Cost Per Pool Calculator

Understanding Your Cost Per Pool

As Edgar from the Pool Nation Podcast puts it: "This is the number that decides if your business is profitable, scalable, and more importantly sustainable."

Most pool pros underestimate their true costs by 30-60% because they only count wages and chemicals. "Once you actually see what the real cost is of servicing a pool. Once you see it written down on paper, it strips away all that uncertainty. There's no more guessing. There's no more assumptions."

Cost Per Pool vs. Cost Per Stop

There are two important numbers to understand:

• Cost Per Pool (Customer): Your total monthly expenses divided by total customers. This gives you a high-level view of your business health.
• Cost Per Stop: Your total monthly expenses divided by total service visits. This reveals where the "leaks" are in your business.

"Cost per customer tells you your overall business health. Your cost per stop tells you where the leaks are." - Pool Nation Podcast

Why both matter: Two customers paying the same $175/month aren't equal if one requires 4 visits and the other requires 8 (like an Airbnb serviced twice weekly). "You might have two houses that are paying the same monthly rate, but house A takes you four visits and the other one takes you eight because say it's an Airbnb that you're servicing twice a week. It's not created equally."

The Hidden Costs Most Pros Miss

"If your business account paid for it, it belongs to the cost per pool. It's that simple."

These are the expenses that sneak up on you. As Zac describes it: "There's a saying death by a thousand cuts... these are going to sneak up on you because you don't feel it on a day-to-day basis, but when they hit your bank account, they hit it hard."

• Labor burden: "A $22/hr employee actually costs you $27-30/hr" when you add payroll taxes, workers comp, liability insurance, sick days, training time, and overtime. "18 becomes 23 to 24 bucks. And 20 bucks an hour becomes 25 to 26 bucks an hour. $22 becomes 27 to 29."
• Drive time: "If you're paying your tech 28 bucks an hour, right, what we call the burden rate... 30 minutes of drive time is $14 straight out of the pocket. And I want you to think about that. For that 30 minutes of drive time, you paid for that employee to do absolutely no work. They're just driving."
• Vehicle costs: Fuel, tires, brakes, oil changes, AC repairs. "Trucks are maintenance machines. Got to have them... these things happen. When you have machines on the road and people working out in the elements, you're going to have to deal with these repairs."
• Insurance: "Insurance has gone up more than almost any other category in the last two years... even if you are the safest person, even if you've had no claims, you've seen the prices go up anywhere from 10 to 20% year-over-year."
• Office expenses: "There are an endless amount of expenses involved with rent, with phones, with software, with printer ink. It all starts to add up."
• Chemicals in bulk: What you spent this month, not what you used per pool. "A lot of people get in that habit and they start thinking like, 'Oh yeah, you know, my chemical cost is $4 a pool.' But when they sit down and they check the books and they realize that, man, we spent $2,400 on chemicals this month and they figure out the number of visits, it puts it at like seven or eight dollars a stop."

Why This Number Changes Everything

"Once you have that number, you get that clarity, you start making decisions based on your numbers instead of your feelings and your business becomes a lot more financially healthier."

"Those that figure it out very early in their journey, they scale a lot faster and they build a stronger foundation than those that kind of have built, you know, two 300 pools and then they figure out that, hey, their cost per pool isn't where it needs to be."

• Pricing: Know exactly what you need to charge to be profitable
• Problem accounts: "It takes the emotion out of it. And instead of, you know, thinking, man, I feel bad for raising my prices or they've been a great customer for a long time... if you could see that you're losing money and you're not making money on that pool. It makes that decision a whole lot easier."
• Route density: See the real cost of distant pools
• Confidence: "This is the number that's going to give you the confidence to make the decisions that you need to make."