A common question among pool service professionals is: Am I charging enough?

Determining the right rate increases to stay solvent and maintain past profitability can be challenging, especially in times of persistent inflation. Simply waiting out the storm is not an option, but deciding how much to raise rates is difficult when the fear of losing customers looms large.

One helpful tool for estimating the impact of rate increases on profits and losses is an inflation impact tool created by National Pool Partners. This user-friendly Microsoft Excel spreadsheet allows users to input their weekly service charges (with or without chemicals), the number of pools serviced, the number of employees and their hourly wages, and the costs of chemicals. The spreadsheet automatically calculates profitability. Users can then input different price changes to see the potential impact of inflation and determine how to adjust rates while considering the potential loss of customers, ultimately helping business owners achieve their desired profit levels.

Consider, for example, a pool service company located in Southern California, with no employees, and a service route consisting of 50 residential pools on once-weekly service. Let’s say the company hasn’t raised its rates in a while and is charging its average customer $150 per month, which includes chemicals. Using the inflation impact calculator, and estimating a chemical cost of $8.25 per stop, this company makes $5,712 per month.

Then consider that in the last year, the company is now paying $5 more per 50 pounds of trichlor, and the price of liquid chlorine went up by $1.

The spreadsheet allows you to easily input those changes, along with how much you use one chemical versus another, and it provides an inflation estimate, based on these changes.

You can then see how much money you are losing this year compared to last year by maintaining the same price structure.

You can play with various price increases to see what you should be charging customers to make the same amount of profit that you are comfortable with.

It even tells you how many customers you can afford to lose.

Unfortunately, the spreadsheet doesn’t factor in gasoline, business licenses, permits, fees, insurance, or truck payments, which can be substantial, so that is a limitation.

This issue of Service Industry News, the first of our three annual survey issues, is focused on the question of billing — specifically, how much do you charge your customers for once-weekly pool service?

In recent years, we have been wit- ness to the steady increase in billing as pool service companies have been forced to raise rates.

In Southern California, for which pool service owners’ participation in our annual survey is heaviest and thus provides the most reliable data, we have watched this charge increase from just over $100 a month in 2019, to about $130 a month in 2021, to $140 a month in 2022, to $160 a month in 2023, to their current average charge of $180 a month in 2024.

It is important to note that this price increase, which has also taken place across the rest of the country, reflects the increased cost of doing business — the increase in the price of chemicals, pool equipment, as well as attracting labor. In no way does it reflect an increase in profitability.

This issue of Service Industry News is the first installment of three survey issues.

We present the 2024 results on billing — specifically, how do you charge, and how much do you charge for your services.

This issue on billing is the result of our 37th annual survey, a nationwide service technician feedback form that asks professionals a variety of questions about their businesses.

The data presented is the result of a survey made available to thousands of service professionals across the United States.

The information presented here is the result of survey participation from 15 states. Responses came from service firms both large and small.

Because there are regional trends in how pool service professionals conduct their businesses, the data is broken down by geographic area, which might enable business owners to compare their own practices to their immediate peers.

Although it is not a purely scientific survey, we believe that our results present a representative picture of the state of the industry in 2024.

Reader participation this year was sufficient to enable us to choose those pricing categories that were supported by adequate data.

In some cases, light participation does not allow us to provide detailed breakdowns for each level of service. Nonetheless, we have acquired enough data to provide some information for every area of the country.

We thank all of those who took part in this year’s survey who made it possible for the industry to get an idea of today’s regional trends.

In our next installment, we will take a look at labor fees that are charged by service professionals. These include not only hourly labor fees, but also the amounts that are charged for equipment repairs, seasonal jobs, and other specialty tasks. Look for it in the June 15 edition of Service Industry News.