What to Include in a Pool Services Business Plan

1. Executive Summary

While many formats and templates are available for creating pool service business plans, each starts with an executive summary.

The executive summary introduces your pool service company and briefly explains the purpose of creating the business plan. 

This section grabs the reader's attention and encourages them to read the rest of the document.

To that end, shorten your executive summary. Ideally, stay within a page.

The summary should contain your:

• Marketing strategy

• Financial projection

• Money request (if you're looking for a loan or an investment)

• Target market or potential customers

Although the executive summary is the first page of your business plan, it's better to write it last to concisely summarize the other eight sections.

2. Business Overview

After explaining the reason for your business plan in the executive summary, the next thing is to give a detailed description of your pool service company.

If it's an existing business, this section will explain the state of the business to the reader. But if you're starting out, it will explain how you plan to operate the business.

When writing this section, start with a brief account of your founding story to connect emotionally to the reader.

You can mention your years of experience, what drove you to set up a pool service business, and how you overcame your challenges.

Next, state the type of pool service business you intend to run.

Will it be a commercial or residential pool cleaning company? Do you want to focus only on pool maintenance services, pool cleaning services, or both?

Remember to justify your choice.

For example, you decided to be a commercial pool cleaning company since few homes in your area have swimming pools.

Finally, specify the legal structure under which your business is registered—sole proprietorship, limited liability company, partnership, or corporation.

Other things you should mention here include:

• Unique selling proposition and differentiation

• Current financial status (if it's an existing business)

• Startup costs (if it’s a new business)

Pro tip!

If you're starting a new pool service business, purchase basic cleaning equipment like skimmers, water test kits, and leaf rakes first. You can buy others as the need arises.

3. Services Analysis

Now, reveal the different pool cleaning services you intend to offer customers.

If you need clarification on which cleaning service to offer, audit the pool equipment you included in your startup costs. Then, pick services you can do with them.

Remember to indicate the time of the year and how often you'll carry out each service.

Also, mention:

• Your cleaning process

• What sets you apart from other pool cleaning companies

• The frequency of pool cleanings for each customer

4. Market Analysis

Before you set up your pool service business, you want to ensure the market is large enough to support you and your competitors. If the market is saturated, you want to create a plan to upstage other pool cleaning companies.

That's where market analysis comes in.

Market analysis helps you understand the local competition, the opportunities available, and the needs of your target customer base.

It also helps you lay out an effective plan for bringing in new customers (more on this later.)

So, how do you analyze the market?

Create a list of your top 5-10 competitors. Then find out:

• Their pricing strategy

• Their service area

• The size of their workforce (you can use this to estimate their yearly or monthly revenue)

You can get all this information from their website or social media pages.

Once that's done, pinpoint their strengths and weaknesses. You want to be as objective and honest as possible.

Lay it all out on an Excel sheet. Then, briefly explain how you'll use their weaknesses to your advantage.

Will you be offering lower prices? Or do you plan to use a unique cleaning process no one's using? Or will you target a specific niche or group of people they've ignored?

If your pool service business is already up and running, use data from digital marketing campaigns to estimate the market size.

All you need to do is:

• Create 2-3 marketing campaigns targeting a broad audience (use few filters) on Facebook or Google

• Track the number of leads coming in from each campaign

• Calculate the percentage that turns into jobs

For example, let's say you create three Facebook ad campaigns targeting a large percentage of people in your service area.

After running the campaign for a week, you average 1,000 calls from different homeowners who own pools. This means your market size is 1,000 homeowners.

Now, you can only use this method with the right marketing tool. ServiceTitan's Marketing platform is an example of such a tool.

The platform ranks your marketing campaigns by the revenue generated.

You can see the areas where you generate the most revenue using the tool's heat map display—the higher the revenue, the bigger the green circle.

Aside from helping you to estimate market size, this tool helps you maximize your marketing spend.

5. Customer Analysis

After market analysis, the next section should reveal who your customers are and how you plan to serve them.

As you'd expect, the type of pool cleaning service company you'll run depends on the customer segment you choose to serve.

If your customers are families and homeowners, you'll operate a residential pool service company. But if your customers are businesses such as hotels, motels, and health clubs, you'll operate a commercial pool service company.

After choosing the customer segment/s you'll be serving, create an ideal customer profile (ICP).

This is a fictional description of the customer you wish to serve.

You must make it as detailed as possible because you'll need it to create an effective marketing plan (more on this later).

To that end, your ICP should include the following:

• Demographics: age, location, educational level, income, and socioeconomic status.

• Psychographics: hobbies and lifestyle.

• Firmographics (if you're serving businesses): company size, location, revenue, and industry.

Besides customer analysis, craft a plan to retain the customers you attract.

One way to do that is to always communicate with customers, which may be difficult when using a manual system. Fortunately, that's what ServiceTitan's Customer Experience software helps you do.

With it, you can update customers along each step of the job cycle, from the time they book an appointment to the moment a technician reaches their doorstep.

You can send customers appointment reminders and a brief description of the technician over SMS.

This helps customers connect with techs before they arrive and overcome the apprehension of letting strangers into their homes or businesses.

You can also guarantee on-time arrivals by allowing customers to track techs en route to their location in real-time.

This dissuades techs from doing detours and convinces the customer that the tech will arrive early.

6. Marketing Plan

This section describes how you plan to promote your services to members of your neighborhood and attract and retain customers.

To make it easier for a reader to skim through and understand your points, divide this part into three sections:

Promotion plan

Here, explain how you intend to let customers know about your business.

You can decide to use:

• Social media

• Email marketing

• Content marketing

• Traditional advertising channels like fliers, direct mail, business cards, radio jingles, and television advertising.

• Neighborhood events like block parties and community fairs

Retention plan

Only attracting customers isn’t enough. You must also plan to retain and convert them into loyal ambassadors.

This will fuel word-of-mouth referrals and can reduce subsequent marketing budgets.

Your retention plan can include:

• Loyalty programs

• Reputation management (requesting and responding to reviews)

• Running an email newsletter

How you plan to measure your success

How would you know if a campaign is succeeding? This will include the metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) you plan to track.

You could pay for different tools to track your marketing plan’s performance, bloating your marketing budget. Or invest in an all-in-one marketing tool like ServiceTitan's Marketing Pro.

With it, you can create and send email marketing campaigns using professional pre-built templates and create hyper-targeted email campaigns using customer data you already have in ServiceTitan.

If you’re using direct mail, simply upload your postcard. ServiceTitan will help print and mail them to customers, saving you time and eliminating design costs.

Additionally, Marketing Pro allows you to track the performance of all your marketing campaigns. This allows you to avoid spending money on campaigns that aren't generating revenue.

Lastly, the platform has a central dashboard that collates customer reviews from review platforms, social media, and Google.

You can also configure the system to send review requests automatically to customers once a pool cleaning technician finishes the job, which helps to fill your business listings with positive reviews. It also allows you to identify negative reviews, respond to them, and convert the reviewer into a loyal customer.

7. Operations Plan

You've laid out all your goals and milestones in the earlier sections. Now, it's time to explain how you plan to achieve them in detail.

Your plan should have two major sections:

Long term goals

These are the targets you aim to hit in the future.

Some examples include:

• Expanding to a new location

• Building your customer base by X percentage within Y years

• Selling X number of pool service agreements by Y years

• Hitting X amount in revenue by Y years

Short-term activities

This covers the activities you plan to do daily that can help you achieve your long-term goals.

This includes picking up customer calls early, assigning jobs to techs ahead of time, and sending frequent job updates to customers.

8. Management Summary

Your pool service company will be as successful as the team around you and the efficiency of your business processes.

You should use this opportunity to draw out your organizational chart, explaining the roles of each employee and the relationship between each position.

Also, compute your labor costs and the amount you charge to break even. You should keep labor costs between 20 and 35 percent of your revenue.

What if you’re flying solo?

You can still sketch your organizational tree, so you’ll have an internal structure to use as you grow your business.

Finally, outline the plan for tracking your business's progress. This includes the tools, metrics, and performance KPIs.

Pro tip!

To have greater visibility into the performance of your business and employees, consider using ServiceTitan’s Field Reporting and Service Scheduling platforms.

The Field Reporting software helps you track the performance of your business using a dynamic dashboard customized to reflect the metrics and KPIs that matter to you.

This way, you can discover when you're falling behind in achieving your goals in real time.

You can also monitor the performance of technicians and customer service representatives (CSRs) using scorecards the system computes.

To arrive at the technicians' scorecard, the system takes into account the number of:

• Memberships the technician sold

•  Jobs they completed

• Positive reviews they received from customers

While for the CSR scorecard, the system uses the number of:

• Calls the CSR received

• Customers they convinced to book an appointment

This gives you an idea of your employees’ performance.

Additionally, you can use the Service Scheduling software to plan, manage, and prepare for jobs––days and even months in advance.

The software also allows dispatchers to use tags to identify jobs requiring special tools and technical skills, so techs arrive at the customer's location with the proper tools and expertise.

9. Financials

No matter the number of customers you attract and regardless of the quality of the employees you hire, the financial health of your business is crucial to its survival.

You need money to drive growth. That's why this section—though it comes last—is the most important part of a pool service business plan.

To ensure your numbers and projections are accurate, we advise you to hire a financial advisor or accountant to help you write this section. It may cost a lot, but hiring a qualified professional to write this section will save you from running your business to the ground.

At the very least, your financial plan should cover your:

• Predicted revenue: this includes your sales strategy, forecasted profit and loss, and break-even analysis.

• Income statement: if you already have a business, this section will encompass your cash flow, profit, and revenue.

• Projected overhead costs: this will cover expenses on labor, equipment, rent, and so on.

If your business is brand new, mention how you plan to raise funding. Do you have money saved, or will you seek a loan or investment?

Finally, make plans for managing employee payroll and customer payments. Payroll errors can be costly, and failure to have a payment management plan can make you chase several overdue invoices at month’s end.

In the beginning, managing customer payments and payroll manually may be easy.  However, it’s vital to have automated systems to eliminate errors and improve efficiency as you grow your business.

To do that, you can use ServiceTitan’s Contractor Payroll and Customer Payments platforms.

With the Contractor Payroll platform, your technicians' drive time, overtime, and vendor and wrench runs are updated automatically on their time sheets.

You can also create customized payment structures that consider commissions and bonuses.

This way, everyone is fairly compensated for their labor, increasing employee retention and boosting employee satisfaction.

The Customer Payment platform allows you to offer flexible payment options to customers. On-field techs can take snapshots of checks and credit cards or send a personalized link customers can use to pay

In addition, back-office staff no longer have to queue for hours at the bank after techs bring back checks from the field.

That's because the Customer Payments platform deposits every credit card or check payment to the bank within 24 hours and automatically reconciles your electronic payments with bank deposits. This ensures your account stays balanced.

Therefore, you won't lose out on customer payments, and the possibility of making accounting errors is reduced. Plus, employees will have more time to spend on productive tasks.

P.S. If you want to sell your business or accept investment from private equity companies, consider using our service business valuation calculator.

Now Over to You

You can now create your own pool service business plan.

Begin with researching your competitors and target customers. Then, put down your marketing, operations, and financial plan.

To make managing and monitoring your business easier, consider investing in pool service software like ServiceTitan.

ServiceTitan is a software pool service companies nationwide use to automate and streamline their business operations. Currently, over 20,000 trade companies use the platform.