Eric explains why he has decided to step down as Executive Director of Watershape University, and move to Pool Brain as their Head of Education Technology.
[00:00] - Intro
[01:03] - Self Awareness
[05:46] - Why I chose to join Pool Brain
[08:47] - Addressing our industry's turnover problem
[14:19] - Motivation when changing companies
[17:57] - What I'll be doing at Pool Brain
[20:48] - ClosingÂ
196. I've Joined Pool Brain. Here's Why.
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Eric Knight: Welcome back to the Rule Your Pool podcast. I'm your host, Eric Knight. This is episode 196. Just four more episodes till the big 200, and we might have to get Jarred on for that one. I don't know. Honestly, I doubt he even knows that we've gotten this far. But that's neither here nor there.
This episode is not about a specific chemistry subject. If you are on social media today, you may have seen an announcement, which, for the record, I have no interest in putting out a press release for something like this, but it was not my call. There's a press release that has gone out and announced that I have decided to change companies. And I wanted to explain why, what my thinking is, and what is to come, because there's a pretty exciting pivot in this, and I think it's going to be really good for industry education. I think it's going to be good for pros. And everything that I've done since I've been in this industry is to advance the pool pros' ability to make a better living for themselves, and this definitely falls in line with that.
And it doesn't conflict with anything I've done before, which is amazing. So I am looking forward to explaining this. This is episode 196. Let's go.
[00:01:03] Self Awareness
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Eric Knight: For those of you who know me personally, maybe I've ridden in the passenger seat of your truck and we've worked on your route, or I've been in some backyards with you, I've met you at trade shows. Uh, for the listeners out there, if you haven't had a chance to meet with me, uh, that's probably for the best. You're not missing anything. But, for those of you who have, you probably know that one of the things I do a lot is I read and listen to a lot of books. Specifically business books, psychology books, strategy.
I'm really big into history and all sorts of stuff. But I've spent a lot of time in the past, I would say two years, with business books in particular. And one of the things that I had to learn about myself is I personally am not an operations-minded person.
At Orenda, if we go back to the beginning of when we first got introduced, I did not run Orenda. A lot of people seem to think I did. No, absolutely not. Jarred, for the most part, ran Orenda. I did not. I am not a bean counter. I am not, uh, an operations person. I don't, I don't manage things like that. I was forward-facing. I was in front of you. I was doing this. I was writing blogs, researching, teaching classes, all that stuff.
None of that is operations related. I had nothing to do with the supply chain. I had nothing to do with warehousing and logistics and, you know, procurement and all. Jarred did all of that stuff, and he's really good at it. And so we had to find our strengths and make sure that we were doing what worked best for our skill set.
And so after I came to Watershape, it became very clear that the role, as it was described to me, was actually more of an operations role than I thought. I thought it was we're going to build this brand. Perfectly in line. I love education. I love getting people the opportunity to raise their game and all that stuff, and all that stuff was true.
The problem that I had was I don't possess the skills to do what I believe Watershape actually needs as a business. As a mission? Oh yeah, I'm all about it. It's wonderful. But as a business, that's a fundamentally different question. And so in these books, they all basically say the same thing. You have to know where your strengths and weaknesses are, and you have to get out of the way. You have to make sure that for the good of the business, you are not holding things back. You are not becoming the bottleneck. And to be honest with you, I was a bottleneck. I was the problem. And I recognized that pretty early on. I tried making changes about it, and it was just over my head. I didn't possess the skills to... like, I'm not going to learn business finance very quickly. Especially when I'm running everything else. It's like learning a foreign language for me. I never had to do that at Orenda, and that's just a skill set that I didn't need to learn.
And so it got to the point where I was thinking like, "Oh my gosh, all right, so I want this mission to work." I still do. I want people to have access to this higher education. I want these classes to be aligned better with their textbooks and their presentations, and I want you to have online access to it in real time. All of that stuff remains true today. But in order to do that, I had to have different skills. Or Watershape needed somebody that had the business, or I'm going to call it, uh, accounting and operations skill set that I legitimately do not even possess, like, at all. And, and I know that.
So sometimes when you get to a point in your career and you become such a specialist in something, you neglect to learn much of anything else. And that is the trap that I've fallen into. And I'm not ashamed to admit it. Nobody can do everything. I certainly have not.
Uh, the point I'm trying to make here is I am all in on the mission of what Watershape University is trying to do. I think people deserve a high-quality education alternative. They shouldn't only have one option to get educated.
We want really high-end education, and you should be able to hear different opinions on how to do things. As long as the best known practices are being taught, we're going to have less liability in this industry. We're going to have hopefully less, I'm going to call them fly-by-night contractors who do unethical things. You're going to have less shotcrete failures. You're going to have less cracked pools. The list goes on and on and on. I'm all about that. But running the business of that is very different than growing that mission. And so I made the choice, I need to get out of the way.
[00:05:46] Why I chose to join Pool Brain
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Eric Knight: So then the question is, to do what? Where to go?
it was around that time that I was approached by Adam, the owner at Pool Brain. Those of you who are in the industry, you're probably very familiar with PoolBrain already. They are a pool company software that runs routing and accounting. It allows you to do automatic billing and so much more. It's, it's kind of like an ERP software for a pool business.
Let's go back in time three or four years. At that time, I was still with Orenda before HASA acquired us, and we had been developing the Orenda Calculator, and we were in talks with pretty much all of these routing softwares back then about integrating the calculator to be the standard LSI calculator for the industry. And we ended up meeting everybody, and I remember meeting Adam and sitting down, and he had this big vision of what he wanted to do. And I remember thinking early on, this is before they got big, right? This was like he had just founded the company. And I remember thinking, "Man, if this guy pulls this off, that's going to change this industry in a really good way."
He had grand ideas that were far beyond anything that I thought you could do with software. And to be honest with you, I didn't think they were possible. Some of them were, but some of these things that he wanted to do.
I'll give you an example. He told me, uh, if it can be automated, it must be automated to the point where somebody who has never treated pools ever before can take a one-day lesson in the office on how to safely handle chemicals, like how to handle them safely, move them safely, pour them safely, that kind of thing, but know nothing else about chemistry. All they have to do is they have to know that, and they have to know how to use their test kit and input the results into their phone. So teach them how to use a test kit, teach them how to safely handle and use chemicals. But other than that, you don't have to think about dosing. You don't have to think about what chemicals you need or anything like that.
And this was, gosh, this would've been 2021 or 2022? I don't know. It was early on. And I don't remember what year it was. But I remember sitting down and talking to him. And he said, "We'll be able to have somebody come into a company and in one day be onboarded enough to deliver excellent water quality."
And, and now mind you, at that time, I had been teaching water chemistry at all these shows, and I was going around company to company, traveling over 40 weeks a year. I met a lot of you. I've been in a lot of pool service companies' conference rooms and warehouses teaching, teaching, teaching. And I was kind of taken aback by that at first.
I'm like, uh, what, what do you mean? You're basically going to make me obsolete if that's the case. And I thought about it afterward, and I realized he wasn't trying to make education obsolete. What he was trying to do is he was trying to circumvent the turnover problem. Now, here's the two things. I would have Adam on here, except Adam and his wife just had a new baby, and I know what that's like. The baby's healthy, thankfully, but, but he's not on here as a result.
[00:08:47] Addressing our industry's turnover problem
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Eric Knight: So what he was trying to do was say, "Look, we may never be able to solve the turnover problem." That's just the reality of this. If you're a pool service tech and you're doing this more than one season, awesome. You've got grit, you've got tenacity, and it can be a boring job, and it takes time to learn things.
So when you start, it's hard to be good. I mean, it really is. There's so many things that you need to know. And so when I went to Watershape, if you remember, I made a big point of saying, I'm trying to close that loop. I'm trying to address the turnover problem. We need to show employees a path towards mastery.
We need to give them a clear picture of what they can do in this industry so that they don't just bail after one summer. And the way I see that is education. Really good quality education and access to that education.
And to some degree, that has worked very well. It's just, it hasn't hit most of the industry because what I've learned is most pool pros, they don't care. And it's unfortunate. Most pool pros don't educate. I'll say that again. If you're listening to this, this doesn't apply to you clearly, 'cause I mean, who wants to listen to a boring podcast about water chemistry? But the fact that you're here tells me that you do care. And you do want to get better, and kudos to you for that. But you are in the minority in this industry. Most pool pros, it's just a job. They don't care.
And by the way, this isn't just the pool industry. This is most industries. And not just the trades. I mean most white collar industries. They just learn enough to get the job done. They don't really care about being exceptional or anything like that.
But in any industry, you're going to have the I should say over-performing few. You're going to have people who are driven more than the average, and they're going to separate themselves. Because successful people make a habit of doing things that unsuccessful people are unwilling to do. So they do the things that need to be done, the hard things, the waking up every day, the discipline, the whatever it is. Unsuccessful people? Oh, no, I'll get around to it. I don't really want to do it.
Okay. But the successful people make a habit of that. You know, athletes. I was an athlete. Trust me, we did things that were uncomfortable and painful every single day. We trained hard. Most people are simply unwilling to go through that kind of pain. And in order to achieve mastery in whatever trade you're doing, it takes pain. It takes learning. And what Adam was trying to do was approach that problem from a different angle. And I didn't understand that at the time until he called me several months ago, and he explained that same exact vision, remarkably identical.
He's had a very clear picture for what he wanted to do. And he said, "What if you can't stop the turnover problem? What if you can't? Like, what if you get all this education accessible, and they still don't listen? And they still don't want to learn, and they still quit the industry? You still have business owners and service managers who are scrambling to hire new people to keep their businesses running and serve their customers. That is going to be a problem that you cannot resolve directly.
Then he followed up and he said, "What I want to do is I want to shortcut that onboarding process by taking the critical thinking aspects of it and automating them. So instead of the results lagging behind the experience, meaning you learn and you learn and you learn, and the results follow. You know, you get better with time, so to speak. You start off, you don't know anything, you're not getting great results, and you're trying, but you don't know what you're doing, you don't know why, and, and that's kind of how we learn everything, isn't it?
What this does is it flips that around. What if somebody new to the industry, as long as they knew how to use a test kit and input results and how to safely handle chemicals, what if they could deliver exceptional water quality at the level of a 30-year veteran who has been doing it right and do it on day one? What if you could take the thinking out of it upfront and then follow along with that with education on the back end of it instead of leading with education? So in other words, the results come first, and then the knowledge and education and the experience follow.
And I thought, All right, my brain's twisted, Adam. Let me think about this. And I went home, and I talked to my wife about it. And it just kind of clicked. Like, I think he's right. I hate to say that, but I think he's right.
You know me, I put so much into this podcast and so much into the blog articles and the research and the classes that I've taught, and I can't even count how many classes and presentations are on my computer over the years. And all of it was to try to lead the horse to water, so to speak. I was trying to show you there is a better way to do this than the traditional splash and dash, shock the pool, use algaecides dogma that we've basically been following for so long. And he's thinking completely backwards of that.
And had you told me this when we first met, and c- 'cause he did tell me this, I didn't believe it. I didn't think it could be done. But I didn't understand what his vision was. And I think he articulated it so much better this time. And he made me an offer that I couldn't refuse, not because of money, but because of impact. And I want to explain what I mean by that.
[00:14:19] Motivation when changing companies
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Eric Knight: When you make a change in a job, if you're doing it just because of money, there's a really high percentage you're not going to stay there. Because either you're not going to perform-- Your motivation's backwards, if that makes sense. If you're doing it for the money, it's a job. If you're doing it because it furthers a mission, you're a lot more likely to stay really engaged and focused on that thing. And the challenge that he presented me, I, I'm not going to talk about it here, is a very lofty goal that PoolBrain wants to accomplish.
And I like this kind of deep work. I like thinking about really complex problems and making them as easy as possible. And so there's different levels to what needs to be done here, but this was a challenge that really got my attention of, ooh, man, if we can figure this out, people will be able to employ somebody, and like I said, within a day or two, have them out there delivering results at the level of a, a decade plus veteran who has seen a lot.
Now, we're not talking about repairing stuff. I'm not talking about being an expert on pool equipment or anything like that. No, no, no. But most people who come in this industry, they don't start as a repair technician. They start cleaning pools. You have to get familiar with. That's the low-hanging fruit, and that is where the turnover is.
Because the people that stay in long enough to learn repairs, they tend to stay in the industry, don't they? The-- At least that's the trend that I've seen with almost every service company. Now, they may move to another service company, but they stay in the industry. If you have gone far enough in this industry to learn how to troubleshoot a heater and install one and fix one, you're probably in here for a while.
But pool cleaners, my goodness, they come and go. That's the problem that we need to address. This is how we take the pressure off the business owners so they can start working on their businesses instead of having to scramble all the time to just keep their business functioning because of turnover issues.
If we can shortcut that, the knowledge and experience will follow. They will learn after they're delivering the high value results. And I got to thinking about this book I read. Uh, I've actually read it four times now because it's so good. It's called The E-Myth. I think I've talked about it on here before. You build systems and processes so that anybody with the lowest possible skill can do that function at a high level, and they can deliver the results that you need. And it's not to say we want only low-skilled people. It's that you want new people, and they don't have skills yet, right? They, they may be talented people, but they don't know how to do this yet.
And you could have the smartest person in the world, they're still going to take time to onboard and learn how to do something. So it has nothing to do with intelligence. It has everything to do with experience. If you haven't done it, you don't know what you're doing yet. Fact.
If you could give a guided workflow, a very clear system, a very clear step-by-step instructions on exactly what to do. We're talking dose, dose order, how to add the dose, everything in order. You can do amazing things. You can have somebody new out there cleaning pools so that you, the service manager or the business owner or whatever, has somebody at a low skill level delivering outsized results. Like it's a force multiplier.
They're doing way more than a normal rookie would be able to do, which frees you up to strategize on how to grow your business or to bring somebody else up to that higher level so they can start getting into higher margin repairs and equipment pad installations and whatever else. And that is very appealing to me.
[00:17:57] What I'll be doing at Pool Brain
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Eric Knight: So there's two aspects to this. There's this big project that I'm not going to discuss right now of what to build within PoolBrain for PoolBrain customers. That's very exciting, and that's the first thing. The second thing he said he wants to do, and this is where it's relevant to you, is we want to revolutionize education by making it accessible to people.
And what I will say to that is I have been to almost every trade show, not some of the smaller ones, but like every year I'm at as many trade shows as I can be at.
And less and less people are going to them, for a second time. They may go once, and then they don't go for a few years. And it's not because the trade shows are bad. I really like the trade shows, um, sometimes. But it's travel. It's travel cost. When I started at Orenda, I could consistently get to California for under $500.
The tickets were usually like 400 and change. I can't get there for under $800 now, and that's like a bargain deal. It's almost always over $1,000 for me to fly to California. That has doubled in 10 years. Doubled. Now, inflation is real, but hey, when you add in the cost of Uber and the cost of gas and the cost of the hotel and the cost of food, and the-- it just adds up.
And suddenly these trade shows become cost prohibitive. And so what happens is either people don't go every year or they don't send everybody. And who's like the last person you're going to send in a company is probably the new employee.
They're still trying to figure things out, and you don't even know if they're going to stay. Why would you invest in them going to a trade show and all that stuff? And so what, what happens is, unless it's like local and you don't have travel costs, you just don't have the people that really need this education the most. They're not consistently going to shows. And if they are, which is great, if they are, there's only a finite amount of classes they can take because they also want to see the expo floor. But they all overlap. So even if you optimized your time at the show, there's only so much you can absorb.
The first year I was at Orenda, I took every class I could. I didn't even go on the trade show floor hardly at all. I was told, "Learn. Be a sponge. Go take everyone's classes." And I did. Class, class, class, class, class. And I still could only do one track of classes, right? At any given time at a show, you've got, what, 10 at least going on, um, at the same time. So you can only pick one of those 10.
Well, what if we could bring this more accessible on demand? And yes, I understand there's online on demand. Watershape, we built that this past year. It's wonderful. You can do that right now. But I'm not talking just about those kind of classes. And that's something that, uh, I'm excited to work on and see what's possible, and then introduce it to you later.
[00:20:48] Closing
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Eric Knight: So anyway, I just wanted to explain that. And one of the things about that education platform, it will include Watershape content. And I am still a Watershape instructor. I'm still an advocate for higher education.
I'm still around. I still teach the chemistry class. And so I still have my Watershape hat right here. But the difference now is I'm no longer working for Watershape full-time. I'm now working for Pool Brain. and I'm excited for what we're going to do in this pivot. In my career, i'm excited about it as well.
I think it's going to bring me closer to you all in many ways, and it's going to help the pros in some big ways. Bigger than what we've done before. And I'm excited to share in this vision. So enjoy the ride with me. Hopefully you will stick around with the podcast. There will be a lot more on this podcast coming out because not only are we going to be talking about pool construction, design, engineering, and of course, water chemistry and air quality, but we're going to be talking about other stuff too. We're going to start getting into the business side of things.
I am not-- As I said earlier, I am not a business, uh, finance or operations expert, but we can get those kind of talks going because a lot of what PoolBrain does is it helps you with those sides of your business. And I am looking forward to introducing those concepts to you, and hopefully this podcast becomes even more valuable to you.
So if you like this show or if you have any questions, my email is ruleyourpool@gmail.com. Thank you so much for being around. Thank you for being a loyal listener. This show is coming back. The numbers are coming up.
It's wonderful to see it. Tell your friends, Rule Your Pool is back, and I'm not going anywhere. So I'm Eric Knight, formerly Orenda, formerly Watershape University, but still working with all of them, and now with Pool Brain This is episode 196, and we're going to have a fun fall and training season coming up.
Take care everybody. Thanks.