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Every day it’s the same. You’re up loading the truck at 6:00 AM. From there, the day flies by. You’re double-checking skimmer baskets, handling customer texts, and hopping from one site to another. Before you know it, it’s dark out. If you’re lucky, you might find a few minutes to catch up on admin work and send out a few invoices.
You’re sweating, scrambling, and sacrificing. And if you’re honest? You’re exhausted.
I call this the Solopoolneur stage of your pool business journey. At this stage, you are the business and the business is you. There are a million hats, and you’re wearing all of them.
While being a Solopoolneur is exhausting, it’s also a necessary rite of passage in your overall growth trajectory. After all, every successful pool company starts with an owner willing to do the hard work. But staying here forever is a trap. And for 76% of pool business owners, this is where the journey stalls out.
Why? Because it’s impossible to grow your business if you don’t start thinking like a leader. The first real act of leadership isn’t hiring a team or hitting a revenue goal. It’s deciding that your time is too valuable to be spread so thin.
So let’s talk about how to make the leap from Solopreneur to leader of a growing pool business.
The leadership ceiling you can’t ignore
Many Solopoolneurs go through a similar internal dialogue when they think about growth: “I don’t have time to grow. And even if I did have time, I wouldn’t be able to afford it. And even if I could afford it, no one can do my job as well as I can. So what’s the point?”
To most Solopoolneurs thinking this way, these barriers feel like logistical issues. I would argue that they’re just excuses that need to be reframed. So let’s practice that reframing. Repeat after me: “I’m not stuck because of my circumstances. I’m stuck because of my mindset.”
Take a minute to let it sink in: you’re clinging to control because it feels safer. You think being busy makes you valuable, but what it’s really doing is putting a ceiling on your business.
The mindset shift that changes the game
To get unstuck from this mindset, you’ll need to flip your thinking from “No one can do this job as well as me” to “You know what? If someone else can do my job 80% as well as me, that’s a good enough place for me to start growing the business.”
This doesn’t have to be an all-systems-go decision. You’re not hiring a team of five or a general manager. You don’t even have to hire someone full-time. You just need to find some help, and that can look a lot of different ways.
The goal here is to find a way to reclaim just 5–10 hours a week to start shifting from working in the business to working on the business. If you can do that, you can stop being the doer and start being a visionary.
With even 5-10 hours freed up every week, you’ll be able to make considerable headway on things like:
- Your pricing strategy
- Following up on leads
- Auditing route profitability
- Building systems and processes that scale
- Selling higher-margin services
How to free up your time
So how do you find 5-10 free hours in your already-overwhelming schedule? You delegate. There are a few ways to go about this. I recommend treating the solutions below as gradual steps.
Solution #1: Hire an admin assistant (5–10 hours/week)
This is one of the most powerful moves you can make as a Solopoolneur, and it’s also one of the easiest. My recommendation? Find someone you already know, like, and trust to help with administrative tasks. This person can be local or remote, and they only need to be available for 5-10 hours a week and available to do tasks like:
- Sending invoices through QuickBooks or Skimmer
- Responding to non-urgent customer messages
- Entering payments and receipts
- Scheduling appointments
- Managing Skimmer route changes
- Sending service reminders
- Posting to social media
- Running background checks on new hires
Cost: ~$20/hour
ROI: Reclaim 5 hours/week at $100/hour of owner value = $2,000/month of recovered opportunity. You’d be amazed at how quickly offloading these tasks gives you more space to start strategizing.
Solution #2: Bring in a part-time technician
Now that you’ve freed up some hours of your work week, it’s time to dip your toes into the next phase: hiring someone who can help with service.
Again, this doesn’t have to be some huge commitment. Finding someone—and this could be a retired family member or a teenager in your neighborhood—who can help you out for a day or two a week can help you unlock serious growth.
With this hire, you can delegate tasks like:
- Loading and cleaning trucks
- Organizing equipment
- Doing supply runs
- Cleaning pools
Cost: $15–$20/hour
ROI: Every hour saved in low-value work is another hour you can use to grow.
Solution #3: Use software as a multiplier
Delegating tasks is great, but you also need the right systems in place to scale those tasks—and your business—properly.
This is where using software like Skimmer becomes essential. With the right tool, you can save hours every week by:
- Mapping efficient service routes
- Sending automated reminders
- Logging photos and notes
- Managing invoicing workflows
- Storing customer history
Cost: ~$100/month
ROI: 5–10 hours/week of time back = $500–$1,000/month.
Solution #4: Implement a call answering service
I tell this to Solopoolneurs all the time: one of the best ways you can grow is to answer every single call that comes your way. There are companies you can hire that will do this for you, affordably, based on call volume.
These people can:
- Handle basic customer service inquiries
- Book new customer visits
- Communicate with your techs
Cost: ~$150–$250/month
ROI: When someone else is covering the phone, it reduces stress, improves your company’s customer experience, and gives you more control over your time.
When you buy back time, you buy back growth
For each of these solutions, the cost of labor is less than the value of your time as the owner of the business. Let’s break it down with simple math:
- Your time as the owner = $100/hour
- Lower-skill work (admin, errands) = $20/hour
That means that if you delegate just 10 hours/week:
- You spend $200/week
- You recover $1,000/week in value
Over four weeks, that’s a $3,200 net gain, and you can reinvest those hours directly into growth activities.
Stop doing, start leading
Maybe you read through these solutions and you’re still not convinced you can even find the time to hire an admin assistant or part-time tech. Let’s take a few minutes to reset with a simple exercise.
This exercise will help you see where your time goes—and where delegation should begin.
Instructions:
- List everything you personally handle weekly
- Score how much you enjoy it (1 = hate, 5 = love)
- Estimate how long each tasks takes
- Decide what to keep, delegate, or automate
- Choose ONE task to hand off this month
Here’s an example of how this exercise looks once complete:
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It’s very hard to convince yourself that there’s nothing to let go of once you’ve completed this exercise. So pick one thing and go from there.
Final thought: If you don’t lead your business, no one will
If I can leave you with one thought, let it be this: you’re not “just a pool guy.” You’re a business owner.
Owners build. Owners lead. Owners delegate. You can’t step into your next stage of growth until you stop holding everything so tightly.
This isn’t something that happens overnight, but one day you’ll look back and be amazed at what you’ve built. You used to be a Solopoolneur. Now you’re a leader.
About the creators
At Skimmer, we believe pool service professionals deserve better tools, stronger support, and better business outcomes. That’s why we built the leading software platform for pool and spa service companies.
Today, more than 30,000 pros across North America use Skimmer to streamline routes, get paid faster, and scale their operations—all while delivering consistent, professional service. Our mission is simple: modernize the industry and empower the people who keep it running.
Casey Graham has built and grown companies across multiple industries, including Yummy Pools, which rapidly expanded in the Atlanta market before being acquired by Trivest. Now, as VP of M&A for the Yummy Pools platform, he helps other pool companies grow through acquisition and operational excellence.
We partnered on this ebook because we share a belief: success in the pool service business isn’t only about profit—it’s about purpose, consistency, and the right systems to support your goals. Whether you’re starting out or leading a growing team, we hope this guide helps you align your “why” and move forward with clarity.
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