Eric interviews the CEO and founder of PoolBrain, a routing software for swimming pool service companies. They talk about the growing pains of a pool service business and how PoolBrain has integrated the Orenda Calculator to expand its capabilities for the pool pro in the field.
00:00 - Introduction
02:06 - What is PoolBrain?
04:40 - The pains of running a large pool service business
06:48 - A lack of data
09:42 - The power of standardization and checklists
14:43 - Growing vs. Scaling
21:58 - PoolBrain + Orenda Calculator™ integration
25:55 - Closing
139. Scaling up your pool business with PoolBrain + Orenda (w/ Adam Beech)
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[00:00:00] Eric Knight: Welcome back to the Rule Your Pool podcast, everyone. I'm your host, Eric Knight. And with me today is a special guest. Now, if you've ever been in our classes, we talk a lot about best known practices. We talk about bad habits. We've done several episodes in the past on six bad habits. And following in the vein of our proactive pool care philosophy that we have, we want our customers, the pool pros out there, to be getting better at what they do by tracking things.
One of the main questions that we've had over the last eight years of having the Orenda Calculator as it continues to grow is, can I store my history? Can I store my chemical results from last week? Can I save accounts to this? And the answer has always been no. And the reason for that is we are not set up for that. We are not equipped. We are not really a software company. We're a chemical company. We're an education company, but not really a software company.
And we realized that there are many companies in this industry that are software [00:01:00] companies that are upping that game. And as I said in a previous episode, I think at the end of 2023. We are integrating with them. Instead of just telling you, sorry, we can't do that. We are integrating with softwares and we are advocating heavily that our customers use these softwares.
You can pick which one you want. But we're going to interview each one. And this is the first one we're doing in a long time. This guy that we have today is the CEO of an app called PoolBrain. And PoolBrain came to us with an interesting request. And we're going to talk about it in this episode. So Adam Beech, welcome to the Rule Your Pool podcast.
[00:01:36] Adam Beech: Thank you, Eric. Always a pleasure to talk to you.
[00:01:38] Eric Knight: Yeah. Thanks for being here. I know it's your first time here, but we have seen each other at a few trade shows, and we're going to get into this episode 139.
And I've got a couple of questions for you and I know that you've had some customer feedback and I'm already interested to see what that looks like. Because you're the second app to integrate this and I think you're doing some very cool things with it. So without further ado, [00:02:00] this is episode 139 of the Rule Your Pool podcast.
[00:02:06] What is PoolBrain?
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[00:02:06] Eric Knight: Okay, Adam, when you came to me with your idea for what you could do with our app, no one had ever asked for that before. You said, Hey, we got a lot of customers that may or may not need to use this offline. Maybe they don't have a good cell signal. The idea of having to call our server, which is called an API, just wasn't really in the cards. And it forced us to think differently. So why don't you kind of talk about what your vision has been. What is PoolBrain, and what does it do for the customers?
[00:02:52] Adam Beech: Yeah. Just to speak really quickly about the offline thing, you know, when we first built PoolBrain, I built it for my own company. We had about 35 trucks on the [00:03:00] road at the time. Had some issues scaling and getting the technicians to consistently do quality services based on the unique needs for each body of water, just like every pool company in the nation deals with.
And one of the first features I built in was the ability to have guided workflows and automatic dosing. But it was a very basic way to dose. It was just kind of for my company. It was CPO formulas, just standard boiler plate stuff. No LSI was involved. It had very fixed targets, you couldn't really just customize them on the fly per service level, for example.
But it worked so well, even just above what we were doing that I knew that we would eventually arrive at the place we're finally at now, where we integrate with the gold standard calculator in the industry, which has become Orenda over the years. To do that in a much more, I'd say, complex and intelligent way. And in a lot more customizable as well.
And I still think we're just getting started. But the whole point of not having a cell signal, Um, that's one of our core core values. We just don't give that up. Because we've been in [00:04:00] technician's shoes when they're out in the middle of a job and they literally can't even do their work because the app's just spinning, spinning, spinning and loading and loading and loading and loading.
[00:04:07] Eric Knight: Right, the buffering, I don't know, on a Macbook it's the, what do they call it, the beach ball of doom?
[00:04:11] Adam Beech: Exactly. So to eliminate that, we made sure that we have everything working natively in the app. It makes it lightning fast. It makes it not signal dependent. And then when a cell phone signal is available, it will automatically sync any information that's new to the phone and any information off the phone to the server.
And that's just a much better experience and way to get consistent data. Especially when it comes to something like a chemical calculator, which is a vital tool for water chemistry and maintenance. I mean, you have to have it.
[00:04:40] The pains of running a large pool service business
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[00:04:40] Eric Knight: Well, let me back up. You said something that I actually didn't realize. I know you came from the service business, but 35 trucks on the road? How many pools was your company servicing?
[00:04:51] Adam Beech: At the time it was about a thousand.
[00:04:53] Eric Knight: My word, what market?
[00:04:54] Adam Beech: And then once
[00:04:55] Eric Knight: Where are you located?
[00:04:55] Adam Beech: Phoenix, Arizona.
[00:04:56] Eric Knight: Oh, Phoenix. That's a lot of pools, man. So you actually have [00:05:00] front line experience of what your customers go through on a day to day basis.
[00:05:04] Adam Beech: Oh, absolutely. I've I started in 2006 with just myself and a truck and a friend and we started the business together. We bought a small route of about 40, 50 pools and we lost most of them because we didn't know what we were doing, obviously. Uh, and then just built it up from the ground the hard way.
[00:05:19] Eric Knight: Wow. So over those years, what were some of the things that you learned that led you to create a software? Because, like you said, it's the hard way. Innovation is the byproduct of necessity, right? So what were the problems that you went through over those many years as you were trying to scale your business?
[00:05:37] Adam Beech: How much time do you have?
[00:05:39] Eric Knight: Well, I mean, it is a podcast and people do listen to it on 1.5 speed. So hit me.
[00:05:44] Adam Beech: Perfect. So there's lots, but it mostly stems like when you really analyze it and distill it down to what is the core problem, it's that no pool service company without, you know, a platform like PoolBrain, can actually control their product.
And you think about that. Well, what [00:06:00] is your product? Your product is a person out in the field that's completely unsupervised. Usually on little to no training because you just don't have the time because the industry, unfortunately, is very demanding and pools have to get taken care of every single day. And they don't wait.
You know, again, Because every pool is different, it's very hard to train accurately on all the variables, which are in the thousands of different combinations for all the different equipment set ups, different....
[00:06:22] Eric Knight: Sure. Yeah.
[00:06:22] Adam Beech: Um, yeah. Water chemistry types, and all the different stuff, right? So how can you reasonably expect a consistent quality product that everything is getting done at the right times and the right orders, every time?
And you can't because, you know, even a computer has to be set up very specifically in a very complex way to do that and to track that. And a human is just not the best tool for that job to remember all those variables. And I'm not even trying to say that technicians all do a bad job.
[00:06:48] A lack of data
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[00:06:48] Adam Beech: There's technicians that do great jobs and still turn pools green just because of a lack of data. You're not going to remember what the PSI was across 22 visits for a single body of water when you take care of 80 bodies of water, you know, [00:07:00] 4.5 times a month. And you're constantly seeing that PSI gauge and they all run a different pressures to be correct.
But a computer can see that and it can see that trend and it can alert you when there's an issue with either flow or chemistry over any given time range. And you can set all that up customizable. So that instead of old standard of pool care, where basically a pool company scales by just being able to put out fires better than the next company.
You know, they're just constantly reacting better. So instead of putting out fires, we're just preventing them proactively. And we're able to do that through technology. The idea is you dial in a body of water for exactly what it needs because every body of water is unique. Whether it's what chemistry readings it needs, what targets it needs, how often it needs to be backwashed. You know, if there's a caretaker screen needs to be checked every 16 weeks or something random.
All that stuff can get autopiloted. And then no matter who shows up at the body of water, PoolBrain will tell them what to do automatically. And tell them when things were last done and when things are next due and have that all at a glance.
And chemistry is a key component in that [00:08:00] because it's very, very difficult to train on, and it's obviously critical for that water to not turn green or just be healthy.
[00:08:07] Eric Knight: I know we've talked before and you came to me with these ideas of what you wanted to do with our calculator. I did not realize that you had built a business like that. That's hard to do. So kudos for that.
This is the first I'm hearing of this. So it's given me kind of some different questions to ask you now that we're talking here. Because. What you said really resonates with me. One of the topics that we talk about with companies in private trainings, the people who run the businesses, we don't really talk water chemistry with them very often.
We talk more about standardizing pool chemistry. And I've done a few episodes on this. We have a few blogs as well. If you go onto the Orenda app, go to blog, type in the word standard, you'll see it. There's a podcast in there. I don't remember the episode number.
But standardizing pool chemistry from a business perspective is really important. Because if you have a thousand pools in Phoenix, you're [00:09:00] right. 35 trucks, you've got a lot of people out there that may be all doing their own thing. And, yeah, a lot of them are going to be really good. But, inevitably, even between just two people, there's going to be a difference in experience. You and your partner when you started, one of you had more experience than the other in some areas, and the other probably had more experience than others. Is that a fair statement?
[00:09:21] Adam Beech: Definitely a fair statement.
[00:09:23] Eric Knight: Compound that. You add a third person, now it's six different relationships, not three. And so, every time you have a comparison between more people as you add them to the organization, the importance of standardization really increases almost exponentially, it's a lot of communication channels, right?
[00:09:42] The power of standardization and checklists
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[00:09:42] Eric Knight: It reminds me of this book, this great book called The Checklist Manifesto. Have you ever read it?
[00:09:47] Adam Beech: No.
[00:09:48] Eric Knight: It's this surgeon named Atul Gawande, Dr. Atul Gawande. And he's one of the most renowned surgeons in the world. And he's talking about the importance of a simple checklist. [00:10:00] And what he was doing was examples in a lot of different industries, including big construction projects. They all have checklists.
Now what they implemented in operating rooms around the world due to this initiative with the World Health Organization, was we implemented a checklist. And infection rates plummeted. Complications plummeted.
Because they were simply doing things like, do we have all the tools on the desk? Yes. Can somebody verify that they put the sterilized tools on the desk? Yes. Move on. And then they all check as everybody scrubbed up? Yes. Are all the lights on? Yes. Have we, you know, injected the anesthesia correctly? Yes. And it's simple things that they do every day, but you forget one step and somebody can get really hurt.
And so they literally post a giant checklist with 12 items on it or something like that in the operating room in every hospital. And they have to follow that checklist. There's so many little variables that can go wrong if you miss the [00:11:00] fundamentals.
So if I'm a pool guy, yes, I know how to service a pool. Of course I do. But I can't track it. I can't be consistent on it because I don't remember everything that I did. I, I can establish what I'm doing in the here and now, but what good is that if I have no way of trending? Cause if I can't trend the past, I can't forecast the future. Is that a good paraphrase of what you're talking about?
[00:11:22] Adam Beech: That's precisely correct. If you have the data on the past and you see the entire picture, you can more accurately predict the future and you can do it automatically. And we found we can do it with high accuracy in many, cases.
And you also think about it, like you were talking about obviously medical, like hospital, uh, people having to use checklists because things were getting balls were getting dropped. Well, these are some of the most trained people in the world because the price of failure is so high. Their doctorates and, you know, very, very well trained. And they still need this type of system to make sure everything's done correctly because humans are fallible. It's just unfortunately the way it is. Um, and there's too many variables. We're just not the [00:12:00] right tools for the job to see the entire picture.
And that's the same with the pool industry is that everyone in a big company, especially, has a tiny piece of a large puzzle. And only a computer, a system designed to get the data in clean and consistently, which you need guided workflows to do, which we're the only software that has that right now to my knowledge, but you are going to need that to get the data in.
And then once you have the data in, you can have a PoolBrain take a look at everything and then see the whole picture and then present the right pieces to the right people for actions.
[00:12:30] Eric Knight: Nice.
[00:12:30] Adam Beech: And that really is the whole thing behind this.
[00:12:34] Eric Knight: Technology has advanced to a point that it has made our lives a lot simpler, almost to a fault. Like I don't remember long division. I have a calculator for that. And I've lost some of the skills that I learned in school. But kids today? They're not even learning it. They're not even learning that skill because they live in a world that you don't need that skill anymore. And it's a lost thing.
What technology has become is an extension of what we can do. A force multiplier. It's like having a [00:13:00] tractor. What did the tractor do for farming? You didn't need 12 horses anymore. The idea of using software in general is a good idea. But what you guys are doing is even more than that.
You are almost directing and allowing a business manager, if I'm hearing you right, decide what the workflow should be for that unique company in that unique place so that a company in Miami can do something different than a company in Michigan. Is that right?
[00:13:28] Adam Beech: That's exactly correct. Or a company with a body of water in this place can do something different with a body of water in a different place, like the same company even.
[00:13:36] Eric Knight: Nice.
[00:13:37] Adam Beech: And that covers too, because it's not just the technician, right? Because the technician might know their route. But if they get sick and someone else has to cover the route, it just takes one mistake, one lack of knowledge on one valve or one backwash or anything like that to turn a pool green. And then once that pool's green, it's a runaway train that starts a chain reaction of terrible that every pool company's experienced, and then [00:14:00] normally you just end up spinning your wheels in that reaction. And you never really climb out of it to move forward again at a certain size and scale.
And that's also why our best fit client is a medium to large size company. We're by no means only good for medium to large size companies. But we were, I think, one of the only platforms to be built for the needs of a large company from the ground up from day one.
And so we, we have a bunch of things targeted towards those needs. A smaller company sometimes sees it as too powerful or like, you know, too complex to set up and they don't get past that point, because they haven't really experienced what you were talking about, which is the exponential growth challenge, right?
Where you add on more techs and it's not like a linear thing. It is exponential. At some point you just get bogged down.
[00:14:43] Growing vs. Scaling
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[00:14:43] Eric Knight: Right. It's a difference between growing and scaling. And we did this at Orenda prior to the acquisition. We were growing for many years and then we got to a point where we had to start scaling and that's a totally different thing in business. And you've experienced it too.
Growth is [00:15:00] fun. Scaling sucks. And we're not talking about scaling with calcium in your pool, by the way, we're talking about business, like scaling up. There's another great book called Scaling Up by Verne Harnish. You ought to read it. Basically the dividing line is, in a growth phase of your company, you delegate things you're not good at. In a scaling phase, you have to start delegating things you love doing. And that's the painful part. You have to start delegating things you are good at.
And I don't know where that is for every company. I would say in the pool business, that's probably around 300 pools? I would guess. What do you think, Adam, since you've gone through it?
[00:15:39] Adam Beech: I almost always use that as a, as a marker, or I say about eight technicians and at least one full time office staff.
Like once you get out of the stage where it's like you, your brother and a couple of friends, it starts getting challenging, but you can still grow. I mean, I grew it to about 30 trucks before I really couldn't grow it any further. And it was like, you know, [00:16:00] just kind of waffling for a few years after that. But it got exponentially slower after around like the 350-400 pool mark, maybe. Maybe eight to ten technicians is where it's like a noticeable
[00:16:11] Eric Knight: plateau
[00:16:11] Adam Beech: wall
[00:16:12] Eric Knight: Well, so let's expand on that. At what point did you realize you have to stop cleaning pools yourself and start working on the business instead of working in the business?
[00:16:22] Adam Beech: I probably didn't get out of the field until I had around five technicians, maybe? So, you know, about, I don't know, maybe 300, 400 pools,
[00:16:30] Eric Knight: So talk to me about how PoolBrain addresses those pains that you went through. Cause there's people who listen to this podcast that are at that scale, or they're at that stage in their business or approaching it fast that may need to hear what you have to say, since you've walked that path.
[00:16:46] Adam Beech: Yeah, there's a few things, but it all comes down at the end to the technician, right? And it's so hard to find good technicians. It's so hard to train technicians to do a good job. It's so hard to cover them when they're sick or they just quit without [00:17:00] notice. And then it's so hard to clean up the mistakes that, or the fallout that all of that causes. Because when a technician just quits without notice, well, that's, you know, 80 pools that week that aren't going to get cleaned and balanced if you can't find a replacement right now.
And as you know, if it's in the summer in Phoenix, especially, if you go a week without cleaning those pools, every single one of them will be green with no exceptions. So you will lose 80 pools. You'll get 80 bad reviews. You'll have to spend thousands of dollars trying to turn those pools around or getting sued for it.
It's a nightmare. So even just some, something as simple as someone quitting without notice, uh, put your whole company on the back foot. And when you're on the back foot, you can't move forward. You're just trying to survive.
What the software did is first we focused on how can we get technicians trained faster?
Like how can we just hire a new person? Because there was no shortage back then of people that were willing to show up and try and clean a pool. It's just a shortage of people that were good at it or would last through training, you know, etc, etc. So we could probably get someone pretty quickly.
Throw them in the field, but then, you know, we have to dedicate someone training [00:18:00] and that slows them down. So we'd get less pools done. And they may or may not stick around. So the idea was if we can get some guided workflows and get all of the training information for each body of water and what needed to happen in what order and In the system, then we can just train someone real quickly and then tell them, Hey, just do what the app says, and then you'll be good.
You'll be at least mostly good. You won't turn the pools green, and that'll get you far enough down the road to get some more experience. And we can keep the train rolling, and that worked pretty well, but it wasn't the end game.
So then we realized that if we could put automatic dosing in the system, and just completely eliminate the chemical training, or at least take it way, way, way down. That was the majority of the training. You know, we were training people three, four weeks in many cases. And chemical training, you can cut that in half at least. Chemicals, as you know, you may or may not know this, Eric, but it's complicated.
[00:18:47] Eric Knight: What?!
[00:18:48] Adam Beech: Yeah, and uh, and so if you don't have to train someone on chemicals, you've taken most of the complexity out. It's a lot easier to say hey, here's how you turn valves. Here's how you hook up a vacuum, here's how you net a pool. [00:19:00] Versus here this is muriatic acid, this is dichlor, this is liquid chlorine and here are these doses and these are the equations It's just
[00:19:06] Eric Knight: never mix this with that. And never mix that with that. And you mean there's a lot of variables in pool care? You don't say.
[00:19:12] Adam Beech: There are There are a lot of variables it turns out. But the nice thing is there are calculators for that. And if there's a calculator for it, it's just math. And if it's just math, why are we teaching them to do the long division? Like to your point, you're talking about how they're not even learning that in schools anymore. And I don't disagree with that. I don't think it's a valuable skill if you have a calculator, um, they can probably be learning other things.
They just need to know how to get the right input into the calculator so the calculator can give them the output. And that's exactly what we focus on here. We just need to make sure they're doing the right input. And that is through the series of very specifically controlled workflows that you can set as a company per body of water to make that happen. And they can't skip it, forget it, or cheat it. And I could go into all those details, but probably not worth boring you with that, but they can't do it. So you do get the right input.
And then it's going to give you automatically [00:20:00] the right output. And so you don't have to train and you eliminate mistakes.
[00:20:03] Eric Knight: Well, you still have to train, but you train a lot less it sounds like. You're training them in a system instead of the Wild West.
[00:20:10] Adam Beech: Yeah. And what I mean by not have to train is, is you, you have to train them on identification of the chemicals, like this is what this chemical is. And you have to train them on, like, don't mix this with that, or here's how you put it in the pool. But you don't have to say anything to do with the chemical equation. Like you don't have to say, this is the math you need to do to put this amount of liquid chlorine in the pool.
You don't need to know the gallons, it's already saved. And if it's not saved, there's a built-in gallons calculator in PoolBrain where you can do it right on the spot. It saves it, you never have to do it again, it autodoses from there. You don't have to train on that stuff if you're not doing LSI. If you're doing LSI, obviously there's still some training involved, but if you're doing just like straight dosing, which is what we were doing back in the day, and I will fully say that LSI is a superior way, and I learned about that in, I want to say 2008?
I don't think it was from Harold Evans, but it was, I remember [00:21:00] taking a class with Harold Evans on phosphates back in 2008. Uh, and he was, he was trying to like convince the world that it was a thing we should care about and obviously we should care about it. And I remember pool guys at the time grumbling about, uh, we've had, you know, we didn't, we didn't, Deal with phosphates for the last 20 years. I'm pretty sure we'll get by on the next 20.
And of course, here we are.
[00:21:19] Eric Knight: And then Flint, Michigan happened in 2014 and now it's EPA mandated to have anti corrosion measures, which is almost always some form of phosphate in our drinking water.
[00:21:29] Adam Beech: Yep, exactly. And so, so anyway, so at that same, um, convention, I also learned about LSI and I don't remember if it was from him or not, but someone taught me about LSI. And, and way back then I was like, Hey, that's so much better. We're definitely going to use it. And then I tried to teach it to my techs.
And they just wouldn't do it. And then they would quit. And then the next person would knock at your age. It was just, they just weren't
[00:21:51] Eric Knight: Adam, that was with reference charts. Imagine trying to teach them the actual math.
[00:21:56] Adam Beech: Exactly.
[00:21:58] Pool Brain + Orenda Calculator integration
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[00:21:58] Eric Knight: Well, so let's, let's, uh, let's [00:22:00] dive into that and then we'll wrap this up because this was a great picture of, of what you do and why you're doing it. I think this is great.
You came to me and you said, Hey, we want to use your calculator. And integrate it to help a typical pool pro out there implement LSI on every single visit. So what was your vision and what do you want to do with what we've built, which our listeners are already familiar with, how are you making that better?
[00:22:25] Adam Beech: Basically the vision we had is just making the most seamless and automated user experience possible. One of our core missions is if it can be automated, it must be automated. Our vision for the extreme future is that eventually no training will be required at all on chemistry.
We can get into that in a second, um, but we wanted to take that first major step, or maybe it's like the second or third step at this point. But it was the next step in the progression towards that end game. And we wanted to integrate with Orenda because number one, it's an amazing calculator, it's become the gold standard of the industry for very good reason. Um, but also there's a lot of people requesting Orenda specifically. So we knew it was going [00:23:00] to be a hit with our customers.
So when we integrated it, we basically looked at like, what is the experience currently? You've got PoolBrain, you've got Orenda. And what are people doing now?
They'd have to go into PoolBrain, go through our workflows, enter the readings. Then they have to switch apps and then they have to go and put the gallons in Orenda. Then they have to put their readings in again in Orenda. Then they have to switch back and they have to put in the chemicals.
[00:23:23] Eric Knight: You're not the only one who heard those complaints.
[00:23:25] Adam Beech: Yeah, so it's not the best user experience. Um, but we also, as we've been discussing this whole time, have very unique ways of doing things. We don't just like have a screen that you just do whatever you want in any order you want. So we had to make sure we built this in a really well thought through way that works with our existing workflows.
So the way it works in our app is you can control, at the company level, what chemical readings are required and how often based on the service level assigned to that body of water. So you might say like, I want this body of water to have a chlorine reading and alkalinity reading and a pH reading every single visit, and a cyanuric acid reading every four [00:24:00] visits. And a phosphate reading every 10 visits. Or literally anything you want.
Or maybe you say, I want a whole LSI panel done every visit and you have water temperature, calcium, and the whole nine every visit. You set it and forget it. And then when the technician gets to that screen, it's going to force them to put in the right readings for that body of water at the right frequency, no matter what experience they have. So that's step one.
Step two is they're going to go to the next screen. At some point, they can do their chemicals. And when they tap on the chemicals, it's going to open up a screen that's going to show them the LSI currently, the LSI that's predicted, and of course, Orenda is doing all these calculations, and it's got the same color code and, you know, visual UI that Orenda has. And then underneath it, it's got a bunch of fields for chemicals. And the chemicals they should be putting in that body of water for that day are already filled in.
So it doesn't just tell them what to put in. It already fills in the fields for them so there's literally zero data entry required at all for these chemicals. Of course it can be edited if the technician knows something that we don't for that day, maybe there's algae in the pool.
They can set [00:25:00] defaults for what's going to happen. They can set permissions on what the technician is allowed to do. And we do that throughout the entire platform, whether it's a technician or an office user or anything. We're all about visibility and company wide control from a central command. And also permission limiting because obviously some people should or shouldn't be doing X, Y or Z based on if they're new.
[00:25:19] Eric Knight: Right.
[00:25:19] Adam Beech: Or if, you know, et cetera, et cetera. So when they get to these fields and they can edit them, that's one option. But the other option is they can tap recalculate. There's a calculator icon, the Orenda icon's there. They can tap it and then it brings up the Orenda Calculator. And it works just the same way.
You can change all the dials, swipe left and right. It changes the colors of all your stuff with the same color codes. Um, and you can see your new predicted LSI and dial it in. And then once you have something you like, you can hit calculate or yeah, I think it's a calculate button, but basically the button that says submit or calculate, and then it goes back to the original screen and overwrites those values with the newly calculated values.
And it's cool too, because you can set defaults at the company level for [00:26:00] what chlorine you want to use. Like some companies only use dichlor, some companies only use liquid, et cetera. So you say, what chlorine am I using to raise the chlorine level? What acid am I using to lower pH or alkalinity?
And speaking of that, we do some other automations. Like you know, in Orenda, for example, when you have a dose of acid to lower both alkalinity and pH in the same outcome, Orenda will recommend use the alkalinity. But that's another training point that you have to train the technician like, Hey, in this scenario, make sure you're doing this and you have to trust them to do it and you have to trust them to enter it correctly.
We take all that guesswork out and we just automatically give them the alkalinity based dose in that specific scenario. So there's no training involved at all and it's always correct.
[00:26:40] Eric Knight: Well, anytime you release a new piece of software, there's going to be a learning curve to it for the customers, but you're going to get a lot of feedback. I know we've already been getting feedback with your integration since you released it a few months ago. So I do want to say this.
[00:26:55] Closing
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[00:26:55] Eric Knight: What PoolBrain and these other partners that we're bringing on are doing for you, [00:27:00] listeners, is not easy. This is months of work. This is a massive financial commitment that they are making to you to integrate our calculator into their app.
And I hope what our calculator brings is more than that in return. Because they could try to build their own. They're choosing to build something that you're already familiar with, so that you get the same results whether you're using the Orenda app or theirs.
You're getting the same, very precise chemical dosing. That's why they wanted to integrate. It is not just something. Oh, we wanted to do it because it's cool. No, no, no. This is a big business pivot. They're making that decision consciously to give you the best results possible. And I want to thank you for that, Adam. This took you like five or six months and a lot of calls and a lot of coordination. And it's like that with everybody. Everyone's committed to doing this. It's a big change for your business and we appreciate that.
[00:27:53] Adam Beech: We appreciate you as well. It's definitely a great partnership. I think it's a no brainer. And it definitely benefits us as well as the customers. So we're super [00:28:00] happy with it. And this is still just step, like I said, two or three on a, on a six or seven step process to an end game, which is going to be really cool for the industry.
[00:28:07] Eric Knight: Well, we look forward to seeing what that does as it progresses. You're going to get feedback from customers, and your system is going to continue to optimize as you learn what the users like, what they dislike. So I'm very happy with it. Thank you so much for being on here. Is there anything else you'd like to tell the audience?
[00:28:23] Adam Beech: I don't think so. I appreciate your time.
[00:28:24] Eric Knight: All right. Well, thank you for helping us hopefully get to about 300 listeners. That would be great. This has been episode 139 of the Rule Your Pool podcast with Adam Beech, the CEO and founder of PoolBrain.
We will have a few more interviews. Because again, we are integrating with all the softwares because we want you to have the ability to make your own choices, but we really, really, really like best known practices so that you can track what you're doing and you will get better from it. We're just not cut out to do it ourselves. So why not let the people who are really good at it do that?
And, uh, Adam, thank you so much for your time. Take care [00:29:00] everyone.