Pool Route Optimization: Why Your Furthest Account Is Costing You Money

A pool company owner told me last month that he never turns down an account. I asked how far away his furthest one was. Forty minutes each way, $150 a month, and he'd had it for two years. He was proud of it. So we did the math together, and by the end he was a little quieter.

That account was paying him about four dollars an hour. He wasn't keeping a customer. He was subsidizing a commute.

This is pool route optimization, and it has nothing to do with software. Route software can order your stops. It cannot fix a route that is spread across three cities. Route density, meaning how close your stops are to each other, is decided one account at a time, every time you say yes.

I made the same mistake for the first two years I ran my own pool company in Gilbert. Every yes felt like growth. It took a bad month with a broken transmission to make me actually look at where my trucks were going. This article is that look, so you don't need the transmission.

What a far-away pool account really costs

Most owners price an account on the service. Chemicals, time at the pool, a little margin. Drive time gets treated as a cost of doing business, spread across everything, invisible. It is not invisible. It is the biggest variable cost on your route, and it is different for every stop.

Here is the forty-minute account, priced honestly:

Pay the tech $22 an hour and the account loses money every single week. It has been losing money for two years. The owner never saw it because it was buried in a route that, on average, made money.

The same math on an optimized pool route

Take the same $150 account and put it eight minutes from the previous stop. Drive time drops from 80 minutes to 16. Fuel drops to two dollars. Truck wear is almost nothing. Same revenue, same chemicals, same half hour at the pool.

Gross profit per hour of tech time goes from six dollars to about thirty-eight. Same customer. Same price. The only thing that changed is where it sits on the map.

That is why route density is the single biggest lever on profit in any route-based business, and why almost nobody manages it on purpose. Skimmer and Pool Brain will optimize the order of your stops in seconds. Neither can shorten a forty-minute drive. Only you can, by deciding which accounts to take. Pool service, lawn care, pest control, window cleaning, residential HVAC maintenance plans. Same math everywhere.

How many pools can one tech service in a day?

There is a simpler way to feel this. Count stops per truck per day. A tech running a scattered route across the East Valley does nine or ten weekly stops. A tech running a tight route in two adjacent neighborhoods does fourteen or fifteen. Same tech, same truck, same eight-hour day.

At $150 a month, five extra stops a day across a five-day week is 25 accounts. That is $3,750 a month in revenue from the same payroll and the same truck. You did not hire anyone. You did not buy anything. You just stopped driving.

• Under 10 stops a day: your route is costing you a truck's worth of revenue. Fix this before you buy another truck.
• 10 to 13 stops: normal. Most companies live here and think it is fine.
• 14 or more: the route is tight. This is where the good operators are, and it is where a buyer pays a premium if you ever sell.

Pool route optimization in five steps, without firing half your customers

You do not need to drop everyone outside a radius tomorrow. You need to stop adding to the problem and slowly fix the worst of it.

1. Map every account. Pins on a map. Skimmer, Pool Brain, and Jobber all do this. If you run on a spreadsheet, Google My Maps is free. Look at it once. You will see the outliers immediately.
2. Price by zone, not by pool. Inside your core area, your normal rate. One ring out, add $25 a month. Two rings out, add $50 and be honest that you would rather not. Most far customers will pay it. The ones who won't were losing you money anyway.
3. Say yes to neighbors at any price. When a homeowner three doors down from an existing stop calls, you can quote below your normal rate and still make more per hour than your average account. Density is worth a discount.
4. Drop the worst five. Not fifty. Five. Give them 60 days notice and a referral to a company closer to them. Refill those slots with accounts inside the core. Do it again next quarter.
5. Route new leads by map first. Before you quote, look at where the address is. If it is on your Tuesday route, quote it as a Tuesday stop. If it is nowhere near anything, quote the zone price or pass.

Route density and the phone are the same problem

Here is the part most owners miss. A tight route only works if you can fill it. The homeowner three doors down from your Tuesday stop calls once. If that call goes to voicemail while your tech is vacuuming, she calls the next company on Google, and your best possible account goes to someone with a worse route.

The companies that win on density answer every call, follow up every quote, and ask every happy customer for a review, because reviews in a neighborhood produce calls from that neighborhood. That is the whole reason I built PoolCRM. Missed calls get texted back in seconds, quotes get followed up on their own, and reviews get requested after every job. The route software runs the truck. This fills it.

If you want the longer version of where pool leads get lost, it is in the seven leaks. If you are trying to figure out which systems to build first, start with the five systems.

What happened to the forty-minute account

He dropped it. Gave the homeowner two months notice and the name of a company fifteen minutes from her. Within a month he had filled the slot with an account eight minutes from his house, off a review from a customer on the same street.

Same revenue on the books. About sixty hours a year back. That is a week and a half of a tech's time, every year, from one decision. He has eleven more accounts like it. He is working through them one a month.

Pool route optimization FAQ