0 to 650 Pools - Arizona Mirage

Hello, everyone. Welcome. I am talking to Brian Wright of Arizona Mirage and Aquamosis. I'm going to be talking about Brian's experience in the pool service industry and also his reverse osmosis offerings and this sort of thing. Brian, welcome to the show.

Good morning, Parker. Thank you for having me on.

Brian, I'm curious to get started by just hearing how you got started in the pool industry and how long you've been involved and your general story in the pool business.

Wow. That's a whole topic on its own. Briefly, I was a commercial diver, and I became an underwater welder and a welding inspector. And I would be gone for three weeks at a time, home for three weeks or longer, depending on the situation. My wife and I, who was my high school sweetheart, been together 36 years now. I'm like, I need something to do when I'm home. So I learned how to do irrigation and outdoor lighting back from Chicago area, where I'm from. And I decided I'm going to start an irrigation outdoor lighting company, so I did that.

And I had a client call me and say, hey, can you maintain my backyard? I'm like, well, I don't have the equipment for it. So I purchased the equipment, went and started maintaining the backyard. And then a buddy of mine who I'm still friends with today, he's over in the East Valley, and he's like, hey, dude, if you're blowing leaves into the pool and you're cleaning it, why aren't you charging the client for that? I'm like, all right, how do I do that? He's like, I'll show you how. So I spent about two to three weeks training how to do pools. Bought my own equipment, started doing pool service. It was just myself and my wife.

And then in 2006, we had a couple employees. This all started around 2004. In 2006, we had a fire in the truck because we had landscaping equipment and pool stuff in there. And hazmat came out, shut the whole neighborhood down to a hazmat area. That's another story, but I decided, let's get out of the landscaping business. Let's just stick with pools.

Fast forward to 2009. I had one realtor guy that I knew because I went to these networking meetings. He's like, hey, I got this realtor that has got a couple pool guys not doing their job. Go and talk to her. So I did. It was with a well known real estate company here in the Valley. They had about 30 pools. And she's like, can you handle this? I'm like, well, it's just me, my wife, and at the time it was my dad. And he was just doing sales calls for me. I flew home. I'm like, hey, let's go take care of all these pools. So we went out, looked at all 30 of these pools in one day, got the estimates to them next day, and they said, hey, we want you to maintain our pools. So we kept on growing and growing from there.

And now we are about 650 pools, we have about 15 employees. And so in 2016, I looked at doing RO water purification for swimming pools. I didn't feel the need for it at the time. Plus, it was really hard for people to start thinking about conserving water. And so I passed on that. And then COVID hit, and I'm like, man, this got to be the time to start conserving water because we had some really hot summers in '21, '22. And so I purchased my first RO rig from a company called Puri Pools that manufactures these machines. And I went out, got some training on it. There's another guy in the Valley here that does the water purification. Great mentor, great guy. And so he's in the East Valley, I'm in the West Valley. And started the purification process and realizing that we could save water. And not only that, the water is so much better than just draining the pool and refilling a pool. So that's kind of it in a nutshell on how we got into the pool industry. I mean, we've been very blessed doing what we've been doing.

Interesting. So you started out doing commercial diving, and then was it welding? And then eventually you got into outdoor lighting and then eventually landscaping. And you were landscaping, blowing leaves from the pool, and a friend told you to start cleaning the pools. I'd be curious to hear from you what were the differences of the landscaping business versus pools, and what led you to switch to doing pool service over landscaping type work?

There's a lot of competition for landscaping. Getting outbid by a lot of people that were not licensed. We were licensed, bonded, insured for the landscape side of it. And I was just trying to find the right people to work. We're talking 20 some years ago, 2004, 2006-ish. And I think it was about 2006 when we actually really started pushing on the swimming pools.

But actually, because I'm a water guy living in the desert, I love water. And I found that I enjoyed servicing the pool and the outcome you get when you have somebody's pool that looks like a swamp, you turn it around, make it beautiful, crystal clear blue again. That just speaks for itself. I get more satisfaction from a swimming pool than I do from landscaping. That's why we're just sticking with pools.

Yeah. And you've been doing pools for how long now, did you say? Since 2006?

Kind of. It's weird because we started in 2004. We started Arizona Mirage in 2004. Then I think it was about 2006 when we had the fire. So I'm thinking around 2004, 2005 is when we actually started the pool service side of Arizona Mirage.

Since COVID, you've now been working on the reverse osmosis type work. I'd be curious to zoom in on what is reverse osmosis, how does it work, and how did you get into it, and what is your business there involved?

Well, the RO side of it, we call it RO because basically, you take your RO system you have underneath your sink for drinking water, right? And you just times it by a hundred. That's how much bigger these systems are. They're self-sustained, so it has its own generator, has its own fuel source, has the membranes inside the trailer, and it has its own filtration system.

So what we do is we run lines from the swimming pool to the trailer. And we run it through the trailer and remove any impurities, such as total dissolved solids, cyanuric acid, salts, bacteria, hardness, viruses, everything that we can remove without having to drain the pool. Now you can adjust other balances of the pool, such as your chlorine. If it's too high, you don't put any chlorine in. If it's too low, you add a shock or add extra chlorine. That stuff can be adjusted without draining the pool. We can remove some phosphates, but phosphates can be removed with a product. But what we're really attacking here is the solids and the hardness, because we have really high calcium hardness in the water here in Arizona.

And how does this compare to draining? I figure the alternative is draining and refilling the pool. What are the pros and cons? When might one consider reverse osmosis over draining, and draining over reverse osmosis?

Great question. So a couple things. One, if you have a pool that has a bad finish and you can't afford to remodel the interior of the pool, this is the best way to go. Because every time you drain a pool, you're susceptible to being exposed to the environment, causing cracking, popping, chipping of the pool. And in wetter areas—not that we have that problem here in Arizona—the pool can come out of the ground. That's more like in Texas or Florida area where you don't want the pool to come out.

So the only way to purify or to get your clear water is to do the purification process, and then you're also conserving up to 80% of the water. So some areas have high water costs. And if you're conscious about what your water bill is going to be, and I get it, some people are like, oh, my bill's only going to be $50 or $100. Like, yeah, but then you put that into the aspect of hey, I got to drain my pool. My pool is going to be down. It could crack. It could pop. So is saving a couple hundred dollars worth it to drain your pool? Maybe, but I want to conserve the integrity of the shell of the pool.

Okay, so a few of the benefits that reverse osmosis and the service you provide through Aquamosis provides over normal draining is it prevents the risk of cracking and popping, and also saves people on their water bill.

Yes, exactly. It does in a way. I've had people say that the cost effectiveness was maybe $100, $200 more than doing the drain and fill.

I see. And then, as someone who's just learning about the business, what are the instances where a customer's pool would traditionally be drained but you'd do the RO process instead?

If they need to do a chlorine bath. If they got staining in their pool and they're trying to clear that up. If the pool is super green, we cannot run it through the system because it'll clog up all the filtration system in there. So our job is to clear the swimming pool before we do the process. So if you have a green pool and we can clear it up and have it ready for us to run through the process, we can do that. But if it's like a swamp, you might as well just drain the pool. So there are instances where you will need to drain the swimming pool.

And what are these instances in terms of like, you go to a customer's pool or one of your techs is servicing their pool, and they report back that it should be drained. What are the different cases where you do need to drain a pool versus doing RO?

So what we'll do is we'll look at what the stabilizer level is, what the total dissolved solids levels are, what the calcium levels are. Locations that have well water, we have to test for silica, which is fine sand particles in the water. And if that's too high, there's no way that we can do the RO process.

There are other businesses here that will take the chance and do it. But for me, the cost to clean the membranes or replace them from having something like the silica being too high, I don't take that chance. I just tell people even if the pool is crystal clear and their total dissolved solids are high, I'm like, you're just going to have to drain the pool. And then you have to have water hauled in if you're on a well.

I always tell everybody we need to test it at least three to four months after you have it put in or refreshed with the water that you haul in, because then we want to see what the readings are from the water that was hauled in. We just have really bad water here in Arizona. I mean, you wonder why they call it the Salt River? Because there's so much salt in the water here. We have a salt aquifer underneath us.

And if you get too high—say my highest I like to go is 8,000 total dissolved solids. Above 8,000, I'm like, you might as well just drain the pool because it'll take me twice as long to run it through the process than it would be for them to just refill the pool.

Okay, that makes sense. And I want to come back now to you in 2004 starting to do pools. And now in 2026, 22 years later, I'm curious about the process. Maybe we can talk about the story of you and Arizona Mirage and now having a 650-pool business. What were some of the key milestones along the way? Maybe hiring your first employee or this sort of thing. Could you walk me through your journey there?

Well, it's funny. He might get upset if I talk about him. But my operations manager, his parents were one of my first clients. I think I was doing irrigation for them. I put in an irrigation system in their backyard. And mind you, I came from the Midwest, so I had this big 24-foot snowmobile trailer that was hauling all my gear in there.

Where in the Midwest?

Chicago area. I brought it here from the Midwest. Actually, I bought it from my buddy who got me into the pool business.

I was born in Wisconsin. That's why I'm asking.

So I'm working in the backyard, I come out and I see this kid in my trailer, and I'm like, what are you doing? He's like, oh, I just want to organize your trailer. I'm like, really? Okay. So I'm looking at this kid, and I'm in my 30s, and I'm looking at this kid, I'm like, you want a job? I think he was 15 at the time. He's like, yeah, man, I want a job. I'm like, all right.

So I hired him, and I'm gonna say his name. His name is Bryce Rebland, and he's been with me since I started the company. I taught the kid how to drive stick, how to back up trailers. And I remember times that I'd have to go back and bang on his door, saying, come on, kid, you got work to do, at six in the morning, like, we got to get going. And here he is today. He's pretty much running the show for me at the shop all the time. And that was our first employee.

And then we were running this out of our house. And we have three daughters, and they were very young, I think our oldest was four when we started the company. And so, parking all this stuff on the side of my house, I'm having deliveries of chemicals brought to my house, and I'm like, I need to do something.

Well, let me step back a minute. I had a truck and I didn't have any lettering on it, and I started seeing wraps on trucks. And so I told my dad—my dad was very successful—he's like, don't wrap your truck. You're not ready for that. I'm like, yeah, I want to look more professional, right? I don't want to just throw a magnet on my truck. There's nothing wrong with magnets on your truck. Everybody starts somewhere.

And so I threw the wrap on the truck. And my dad happened to be driving that truck, and he was filling up at a gas station, and this guy at the gas station started asking him about the pools. Well, that customer ended up being a customer. I think he's still our customer right now today, for over 20 years this guy's been our customer.

My dad comes back to me and he's like, man, I have to say, that was one of the best things you ever did. Take it back, that you weren't ready for that. He's like, do the wraps on all your trucks. I'm like, all right, yeah, that works. So every time we get a new truck, it gets a wrap on it or gets our signage on it. We don't do full wraps anymore, but it gets our signage on it. So that was a big milestone for us because that just really got us busy.

And then I was like, all right, we need to get out of our house. So we got our first rental. And we only had the one truck, and we had this 1500 square foot shop. And my wife was like, I'm not ready for this. I'm like, I think we're going to be all right. And we went from, I think, 100 pools to almost 250, 300 pools. And this was right around 2008, 2009. And that's when the market took its crash.

And that is when I got introduced to that other realtor I mentioned earlier, where we took over 30 pools. I think it was from three different pool guys.

And so were those people the realtor knew, and the realtor had helped people buy houses and they set them up with a pool? What was the situation?

No. This realtor was a referral from another realtor that needed a pool company to take care of pools that were in foreclosure that people wanted to purchase. You can't sell a house with a dirty looking backyard.

Okay, that makes sense.

So we started cleaning these all up. And 2009 is when we really blew up, I think. I think we went probably 350, 400 pools and our goal was always a thousand pools. Today's day and age, I'm like, I don't know if 1,000 pools—it seems more of a headache than staying where we are.

But every year it's just been substantial growth, and I think that 2009 era was our biggest milestone for our growth. And now we're in a 5,500 square foot shop with 15 employees and almost 650 pools.

The services you provide—there's obviously Aquamosis and the RO stuff. But if I'm understanding correctly, you guys just do service. I know some businesses have a retail shop and then service. You're primarily a service company. Am I getting that correct?

Yep. We are primarily a service company. We do full swimming pool services. We do hot tub services. We do commercial services. We're licensed for residential and commercial. We do acid washes, tile cleans, repairs, upgrades to your pool equipment. But yes, it's been a real fun road, I would have to say.

And I'm curious. You said you have 15 employees and you got started with your wife. I figure she was probably doing more of the bookkeeping, operational side of things?

No. Oh, yeah. Oh, no, no, no, no. This little lady, she's just under 5 foot, so she's a tiny one. She was out there doing acid washes, filter cleans with me, servicing the pools. Because mind you, I would travel for work every three weeks at a minimum. So I left her alone with our three daughters to run our company, having Bryce by her side. She's the one that should get the big pat on the back. Because in 2020 is when I retired from diving and inspection. So I've been focused on the company since 2020.

And then what is the structure of the company look like? How many of the people working for you are techs? How many supervisors? How many people in the office?

I have an office manager and two office girls that are in the office. I have an operations manager and a field lead. And the field lead basically has meetings and is kind of the go-to guy for our technicians to say, hey, I'm having a problem with this pool.

And on the technicians, I think we're at eight technicians now, we just hired another one. And we're starting to get more girls on our team, which is awesome, because everybody's like, oh, this is just a man's business. No, no, no, no. My wife is one of the first women that was out there. But there's a lot more women coming in to running business, running the pool side. I know a lot of ladies, husband-wife teams that are just killing it out there. And then we've seen a lot more women out there actually servicing swimming pools, which is awesome.

And then how do you source new talent and new technicians? I know people have different strategies—maybe they post something online or they put a job into a retail shop. How do you source your technicians?

Some of it's been word of mouth. And that goes all right, because people are like, hey, I got a guy looking for a job. But the problem with those is the guys that are looking for jobs that are getting referred from somebody else, I hate to say it, but they're really not a good fit. It's like, why do you need a job when you come to me and say, hey, I need to make some money? That's not what I want you for. I want somebody that wants to be part of a career. The money always comes when you can prove yourself.

You know, having a guy in our business that's like, hey, I want to move up to repairs. What does it pay? I don't know if I want you doing repairs if it's just about pay. I get it, everybody wants to make money, but I want somebody who wants to learn it and do an outstanding job at what they do.

But as far as sourcing, we use Indeed, we have a page. You know about the AZ Pool Tech page that people will be like, hey, this guy's looking for a job or anybody hiring. And we'll vet people. They'll come in for a phone interview, and then I'll have an in-person interview with them because I want to vet them first.

And I will hire either a trained or untrained person. The trained people, though, I got to retrain them, because not all pool companies are the same. Some guys are just splash and dashers, and we're not that. I want people that are going to go in and say, oh, yeah, this pool needs to be vacuumed. We're going to vacuum this pool.

And how long does training take for you guys?

Oh, four weeks at a minimum.

Four weeks at a minimum. And what does that look like? Is the person doing ride-alongs with someone else? Is there any unsupervised stuff during the training?

And that is the other thing I forgot to mention—I will have you go on a day or two ride-along to see if this is actually something you want to do. And I'm looking for somebody that goes in on a ride-along and doesn't just stand back and watch. I will pay you for the ride-along. I want somebody that's going to be like, hey, let me do this. You know, if you're just sitting back watching me do everything, then you're not a go-getter. Get in there, ask questions, say, hey, how do you do this? Can I try this? Let me do that.

Yeah. Interesting. And how do you run your business in terms of software? Do you use something like Skimmer? I imagine you use QuickBooks.

Yeah, we actually use quite a few. We do use QuickBooks, but we are slowly merging to Skimmer. Skimmer we've been using for a long time. I've tried some other programs. They have some great stuff, but they just weren't what we were looking for.

We started in the very beginning with Pool Trek, which I believe is meant for just a single pooler. They were really great in the beginning for what we needed. But as soon as we kept on growing and growing, we needed something else to adapt with us. I haven't looked at Pool Trek in a long time, but I'm sure they've expanded what they do.

Pool Brain—Adam Beach is an amazing guy. I've met him a long time ago when he first started Pool Brain. Unfortunately, the tracking at the time wasn't what we needed. He's evolved, and I really wanted to switch over, but there's just some things that were too difficult for us to do. Like you imagine having 650 clients that you want to get all their information into another service program. Photos, everything. That would require all my technicians out there to take photos. And stuff that was just too much for us to do.

I tell you what, if Adam Beach came up—Adam, I hope you're listening—if you come up with a way that you can transpose everything, photos, everything, just automatic transfer over, I'd probably try it again. But Pool Brain's a good one.

I've looked at RB Controls many, many years ago, but I'm very happy with Skimmer. Skimmer did throw a little curveball for everybody back in the day when they raised their rates and everybody was panicking because they like tripled the rates. Like, what the heck is going on? But I made a phone call to them and Skimmer support and everybody there has been very good to us. I come up with ideas. I'm like, hey, you need to add this. And I get a response. I just saw an email come in from them because we were talking about something we needed done in Skimmer and they're like, hey, we're going to work on that. Okay, cool.

So yeah, we use Skimmer, we use QuickBooks, we use Square Team. Square Team is how my people keep track of their time, and that's how we communicate with everybody. And they can put in their time off requests. So I use that.

And then another thing I use is Verizon Reveal. Verizon Reveal is GPS tracking for my trucks, camera systems, and it's AI. And the other thing it does is that tells me how much fuel my guys are using. If they don't have a seatbelt on, it will give them an alert. If they're speeding or reckless driving, they'll get alerts. So it's kind of cut back on—we've had some incidents, obviously cut back on incidents.

And then they can also do a vehicle inspection report with this. And it's all on a phone. So those are the four programs that we use on a daily basis.

Someone watching this, maybe they're earlier in their career getting started in the industry. What sort of advice do you have for them? Are there any mistakes you made in your career that if someone gave you that advice and took you aside and said, hey, Brian, think about this very seriously, that would have saved you some time? What advice do you have for people earlier on in their career, maybe they own a pool service business?

Have a partner you trust. And I'm not saying go out there and become partners with a buddy. I'll tell you what, buddies and family and friends do not work out. My best partner is my wife. I tell everybody we wouldn't be where we are today if it wasn't for her. I'm the brains behind, hey, I can go make the money and I can do the jobs. But she's the one that keeps the day-to-day organization of everything. HR, financing, everything. We don't spend money unless we go to her and we're like, hey, we need this. Can we get this? Well, what's it going to bring us in? All right, this is what it's going to do for us.

So yeah, having a good partner. Because if you try and do everything yourself, you're just going to burn yourself out. You're going to be so overwhelmed.

And then talk to smarter people than you. That's what I do. I meet with some guys. Like, I want to meet with one of them tomorrow. He's going to see how I set up the RO trailer. We're going to sit, he wants to see how it gets set up. Probably going to go have lunch. We help each other out. We share some of our documentation to help each other, which I think is the best.

I mean, even though everybody's like, oh, man, that's my competition. I tell you right now, not every single pool company services every single pool in the Phoenix area. There's no way. There's too many pools. You think about the small amount that I have? I'm at 650 pools. How many pools does everybody else got? Up to 100. You know, you got a lot of these single poolers and there's—I think the last time I checked, there's almost a million pools in the Phoenix area.

So there's no way that we can all cover all these pools. Even our biggest competitor—I'm going to call them a competitor because they're the biggest—I just found out they acquired another pool company and they got 42,000 pools nationwide. Nationwide. So it's like, okay, so if you have 42,000 pools, how many do you have here in the Valley? 20,000. That's a far cry from a million pools.

So I mean, for anybody that wants to get in this business, go to the pool shows. Talk to other pool guys. Don't be afraid to ask questions. The only dumb questions are the ones that aren't asked.

Do you ever travel to pool shows out of state? Or is it mostly Desert Pool and Spa? Do you go to IPSSA meetups? Do you have any recommendations in terms of networking like that?

Oh, yeah. I have been invited to IPSSA and I have considered joining IPSSA. The only benefit I would see going to IPSSA for me is to just be around other guys. The single pooler guys, it's a great thing for them because they offer insurance, they offer sick coverage. There's other things that they offer.

I have been invited to a lot of IPSSA meetings because I know a lot of guys in the Valley here. I have gone to Las Vegas for the pool show. Anytime one of our manufacturers puts on a summit or something, like, I'm headed to Georgia in March for Hayward Summit, and they have speakers and such, encouraging speakers. And you get to meet other pool companies across the nation that go to these summits, and you learn from them, you get their numbers, you talk to them, say, hey, can I reach out to you if I have a question about this? Because even though they're in a different market area, you may learn something from them.

But yeah, get as much education as you can. Get a business coach. We had a business coach.

How early in your process did you get a business coach?

Eight years ago.

Eight years ago. Okay, interesting.

Yeah. It's great having a business coach, but we decided we didn't want to keep going with a business coach anymore because we kept on talking about the same thing. We're like, okay, talked about this. So now I just go to other ways to get coached. Either business guys—not even just pool business.

And it's funny, I actually have one of my clients who has four factories across the nation. And he made a comment about how he's having to put out fires at his four factories that each one of his kids run. And he's like, this day and age, people are wanting to be at the top without working to get there. And they just say, hey, I just want to make this money up here and be up here. All right, well, show me what you can do. And then they're like, hey, I do this, I do that.

I had a dive coach that said, don't tell me. You could tell me all day long you know how to do a weld upside down. Until you show me you can do it, I don't want to hear it. Showing people what you can do is a lot better than saying what you can do.

All right. Well, I love it. And at that, I thank you for coming on today, Brian. It was fascinating to learn about your story. And thank you for your time.

Thank you. And anybody that's out there that wants or has questions, call me. Call me at Arizona Mirage. I'll give you my personal number sometime because I don't give that out too often because I'm afraid customers will get in. I don't want them calling me. I want them to call my office because they know everything.

But any of you guys out there wanting to learn more and more about pools, just be friendly. Talk to people. Ask some questions. If you know other pool guys, ask them questions. Or if you want to reach out to me, give me a holler. Thank you, Parker. Appreciate you.