an annual thing. And it was a two week, I would literally have a folding table and I'd be set up and I had the spreadsheets and I'm going through it and I'm figuring out and I'm searching and typing and then figuring out margin and all this stuff. And it's a painful time consuming process and with all the rapid changes that are frequently happening now over the last few years. I mean, there's times where we're selling product and then we try to stay on top of it and then all of a sudden we catch it and it's like this went up $75, $100, $150 and we're like, how many of those have we sold? And that's what's beautiful is like, I love this because we're talking about hidden cost factories. And that, I'm at a point where I'm like, we've learned how to make money. Now we need to identify how to keep all the money we can and you're attacking these things like you said, like when it comes to inventory, it's like their systems but they're very broad industry wise and very generalized but you have something that's very tailored to the pool industry to solve these problems. So what other things you got in the pipeline that you're gonna, well, I have one that I'm waiting for you to talk about. I'm over here dancing. I know what it is. We're almost, we're almost there. I want to make sure we cover the heritage stuff fully though because that's one thing we have today, right? What we're already working on and what will come, probably two, three months after we launch this other inventory phase is going to be a much, much deeper integration suite of features with heritage for having everything built into the app for ordering availability checking things like that. So the idea is whether you're out in the field or in the office, you can easily say, show me how many of these skimmer baskets exist in these locations, which one is closest to me, what are they cost? And then from there you can say, give me three of those, put them on a will call. I'll be there in a second or ship these to my office or some custom address or the property I'm standing at, that kind of situation. And then from there, you can have all your purchase order management and shipment tracking completely within pool brains. So you never have to leave pool brain for the availability or price checking experience or the ordering experience or even the receiving and delivery part of that. It's just all there and one. We're developing some cool things with them on both sides and it's going to be really powerful. So a quick question for you. So anybody that's using pool brain that wants to get that integration today, what do they do? How do they do it? - So for heritage, you would contact heritage. I believe there's an email. It's like, I don't want to give it out the wrong email. - Oh, there's a couple of email addresses. (laughing) - On our health article section. (laughing) Matt McGurman, we're gonna give you that email address. (laughing) So in our health article section, if you go to help.poolbrain.com, it'll have the layout in the email there or you can just reach out to
[email protected] or start a message on the website and then they can tell you, but there's an email that you email Heritage@ and then they will give you an API key. You plug the API key into settings and pool brain and then you would match the item part numbers. And they're working on some cool things on their end for auto matching. It's gonna make that pretty much a press of a button situation, but for now you would just look up Heritage pool plus and you would put in the heritage part number and then you would never have to think about it again. It would update. - That's awesome. - I have over here, the dollar round on the truck is awesome and assigned to a pool tech. Let's go and then of course they're teasing me, go in Tea Party Tea Time. So we're always spilling the tea here. So they know that they wanna get to the good stuff that I'm talking about. So what else you got in the pipeline? - All right, so this is cool because this is something, there's been a lot of things that we wanted to do since day one of this. Once we realized all the data we had and what you could do with that data, like I said, it's a lot more difficult. It takes a lot longer than people think to get to this place, but we're at least at this phase, which is super cool. It's something that, okay, so when I put in automatic chemical dosing in the platform, it was like half automated. If you're being honest, you have your break point dosing which you go and you say, okay, it's at a one today, chlorine. What do I need to put in this pool to bring it back to a three or a five or whatever you're targeting? That is just a straight equation math. You can automate it. We integrate with the Rindah. Obviously they do a great job with that and we use their calculations for all those automations. But then another half of that, which is, okay, now how do we keep it where we want it so that next week we don't come here and it's green or a zero, like ideally it'd be one, two, three, whatever. And that part, we check deeply. Nobody in the world has addressed this in any meaningful way. And so you're talking about typically one of two things that situation you're talking about, salt systems, or you're talking about chlorine tabs and depending on the region, some are more prevalent. But tabs is still huge. And when you train a technician on how to dose tabs, like how do we do it, right? Every pool's different, good luck. And the summer fill it up and the winter, I don't know, feel it. Use more if it's zero, use less of its pie. It's just a complete crapshoot, truly. And maybe a pool needs 10 tabs and two floaters and maybe it needs one tab. It's all over the map, right? And so when you're trying to solve what we're trying to solve with full automation and full accountability, how do you address that problem? And the reason we can't do it with straight math is because of the variables, the unknowns. end of the video.
different body of water to body of water. A lot of that is environment, bather load, of the dog swimming, or the kid swimming, they have imparities every weekend. Is there a tree dumping leaves into the pool? It's different. And most of these variables, unfortunately, at the end of the day, are unknowable. Another big one is weather, though. How hot is it? Sun exposure, precipitation, things like that. And this is knowable. And we can pull this from an API and predict base off it. So long story short, is we trained in artificial intelligence model across millions of data points to dose tabs automatically based on a chlorine prediction. So you can put in a target and you can say consider zero if I show up a failure. Consider five a success or anything up to five a success over zero, anything above a five a failure. And we're targeting a three, just using examples. And you can control these variables when we release this in a few months. If you're targeting a three, so far in the test data we have, and I want to be clear, this is a test environment. Real world, you never know. But it is accurate, almost every single time within about one ppm. So if you target a three and you miss out a two or a four, you're just fine. Yeah. So even if it's further off, I would say two things. Number one, it's not going to be further off than Trevor the pool guy, who is especially, it might not be his fall. He might just be covering around. There's all these things that we expect to throw people on these pools. They know how to do it. No, it's a complete guessing game. So the idea is that we are now fully automated chemistry to where you show up and you do nothing. You need to train them on how to identify chemicals and handle them safely and how to introduce into the pool. But you don't need to train them on any equations or how much or when to use whatever it just works in tabs are obviously a big part of not turning a pool green and a big part of protecting your investment, your bottom line on that stuff. That's incredible. And the AI now, obviously we know that AI right now is changing the world. And I think we're only seeing the tip of the iceberg of what it's going to do. You know, what point did you see that coming into the picture and get excited because I'm sure you got giddy like crazy and started training that to be able to do that. So we started training this AI about seven or eight months ago. Took again, like everything longer than you think or than you think. Sounds simple, but to actually get the model trained to get very reliable, it takes a lot of experiments, a lot of trial and error to see what's actually valuable there. And then of course, you have to set up like what weather is valuable as well because you pull weather data on the API and you get hundreds of data points. And so you have to really distill it down and figure out what is critical there. And I don't want to go into that too deeply just for proprietary purposes. But there's more there than you think, but it can be done. It is being done in AI. Like you said, definitely tip of the iceberg. This is game changing for the world on all the things and it's game changing for the industry. And we plan to be continue to be on the forefront of this developing things that have never been developed. That's all big pain points. And the nice thing about AI as well. And I was going to say this earlier is even if it's this is the worst it's ever going to be. Yeah. So AI gets better, but also the models in general get better because just like humans, the more they do they see the more they do it, the better they get. And especially when they can see each body of water, and treat each body of water as a different math problem, you don't even really need a lot of these variables because at the end of the day, the variable is just what's the chlorine demand. And so it knows this body of water has a higher chlorine demand. So it just keeps upping the dose until it gets success. And then it dials in that success. And then based on the weather, it's going to automatically dial it down or up or whatever changes. That's incredible. I can go down that room. Look, I'm really excited. And not just because it's going to be great for us, right, as an industry, but I'm going to take it back a bit here and just say how far we've come as an industry, right? And it's people like you guys that are help leading the charge. Just we've been talking about our pull and stream, how we've been a generation behind when it comes down to technology, right? And it's always been because it's good enough, right? And this is all that's available. Yes, we can do more, but we don't need to prove it. We don't need to prove it because it's just good enough. And we've always been so many years behind every other industry and like tools and products and like features and things that can be done. And it's been very frustrating on our end, knowing that so much more can be done. But it's simply because it's just not economical or worth it for us. Okay, I can take a time analysis here. A complete time out here because you're not going to believe this. Look at who message Matt McDermott said in an email and said for more information or to request an API credentials, contact customer support and heritage. I am not kidding. Look at that. You're very concerned that people don't know. Matt, you are the man. We appreciate that. By the way, we would never give out the address. But it was very frustrating, right? Being in the industry, knowing that we have these tools or we can do better, but we choose not to. We're now, we see companies like Pulse Eye Tech. We have you guys that are looking at this. And yeah, Pulse Eye Tech, it's like they created this product and the attendant, right? On technology that has been around for decades, right? This could have been done years ago, but there just wasn't enough of a need apparently from some of the others. And you know what, you know what it took, right? What did it take? It took another pull pro to put it together because for some reason within our industry, it always takes a pull pro to stand up and go, I'm going to say enough is enough and we need something, right? And the same thing too, like we could talk about like with products and drain plug placements, right? Or we talk about filters exploding. And these are some of the concerns that we've been having for years and years that haven't really been addressed. And then you got a company like AquaSide, it comes out. Okay, I got this hold my beer. I'll make it happen and I'll figure it out. It's really simple and it's been just really frustrating. And I think that's part of the reason why some of us have become jaded over the years and get grumpy. You know, I always talk about why pull guys are always grumpy. And I think this is part of it. But I look at it now is it's so exciting because there's been such a movement, man. And to see where AI is our future and seeing our little industry, taking it and embracing it and finding a way to utilize it to make it better for us now instead of waiting five years from now or 10 years from now, right? When things are flying around and whatever it may, who knows what's going on. And then we're still and then finally saying, okay, we're going to adapt and we're going to somehow integrate it because it's more cost enabling for us or it's not going to cost us as much. It's dirt cheap now. We're kudos to you guys, right? And these are some of the small things that we look at and we glance over or we don't really put, maybe I'm going too deep in this. I don't know. We need more of this, right? And thank you. Because you better believe it that because of what you're doing, right? Because of what like Aqua Star is doing because of the changes in the way, like even heritage, right? How they their culture and the way they look at things, right? When we talk about game changers, it's not just a term that is just loosely thrown around. We truly mean it because you guys motivate you inspire the change because now the bigger companies and others are going to look at either look to have to catch up. They have to do it, right? And then look, competition is the mother of innovation. It really creates people to like, okay, I got to do better and do more. And then at the end of the day, we all benefit from it, right? Kudos to you guys. That's awesome. I cannot wait to try this and use this, the AI function of it because that is the future. Yeah, that's 100%. Yeah. Paul Brain rules. I don't even use all of the functionality. That's our boy David from Cap City. Big shout out to you. And then by the way, Paul Rangers sent us the customer support at Heritage Bull Plus dot com. So big shout out to them out there. I'm going to say John, final thoughts. Yeah. No, we have, we have one more thing that we want to talk about out here that you guys have coming. It's your moment. It's the last two were my moment. Do we have it coming? There's, there's lots of things that, ah, remember, we were right there. We have that now. You have that now. So let's talk about that. There's other things that are coming. There are that are, that are big. Those are a little confidential. Okay. Okay. But remote data monitoring. Yeah. That is the future of this industry in my opinion. It's just to what extent. We integrate with a product now called water. It's a great product. So hangs under a skimmer lid. You can get a chlorine reading and all the other chemistry that you want from it. And then on top of that, you'll get flow. Like whether or not the pump is actually running or not during the times it should be. So you can actually remotely get just from putting a device under a skimmer lid is your pump down, which is huge because at the end of the day, what we're trying to solve is the number one problem is don't turn the pool green. That's an oversimplification for sure. But don't turn the pool green and 90% of your problems aren't there. At least not fires. So not turning the pool green chemistry. We just talked a lot about how we control that and then your flow. So you solve those two variables. You're not going to turn a pool green. And the biggest issue or one of the quickest ways to turn a pool green is if your pump goes down, you show up the next week and you didn't know it and now you have a green pool. And the customer is always going to blame you. Spoiler alert. It doesn't matter. So in this case, if you're using remote data, even with what we have today, you can truly tell your customer, I can guarantee you this pool will not turn green because even if it's a chemistry thing, which it shouldn't be, if you're using the platform on all its features, you'll see that too. You'll see three days in a row. You can set alerts however you want, but I would set one saying if it's two or three days in a row with chlorine at zero, tell me. And I'm just going to have the closest person go fix that. And you can charge him more for that. So 50 bucks a month more, whatever you want to do. You put the device in there. You own the device. If they cancel your service, you take the device and you can just reap the extra profit while simultaneously having a lot lower liability and cost. And I think that's just enormous. That's the tip of the ice for you guys. - I guess you know. - Yeah. - My ultimate vision for this is if you walk into a backyard,
and the equipment on the pad can talk to the internet, which I think pretty much all of it will, and on a long enough time, when in a lot of it can now. Then you can connect it to that body of water and pool brain. And we already have an alert system highly customizable to where you can say whether it's remote data or this data treat the alert differently and show me on the first trigger or show me only after it triggers two consecutive times in a row across more than two days, or after this percentage drop a million different things only on these service levels. And so you can just set your company on autopilot and just react to the things that are coming in and you know everything is running like a top. And I tell you my dream. I don't do polls anymore. No, but we talk about vacation rentals, right? So I'm going to go all the way back and this has always been my vision. I go all the way back to my Airbnb days and I used to do tons of them because it was Disneyland and they were getting trash. We had to do them twice a week. My vision has always been, and I talk about Zachary's office, right? The big TV. And imagine having all that stuff connected through pool brain where I can wake up in the morning and grab my phone and just kind of look through all those and go, where's my problem points? And just be able to go to that tech and go, hey, we normally start on pool three or four today. You're going to start on 10 because we're having some issues there or I'm going to go there, right? And you're just waking up and you're just being able to see all that. Instead of reactive, right? So you get to actually look at these and then figure out that dashboard sitting right there in the office to just be able to see all those data points and be like, that's the dream. We share the same dream. Good. Hey, go ahead. Go ahead. No, I was just going to say, yeah, what you were talking about is also what I envisioned, but even more automated to where in the morning, your technician just has the schedule auto dispatched based on the data that's come in. I don't even need to look at my phone. I was a little disappointed. I was hoping that you were going to say you have project drone or drone. Well, hey, hey, that's that requires an NDA that might be coming down the road. Let's not talk about that right now. Oh, my God. Challenge accepted. So now we're going to have to go and figure out what drones. What drones is going to use so we can invest in them. Just imagine that, right? You know, drone over and over. Just dozing the pool. Just dropping the drones. Yeah. The drones going over to see the pool usage. There's an alert that there's too many people in the pool. Here comes the drone with a tomato. Yeah, to use pH and it's getting it. We laugh about it now. We've officially gone down the rails. 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As always, Universal Color Logic lights retrofit into virtually any in-ground pool or spa while delivering industry leading vibrant color. Welcome back everybody to the Pool Nation live podcast we continue our conversation with Adam and Kevin. We are at our final thoughts. I think we could have gone for at least probably another hour easily because we just hit the tip of the iceberg like we weren't even able to get into a lot of the things that I wanted to talk about which it currently does now. I think we're going to have to do another podcast and have you guys come back where we can talk a little bit strategically about the phases and what are some of the things that the pool pros as they go through those phases they should turn on and start to use that will be able to help them. But Mr. Zacharias let me get some final thoughts. My mind is very similar in the way of like whenever I encounter a problem in the business. My goal is how can I solve this problem for good and forever? What rails can I put in place that we can then go and I don't have to experience this again? And that's what I love about pool brain. It empowers us to be like we've said multiple times proactive versus reactive and it sets the tax up to be more successful because like you said they are set up for failure. There's so much in this industry that it's like okay here you go fly after two weeks and it's like they're not even close to being able to understand what they need to know to do their job successfully. An in turn have better morale better customer experience better retention. So I think that it's amazing now that there is a tool that can assist business owners with doing this with their team because that's the biggest struggle like all this stuff lives in the business owner. We start growing we start hiring we're putting out fires and then it's just this vicious cycle that we get stuck in. And one of our core principles is making pros financially successful. Having that data and that information and that level of control like you said the problems come to you you don't have to sit there and search for the problems. That is just amazing. The money savings and the things like that because that's what we want people to be financially successful and in turn we rise the industry for everyone. Absolutely. Is there flowers? Final thoughts? Look I got a lot and I know we're running out of time here and as usual before my final thoughts I get into my final thoughts. I'm going to try to contain myself here but first and foremost I want to try. I want to say he was right on a couple notes one for coming out here and doing this taking the time out to do the podcast two for being one of our visionary partners and believing in us and what we do I think we're aligned in the dream and the vision of educating the pull pros and we have a common goal but three more importantly is thank you for being apart and I touched on it before the break of the fire right to get our industry to where it needs to be so that we can move forward and we can progress and we can do better and we can make our jobs just a little bit easier. What I love about pull bearing is that we've always just been used to route software and it's just managing routes going out there taking picture sending emails doing whatever it may be or you guys evolved into it you're literally like a partner with the business right you fill in the roles of a service manager and stuff for especially for smaller companies that might not have a hundred trucks out there people with two three employees that are getting there and still
trying to juggle 15 different hats and it's really hard to make it happen. You have taken some of the pain away from that we go through or alleviated the extra expensive cost or us having to educate ourselves to get really down deep into some of us just don't have it in us to be able to do that type of stuff or don't have the time. And you have, I think it's what differentiates you from the competition out there is that you've taken this almost as a personal mission, right? The challenge is that you're where it's yeah, we might have already the best route software out there, but we can do better. We constantly need to grow and more importantly, you listen and it's where you tear down those walls and I touched on that frustration at the beginning of the podcast where you you have these conversations with some of these other people and it's okay, but that might make sense to you or we haven't heard it enough yet or there haven't been enough cries or screams or yelling for us to even make a move on it. It is what you got and it is what it is deal with it. What else are you going to do or are you guys taken into and I had a perfect example and we had a conversation about few months ago about a concern or an issue from somebody that I know that came to me and we talked about it, but it's like to be accessible to be there and to actually have a conversation with somebody who's lived it and breathed it and understands it and knows the frustrations and more than likely because you've already you've fallen on your face 10 different times, you've experienced it, you've failed, you've taken three steps back or you've gone through those troubles that somebody just might be currently going through initially, right? And then you're able to actually help solve that issue or you can I don't really know how to explain it, but you have a lot more credibility because you're one of us because you've been in the industry doing what you're doing. So I think that's what I love about pull brain and more importantly that you guys enough isn't good enough right? You want to do more and the examples of some of the new stuff, especially with the AI and what you guys are evolving to and it's balsy to do stuff and that takes a lot of money and a lot of effort and I just look forward to seeing what you guys have a roll out and what the rest of the industry is going to do in reaction to it. Thank you so much for coming down. I really appreciate it. Kevin, appreciate you my friend Adam. You were the man looking forward to getting some nice food right now. Thank you so much. Thanks for coming guys. We really appreciate it. A lot of times we talk about it all the time and we go through the struggle of we really want to better than the industry. That's the end goal, right? And we go through our ups and downs and sometimes we feel like there's progress being made and then we sit down and like man is progress really being made, right? And today I leave fire not right because there's somebody that is a pull pro that's putting a product together that when we talk about helping pull pros be financially successful, right? Which is our core mission of what we want to do. This is a tool that if they use if they put in play is just going to be game changer for them. So I leave excited today knowing, Hey, with our mission and with people like you and the tools like that and wanting to better the industry, we're going to get there for sure. Hey, thanks to everybody out there. Catch me and John next Wednesday. Yes, we will be back live next Wednesday. Miss the last two. I heard it. I'm sorry. We will be back next Wednesday. What we're going to do a little bit different. We normally leave with word from our sponsors, but you know what? Somebody magically sent me a video on a lot of people that you guys, your guys, this products and we're going to go ahead and play that as our outro. We'll catch everybody next Wednesday. Have a great weekend. Bye guys. It responds from all the employees of how much better this was made it clear that we were on the right track choosing bull brain. The most valuable features in pull brain are the automated alerts. It's really helped us to address issues before their issues, to fix things before our customers notice them and to reduce our total number of complaints and rainfalls. That's normally when we start losing customers is when the pull turns great, right? So the alert feature has been again, another game changer for our freeing choice. The ability to have the alerts and kind of track the consistency of the alerts if it's going on for a couple of weeks gives us the ability to get ahead of customer issues and really work with them to solve the problems that ultimately would have led to churn downstream. You've definitely seen material gain with the chemical tracking function in bull brain. Because we're using consistent tools, we have the dosing calculator and all kinds of features turned on. We're finding that we can get texts out in the field faster and also when they're out in the field, they're out doing consistent work the way we want and done. There really is so little training for the technician. It's self-explanatory. It takes them step by step and is very user friendly. It's the email and the detail of the photos, the description of the photos and any call to actions after a visit. It is far superior to the competition. We have been able to basically double the size of our customer base with the same amount of folks handling the upfront office things because of the streamline processes between billing and customer service. We've been able to reduce our money owed over 60 days to under 0.6%. One of the big ones is the real time progress indicators. It provides the back office to you with the ability to monitor the text and what they're getting accomplished or not getting accomplished throughout the day. That's just a huge from a accountability perspective. I love to nerd out in the technician page and see exactly what everyone where people are doing on a daily basis. The payroll side of bull brain is far and above better than everybody else. The feature set that we've gotten in fact has had on our business has absolutely paid off and again I already think it's better now and it will continue to just get better. I know what bull brain is done for us and so I'm happy to refer it to Indian all pull service companies out there. We have tried multiple bull routing software solutions and bull rares by far the best. It's better to try to strew if you're a bull company you'd be crazy not to lost bull brain. It is really good. It really is great.
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