Eric outlines his WHY. His purpose for not only creating this podcast, but for being in the industry in the first place.
[00:00] - Intro
[00:58] - To pool professionals.
[05:41] - To you, the individual listener.
[08:47] - To the industry in general.
[11:28] - To homeowners.
[18:30] - To me.
[21:20] - Upcoming education events.
171. My Statement of Purpose
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[00:00:00] Intro
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Eric Knight: Hi everybody and welcome back to the New Rule Your Pool podcast. I'm your host Eric Knight, and it is good to be back. And I thought to set the tone for what is to come in this podcast moving forward. I feel it's appropriate to make a statement of purpose. Why did I come back to this? Why am I doing this?
This is a lot of work. It's a lot of time. I've got plenty to do. We're trying to create new classes at Watershape, we're trying to plan events. There's a ton going on, and yet I am finding time to do this. Why? Well. As I've gotten older and spent more time in this industry, I have become more and more connected to the people that I've come across. You.
I want to first speak to pool professionals, whether you're pool builders, designers, engineers, pool service, repair, whatever you are. You're in the trade. Then I'm going to talk to homeowners who listen to this. And then I'm going to tell you about me personally. So let's start with Pool Pros.
[00:00:58] To pool professionals.
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Eric Knight: I came back to this podcast to help elevate the entire industry through education. And not just what I know, because that's very little. It's from gathering the best and brightest minds. It's doing research. It's doing things that most pros don't have time to do. It's not that they're not capable of it, it's that they're too busy. They're working. It's a hard job. You're outside all day long. Who's going to take the time to research as deep as I can research? And I'm grateful for that opportunity, but that to me is my way of serving you. Because I wasn't a service and repair pro.
Anyone who listens to this already knows that. I never pretended to be. I was a swimmer. And I've been researching and I've been figuring things out and I've been in backyards and the concentration of my experience in this industry is dealing with problem pools.
That's pretty much all I've dealt with actually. And I want to fix that because it really affects you and how you can make your living to put food on your table for your family. And if these problems go misunderstood and you're fighting the same thing, but you're actually fighting the wrong battle, which we talk about a lot. I want to stop that. I feel for you. I want you to know what's really going on.
So it's not coming from me. It's coming from researching people who actually did the science and did the experiments, and it's just reading what they did, and then talking to chemists and physicists and people who are way smarter than me. Then distill that information in a practical way to explain it to you.
That's what I've basically done in my entire career. I take information that quite honestly, kind of confusing, really boring. Like if you read scientific journals, it will put you to sleep if you're not careful. It's not entertaining to do it. But in the pursuit of an answer that's affecting customers, I had a lot of motivation to do that and figure out what was really going on.
So I gather information from the best and the brightest people I can find. And I want to bring the most experienced masters of their trade onto this show to share their knowledge and wisdom with you. That's what Watershape University is all about. We have the best and brightest instructors that we can find. Masters of their craft.
Now, if you're going to try to learn how to build a pool, let's say one with a vanishing edge, and you've never done that. Are you just going to go try it? Figure it out in the field? Now, don't get me wrong, there are people that do that, and some do it successfully. But not many.
What do you think is more affordable? Taking a class with people who have done all of this before, and you get to learn from their mistakes for the price of a class? And get to ask the people who have mastered this anything that you want for three days in a construction school, for instance? Or two days in a fluid engineering school? Or two days in an electrical school?
You can learn all this stuff in classes, or you can go figure it out the hard way. What do you think is more practical? What do you think is better for your career? And by the way, if you learn on the job you're learning from somebody, but where did they learn it from? Are they doing it right? Do you have anything to compare it to?
This is what we see in this industry. I see it in the service trade especially. Oh my gosh. Have I seen a lot of problems. And a lot of it comes from, well, that's how I was taught. Yeah, but that doesn't make it right. I'm going to use one example: column pouring acid.
That was like a recommended thing that we put in our app back in 2017, because that's at the time what the industry was recommending. Oh, you want to lower alkalinity but not pH as much. Column pour the acid. Don't spread it around. You remember that? Yeah. Bad news. That was not fair to you, but where did it come from?
I don't even know where it came from. But yet people continue to talk about it. Doesn't make it right, but when you think practically about it, how acid is denser than water and it's going to the bottom of the pool and you start seeing white marks and discolorations, and people call it scale, but it's not. If you have those marks on the bottom of your pool, it could very well be from just not diluting acid enough. Your pH spiked when you come back on a cement-based pool, that is. Well, yeah, it probably etched the cement. So column pouring acid is just one very small example of this, but there are hundreds of examples.
It would take me some time to think about it, so. But I, I think you get my point. Where did you learn it from?
[00:05:41] To you, the individual listener.
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Eric Knight: Now that's just talking to pool pros generically. Let me talk to you on an individual level. This is Eric to you, the listener, whoever you are. If you are in this trade, if you make your living in this industry, I am doing this podcast to help you achieve mastery in whatever direction you're trying to go.
You want to be a builder? Awesome. You want to be a designer, you awesome. You want to be an engineer who does hydraulic diagrams and rebar section drawings to help a good pool builder or whatever? Great, we got you. I'm not any of those things, but I can bring those things to you. If you tell me what you're trying to do, I want to help you get there.
That's why I came to Watershape University. That's what we do. We will help you realize your full potential, but that's a choice. You have to make that choice. And all too often in this industry, I see people who have never really applied their own ambition to this because they came into this and you know, it's just a job. Especially in the service trade. It's just a job.
Okay, well, yeah, everything starts out as just a job, but you find purpose as you go. If this is the path that you want to be on. Mike Rowe puts it really well, don't follow your passion, follow opportunity, and the passion will follow that. The passion will come. But you have to want to pursue mastery. You have to have a direction.
This is a destination career. But most young people who come into this career don't stay very long because they don't see that. Maybe it's their employer who doesn't have a clear path for them to go. Which is why we are creating a service track with certifications at Watershape. We're going to create a path for you. We're going to show you what it takes to get to that next level. It's actually three different levels.
We'll have the Watershape service technician, then we'll have the professional technician, then we'll have the master technician. We know that if you show people a direction and they can see this is the expectations of what you need to do to get to the next level, you're a lot more likely to pursue that.
But if it's just a job and it's monotonous and you keep doing the same thing every day, well, it gets boring pretty quick, doesn't it? This is why we have such turnover problems in the industry. Because we're not showing these new people in the industry what they can be. We're not showing them the opportunity. And my God, the opportunity is limitless. It is limitless in this industry if you're willing to apply yourself. And to be honest with you, you don't have to be the best and the brightest. You do need discipline. Absolutely. You need discipline, but you don't have to be the most intelligent person. To be super successful in this industry. You need to be consistent. You need to be honest, and you need to be constantly improving, even if it's just a little bit every week. Find a way to improve.
I suggest you read the book Atomic Habits if you haven't.
[00:08:47] To the industry in general.
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Eric Knight: Hi Emmy. I'm recording a podcast so you got to be quiet. Hi. And my great Dane has just jumped on the bed right behind me. Hi Emmy. Hi, sweetie. She wants to be on the podcast. Everybody say hi Emmy. Oh, good girl. Okay, stop. Stop licking my ear. Okay. Back to you.
Excuse you. You good?
I want to help you achieve mastery in whatever you want to do in this industry. That's what Watershape University is going to do. That's what this podcast is going to introduce to you. I've found that most people are just, excuse me. I found that most people are largely unaware that this education exists. That these opportunities do exist, because they do. And this industry is yours for the taking, but you have to work for it. You have to identify where you're going to go and we can help you take that path. But not unless you want to. The amount of value you can pull from this podcast is directly proportional to how much you focus on it and take it seriously to go that step further.
Now let me take a step back from speaking to you directly. Generally to the pool and spa industry, we all deserve complete information. We deserve to hear multiple opinions and perspectives on facts. People are going to spin things different ways, and that's fine, you should listen to them. Don't just listen to me. Don't just take my word over others. There's a lot of other podcasts. Listen to them. Read things. Take other classes.
I am in the marketplace of ideas. Now I'm quite confident in my ideas. They've proven themselves time and time again. They're backed in science, but if it ain't broke, don't fix it. You should always question is there a better way. You get to decide in a free market of ideas, what ideas are best for you, and more importantly, what's best for your customers? Because if you're not thinking about your customers before yourself, ooh, I can't help you very much.
We're all in this business to deliver goods and services to our customers. If we're thinking about ourselves at the expense of our customers, that's not good. I can't help you. I won't help you. If it's all about you, stop listening now. I have nothing for you. You're wasting your time. If you want to serve customers, you want to add value, okay, stick around. I'll help you do that.
[00:11:28] To homeowners.
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Eric Knight: Now that's the pool pros. To the homeowners, you deserve better. You deserve better than just flashy marketing and simple one product does all solutions that you see on Facebook. But they never actually get the job done. They're all blends of something and who knows what the byproducts are.
You deserve better than being told the same thing every week when you get your water tested at the pool store, because it never worked. You still have the same problem, or you come back and it's a different problem. Then you fix that problem. Then you come back, oh, well now I have another problem. And you're buying chemicals that conflict with one another, or you're buying products that don't last.
You deserve better than a printout that simply tells you how to get back to whatever the computer says the range chemistry should be. Parameters, by the way that water never consented to. Water doesn't listen to mankind. Water is governed by physics, natural law, not us.
Wondering why you can't keep your pH down? Well, you deserve to know why. You deserve to know why alkalinity affects that. You deserve to know why aeration affects that. You deserve to know what a salt system does. What an auto cover does. What a UV system does. You deserve to know what technology is available to you.
You deserve to know these things. You need to know what automation options are available to you. It's your pool. It's your property. Now, whatever you decide to do, you have the freedom to do that. It's a beautiful thing. But me personally? I like making informed decisions, and that's what I'm going to offer to you. I'm going to help you make informed decisions. I will not make the decisions for you. I don't have the right to do that. I don't expect to do that, and I'm not trying to. I just want to inform you.
You deserve safe, clean, and clear water in your pool. I want that for you. I want your water to behave because you're aligned with physics, which then allows you to sustain disinfection, which is the most important thing to me. Hell, I was a swimmer. I used to spend hours a day in a pool. I don't want you to get sick. I don't want your kids to get sick. Disinfection is very, very important. But I also know if you're not chlorinating constantly and you don't have automation, it's really hard to hold chlorine for seven days, especially if your pH is rising too much.
So if you're not aligned with physics and the pH spikes or bounces or whatever, chlorine can separate from CYA, it gets lost to sunlight, and you could go several days without any sanitizer in that pool. Depending on what you have, of course. Or maybe it's not even about disinfection. Maybe you just have cloudy water because you have too many oils in there and the oils float, dirt sinks. And so they just kind of stay suspended, making the water cloudy. But if they're just kind of staying suspended and they can't float to the top, because the dirt's heavy, it doesn't get into the skimmer. And if it can't sink all the way to the bottom, it doesn't get pulled into the main drain. So that water just stays there.
And common thing is to just blame the filter. But the filter never saw that water, because you had oils in the water. It makes a lot of sense. Where do the oils come from? Well, they come off of leaves and grass clippings and things like that, but majority of it, they come from you. Come from sunscreen, cosmetics, lotions, deodorants, body oils in general. Sweat. Dogs if you have them. Got to do something about that.
Well, I mean, it's your pool, right? If you want to Rule Your Pool, you got to do something about it. But that's up to you. But you deserve to know why it's happening. You deserve to know how to fix it instead of going back to the store and trying again and trying again, and buying more stuff that might conflict with itself or another product that you're also paying for.
Classic example of this is you have a staining issue. And then you put in a sequestering agent, which is phosphate based, and then, well, you have high phosphates. And some people by the way, say phosphates don't matter. Okay, if you have adequate chlorination that can stay ahead of it, I guess they don't temporarily, but it certainly makes it more complicated.
So you see the phosphates, you get an algae problem. So you kill the algae with a chlorine shock, for instance, and then you wipe out phosphates. But that took out the sequestering agent that you paid for. So the metals go free, and then they get oxidized by chlorine, further reducing chlorine. Which creates another problem because you have stains coming back.
This is just one example, but there are several of these. You deserve better. You deserve honest answers. You deserve to know why swimming pools cost what they do if you're thinking of building one. And you deserve to know if something was built wrong. A lot of pool builders aren't going to like that sentence. Not many, but enough.
See, I don't think there's many people in this industry that are genuinely trying to take big shortcuts to get away with something. But the reality is a lot of subcontractors are involved unless you're policing the whole job, shortcuts are taken pretty frequently. And it's not a good thing. Now that I'm at Watershape University, oh, the stories. It's crazy. It's very, very common and that's not good. But it may not be the intent.
But there are a few companies, for instance, they give a really bad impression of our industry. The ones that you hear about in the news for ripping off a bunch of customers by taking a big deposit, digging a hole in the backyard, and then folding their business and moving to another state, or whatever.
You hear about these stories, that's horrible. I'm not talking about them. Generally speaking, the people we work with are trying to do the right thing. They're trying to serve customers, but they may not know the best ways to do things, and they may not know what they're doing is not right.
Nobody knows what they don't know. So by providing higher levels of education to get very specific with how things should be done to the best known practices, that's going to make everything better. But homeowners, you deserve to know what those things are. You deserve to know what you should be expecting. You deserve to know why things cost what they do. There's a lot of materials, there's a lot of engineering that goes into pools. You deserve accountability.
And most importantly, you deserve the joy that you invested in for your family and friends. You spend a lot of money transforming your backyard into a, a work of art that is a reflection of your vision, and the contractors that you hired. It's a reflection of their workmanship. It's a reflection of their passion, their pursuit of greatness, whatever you want to say, and I, I want that for you.
I don't want people to resent having a pool. That's no good. Pools can be an amazing thing. They can be such an amenity. They can bring you so much happiness and laughter, and they're beautiful to look at. There's something about that, that the human mind loves water. I want that for you.
[00:18:30] To me.
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Eric Knight: Now to me. I came into this industry when I was hired literally off the pool deck at Olympic Trials in 2012. And it was to fix indoor air quality problems, chloramines. I got very sick swimming indoors. I've probably told you this plenty of times, but if you're just now tuning into the podcast, it's a real problem.
And so I've devoted my career to fixing that problem. I started in the ventilation side of it. Then I came to Orenda in 2016. And in between I did an app startup, which is where I learned the skills to build the Orenda website, and more importantly, the Orenda App. And that app startup was fundamental to me coming to Orenda, actually. I had known Orenda before, but I never worked for them.
And then with the skills I had gained at the app startup, that was huge because that allowed us to unlock the opportunities that you now know. Because without the Orenda app, most people probably wouldn't have the ability to calculate things like the pH ceiling. I mean, I don't know. Let's not speak hypothetically, but nobody was doing it before, so who knows if it would would've ever come out? But think of what a game changer that is for you.
Now I'm with Watershape University. And the reason why, as I said in the last episode, is education goes way beyond pool chemistry.
I'm here because I want this industry to get the recognition that it deserves. So that we can recruit young people out of high school and college to come into our industry. And I want to keep them. It's hard to attain people, it's even harder to retain them, especially after a summer that's hot and it's the same thing every day in the service business anyway. It's a hard job. And I want these people to realize there is meaningful work to be done here.
We can recruit young talent. There are people that we should be serving, and there is a career to pursue when you're doing that. And above all, limitless opportunity to work towards mastery in your own professional trade. You get to chart your own path and there's so many options in the pool business.
You could be a specialist if you want. That's great. You can kind of do all sorts of things. This is a hard job. This is a tough trade. You got to be an electrician, a plumber, a chemist. I've said this so many times before, but it's true. Take pride in your work. But more importantly, we as an industry have work to do to get to that point of recognition where we are considered one of the main trades. Of course, there's a lot less pools than homes and buildings. I, I get it. We're never going to be as big as these other trades. Roofers and carpenters and all that stuff. But that doesn't mean that we can't have the same credibility. It doesn't mean that we can't be in the conversation to recruit people out of high school or college or whatever.
[00:21:20] Upcoming education events
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Eric Knight: We don't have a trade school, and that's what I'm working to build. I'm trying to get our industry to that next level. If you believe that like I do, this podcast is for you. Whether you're a homeowner or a pro, if you want this industry to grow and and prosper so that we uplift the service quality and the expectations, this podcast is for you. And I'm happy to do it.
If you want to be part of that, I'm here. Talk to me. The email is ruleyourpool@gmail.com, you can also find us at watershape.org. And by the way, that mission is shared by Orenda and HASA as well. Just because I'm not there doesn't mean that they don't share this mission. There's a reason that they're letting me do this. They want to promote the education. This is a channel to get information to you. And if you want to go deeper, visit Watershape.org. You can see our classes that are online, we're going to be adding a lot more to them. We're going to be doing a lot of in-person events.
We've got Fluid Engineering at the end of this month. That's September 30th and October 1st in Charlotte, and then October 2nd and third in Greensboro with Dave Peterson. We also are going to be at the Master Pools Guild in Whistler in October. And then we've got the education vacation in Phoenix, December 4th - 6th. And that one's starting to fill up.
I think that might sell out. So if you're interested in going to Phoenix, we are going to be doing, um, at least from the service side, I'll be doing the eight hour chemistry class, Essential water chemistry. And the next day is the first ever Core Four. With the manufacturers coming together to create roughly two hours each of pumps, filters, heating and automation.
So that's going to be the first time that's ever been taught. I'm very excited about it. And that class is actually in production now. It's not even done yet. But you know, the manufacturers know what they're talking about. So we're going to come together and, and make a fair and balanced view of these categories of equipment.
But we also have Rick Chafey teaching a vanishing edge engineering and construction class. We've got our three day construction school. We've got our two day tile school, our two day plaster school, our two day electrical school. We've got our two day pool inspections for real estate transactions class. We have a three day design school. Perspective drawing is the first day, and then you've got essential principles and elements of design. I probably said that wrong. But I think you get the idea.
And we, we have, excluding myself, we have some really good instructors. And I'm looking forward to growing this and building this into a legitimate trade school. I hope you'll take advantage of that because this level of education has not really been made available before. It exists, but I want it to be more accessible to you and you deserve the choice. You deserve the choice of what level of education you want. If you want to pursue mastery, okay, we got you. If you don't care, don't come. That's fine. It's your career, but that's my message. That's why I'm here.
Now in the next few episodes, I don't know exactly which place I'm going to start, but I got a lot of ideas to write down. I got some guests lined up. It's just a matter of time getting them on the show. And, uh, yeah, we'll see what happens. Thank you all so much. This has been episode 171 of The New Rule Your Pool podcast. If you have any questions, ruleyourpool@gmail.com. Take care everyone.