Is Your Pool Route Bleeding Money? Smart Fixes!

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And welcome to the Pool My Podcast Show.
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I'm going to go over some practical tips to kind of save a little bit of money each month out there on your pool route.
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That's not going to, of course, affect the quality of your care, but it may actually add up to a significant amount of money and savings to your company, especially with this rapid inflation period that we're facing right now.
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We're in a weird period of time when the economy seems to be doing really well.
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The job report is good.
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There's fairly low inflation except for fuel costs.
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But this kind of nagging Iran conflict is causing some inflation and s and some kind of weird market conditions that may affect you all the way into next year, possibly, depending on where you're located.
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Like here in my area, we have gas prices as close to$6 a gallon.
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Some areas are probably over$6 a gallon.
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And you may be wondering, you know, how can I do something to kind of mitigate this and get through this period of time?
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And I really don't think it's necessary to circle the wagons or do anything drastic.
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I hear a lot of talk about you know getting rid of your high gas or gas scuzzler, low gas mileage vehicle, and getting something like the Ford Mavic hybrid, like it's like 40 miles per gallon, which is pretty good.
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And I can't deny that a truck that gets that kind of mileage is an excellent addition to your pool route.
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So if you don't have a vehicle and you're looking to buy one, I would probably shy away from like the Dodge Ram, and I would go with something like the Ford Mavic.
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If you can manage your pool route in a smaller vehicle, even the Hyundai has pretty good gas mileage.
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And my Honda Bridge Line currently gets about 19, maybe 20 miles per gallon.
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It's not terrible, but it's not robust compared to the bridge to the Mavic.
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And I hear Ford's coming out with a pure electric vehicle next year.
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So the first question or the question I get asked often is is it logical to get rid of a paid-off truck?
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Let's say it's getting 14 miles per gallon, but there's no payment on it, and get a Ford Mavic hybrid.
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Now you could probably sell that truck for the down payment, so I'll cover that.
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And that probably would bring the payment down to about$500 a month.
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So if you do the math on that, and let's say gas is$6 a gallon, and you drive a thousand miles a month on your pool route, you still won't break even with that kind of trade-in because your current truck you're spending about$430 a month on gas, and the Mavic is going to be about$150 a month on gas, which is tremendously great.
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I mean, that's that's an awesome drop.
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But then you have to add in the$500 truck payment, and you might have to add in higher insurance rates because it is a newer vehicle, and that's gonna raise that, and higher registration rates.
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So it's just not not just a car payment that you factor in, you have to factor in registration and insurance into that, but just a straight across-the-board math equation of you know$500 plus$150, that's$650, and your current vehicle spent you spent about$430 on gas.
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So you still are ahead with your current vehicle by quite a quite a lot of money over$200, still$228, actually, to be more exact.
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So you're still not saving any money by doing that, and you're creating more expenses.
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So that's not a smart thing to do.
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And it may look smart and it may seem smart at that moment, but you're at a negative$230.
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So if you just carry that math out for the entire and that's not including insurance or registration increase, by the way.
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But this is a$230, carry that over 12 months.
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That's a loss of$2,700.
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So not a not something that's going to help you.
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Now, what may help you with your current vehicle is to drive less miles, and how do you achieve that?
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Well, if you have outlying pools, it may be time to maybe trade them with somebody or put a sign up saying you have three pools for sale.
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It maybe take that money and purchase three pools closer to your pool route, or just let those three pools go and shave off a hundred miles a month and driving, which will be actually a pretty significant savings if you were to do that over the course of the year.
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So something as simple as that would be a more logical way of doing it.
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And I know a new truck sounds good, and getting going to the gas station and get and putting all that money in feels bad, but that's not a mathematically sound answer according to my numbers.
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And you can come up with your own numbers, but I still can't get the math to work with the car payment in there.
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Now, if there's no car payment, of course, the math is much better, but then you got to think of what happened to that forty thousand dollars that you put into the truck, where else could you have put that for better use?
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So any way you look at it, the math doesn't really work that well.
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It's more or less a better math to cut back and find ways not to drive as much or consolidate things, maybe have your supplies and chemicals delivered to your house rather than you go and pick them up.
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And that's another thing to consider as well.
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I know there was a big craze or rage back in the 90s and 2000s where people would remove their tailgate.
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I don't see this that often anymore, or as many people doing it.
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Maybe they'll do it again with the gas prices as high as they are.
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But if you actually research it, that was kind of a fab because it didn't work.
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It actually made you get less mileage.
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I think you actually lost about one mile per gallon with the tail off the truck or the tail down, you'd even lose even more.
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So that went out because you don't really save any mileage with the tail off or down in your truck.
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It's actually worse for you.
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Nor do you save a tremendous amount by reducing the weight in your truck, although logically you don't want to be carrying 300 pounds of chemicals in the back of your truck unless you need to.
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But there's not a significant drop in your truck's gas mileage by going from say 300 pounds of stuff in the back of the truck to 150 pounds or 100 pounds of stuff, because you might save 10 to 15 dollars a month in fuel cost, which is not gonna move the needle tremendously.
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I mean, two 150 bucks a year is not great.
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I think really the focus should not be on these little things that don't really do much.
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You want bigger results, and if you're gonna make changes, you want to make big changes that gives you big results.
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So bear with me for a moment.
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Let me just uh make a suggestion that is probably logical and is actually something that can be done, it's not totally crazy.
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But let's just say that you have this truck that you're driving a thousand miles a month, the gas price is six dollars, so you're spending four hundred and thirty dollars a month on gas.
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What if you were to take 200 miles off of that truck that month and you're only driving 800 miles?
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Now, this sounds like it's unrealistic, but what if you went from a five-day work week to a four-day work week, and you consolidated your pools onto four days versus five days, shaving off about 50 miles of driving a week, which would be 200 miles a month, which would save you about$150 a month, which would equal about$1,800 a year.
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So there's something significant you could do.
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Now, I don't say you should do this, I'm just giving you some ideas and some real numbers that will move the needle quite a lot more than removing your tailgate, which won't help your gas mileage, it'll actually hurt it, or lightening your load and maybe not having something on your truck that you kind of need later, and you're gonna bring it because you wanted to save, you know, 25 cents, 30 cents that day in fuel cost.
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That's not gonna really move the needle as much as something like going from five days a week to four days a week.
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I think a big one here, and this is one that a lot of people don't want to hear, is that eating out actually costs you quite a bit of money and time as well.
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And I've always been wanting to pack a lunch or pack something in my truck, a snack, and not really spent time stopping and eating out.
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But if you spend, let's just say$14 a day eating out five times a week, and you just do that 45 weeks, let's just say 45 weeks of eating out, that's three thousand one hundred and fifty dollars.
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That's quite a lot of money, and I can do kind of a running total here to get an idea here.
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So eighteen hundred, and of course you would only eat out four days a week at that point, so that's gonna cut that, but I'll just say three thousand then eating out, so that's forty eight hundred dollars right there by just changing a little habit of eating out every day, maybe stopping to get a Starbucks.
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These things add up, doesn't add up over the course of a week because that's like$70, maybe$80 you're spending.
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Doesn't seem like a lot of money, but over the course of an entire year, that adds up to a lot of money.
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And I'm not trying to be a killjoy here.
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I think you need to have, of course, meals and you know occasional Starbucks, but there should be some type of budget and some kind of expenses that you have every week and you can't go over this amount.
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Because if you don't have everything written down, if you don't have an expense l ledger or log, then you really don't know how much money you're spending on these things.
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And it's one of those things where you really if you really want to save money, you don't save money by doing little tiny things.
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You save money by making larger changes to how you do your business, how you operate it, maybe go from again five days a week to four days a week, maybe skip the lunch more often and bring something from home.
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These do add up to a lot of savings there.
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On the other end of it, your chemical costs, just if you have a pool on your route, or two or three pools that use a ton of chemicals and you're not passing that cost on to the customer, that could also bleed you.
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And I'll just, you know, just let's just say right now you're at 4,800, by the way, with the lunches and going from five to four days.
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Let's say you had three pools on your route that you're you're not really charging the customer for the extra chemicals you're putting in.
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But let's just say that each of those pools is eating up about$15 in chemicals a week times three.
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That's$45.
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And let's just say that 48 weeks times 48.
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That's$2,160 there, plus the$4,800 that you're saving over there.
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That's almost$7,000 right there by these three accounts that are gobbling up chemicals, changing eating habits, and maybe driving less in your truck.
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That's pretty significant.
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Now, what do you do with these pools that are chemical hogs?
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Well, if you're not itemizing all your chemicals, which I don't do myself because that that leads to some irregular billing numbers, and customers kind of like a consistent monthly bill, in my opinion.
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That in my area at least, maybe area is different.
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But here they like just, you know, if they're paying 180, that's all they're gonna pay.
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They don't want to pay, you know, 176 one month, 185 the next month.
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They want a straight, consistent billing.
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And so what I include is the maintenance dose of chlorine and acid and the trichlor tablets, they purchase the bucket, I leave it at the account, and that's their expense, not mine, when I have a trichlor pool.
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So that helps a lot right there.
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But anything else that I add to the pool, enzymes, phosphoryl, large amounts of chlorine would fit in that category.
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So if you have these pools that are gobbling up chlorine like crazy, and you're not charging customers for it, it could be more than three accounts, by the way.
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I'm just using three as a baseline number.
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You could have five of these, you could have six of these, seven of these.
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This could add to a lot of money over the course of one year or course of one month as well.
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And you really can't let this slip through the cracks because as I mentioned, every dollar counts in a sense, not you know, doing things that are weird, but every dollar does count towards your bottom line and increasing your net, especially in an inflationary, weird economic market.
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And it's one of those things where you have to be consistent with the customer.
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So if you have customers that are using a lot of chlorine, what I like to do is I just purchase a bucket of cal hypo, and then I will charge the customer for that cal hypo bucket, 25 or 50 pounds, depending on the chemical uses that's happening at that pool.
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And then I'll leave that bucket of cal hypo at the customer's pool, and I'll use that for any chlorine that I need to add to the pool.
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It's coming out of their pocket now and not my pocket.
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So little things like that, they're not so little, and they do change the whole dynamic of your net income versus the money going out.
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And you can think of probably a lot of these things with your company, things that I didn't mention here, but a tighter route if you get rid of some outline pools, possibly going from four days a week from five days a week to save on fuel costs, and of course it gives you more time because then you're gonna have a three-day weekend.
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You may work a little longer each day, but you're gonna have that extra day to maybe add some repairs that day or add some other services to make more money.
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And this is something I didn't cover here.
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I'm talking a lot about cutting, and that's an important aspect.
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You know, if you can cut certain places that don't hurt too much, but this this example in this podcast, I brought in about$7,000 a year and extra money by the examples I just gave you here, these short examples.
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So if you do other things like create that extra day where you have time to do more bids, maybe do some more installs on that day, increasing your bottom line, increasing your profit.
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What if you got rid of you know eight outlying pools and brought more accounts that are closer so that you can do more pools without driving too far, thereby increasing your output by two extra pools a day?
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That of course increases your income and really doesn't increase your outgo.
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So with these cuts, you can also do things to increase your income.
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And together, if you increase your income by, let's just say, you know, six thousand a year, and you have seven thousand and cuts because you know you've made these changes, that's$13,000 more every year.
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That's over$1,000 more income every month, just by looking at your business, drawing up a plan of certain areas where you can make some cuts and some changes, and certain areas where you can grow your business, maybe consolidate it.
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You know, don't do as much extra work.
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Maybe if you have some above-ground spas that are taking a lot of time but don't have what bringing in a lot of income, drop those and put a regular backyard full service pool count in its place.
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You kind of know your route, you know what works best.
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Maybe get rid of like a 30,000-gallon pool and put two 15,000 gallon pools in its place.
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All these things make a lot of sense, and they do add up to more income.
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And a lot of times cutting your expenses, giving you more time, it just takes some effort to sit down and just analyze your route, analyze where you can do these things to make yourself much more efficient.
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And it's not all about cutting, it's also about adding at the at the same time as you're cutting to really maximize this kind of effort with your business.
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If you're looking for other podcasts, you can find those by going to my website, swimmingpoollearning.com, clicking on the podcast icon on the banner.
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There'll be a drop the menu of over 2,000 podcasts there for you.
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And if you're interested in the coaching program, you can learn more at PoolGuyCoaching.com.
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Thanks for listening to this podcast.
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Have your rest of your week and God bless.