Beyond the Pool: Ethan Guhl on Building Relationships and Innovating in the Pool Industry

 Join us on "Beyond the Pool" as we dive into the inspiring journey of Ethan Guhl, owner of Jet Aquatics and Baja Pool Loungers. Ethan shares his insights on the pool industry, highlighting the critical role of building strong relationships with clients and providing exceptional customer service. Discover how Ethan's emphasis on client satisfaction and organic business growth has propelled his companies to success without the need for a college degree. In this episode, Ethan discusses the creation of Baja Pool Loungers, a brand known for offering high-quality, affordable pool loungers, and reveals his future plans for innovation and expansion. Tune in to learn valuable lessons on entrepreneurship, customer engagement, and staying ahead in the competitive pool industry. 

Transcript

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What's up guys, Chris Bowen here with Level Up the Podcast. I am joined today by Ethan. Ethan is one of the owners over at Jet Aquatics. And then what's the, do you guys have a separate name for your other business or is custom pool loungers or Baja pool loungers. Baja pool loungers, okay. So they do custom loungers, they produce them, they stock them, everything like that. So Ethan, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself? Give us an introduction. All right. My name is Ethan. I started in this industry 18, 19 years ago and was just a normal, normal young. He's a normal young kid and 20 something years old, had no idea what I was doing, but I was only about one semester away from graduating college. And for some reason, somebody in the pool industry found me and recruited me to come to the pool industry. So needless to say, I never got my degree because once I started, never turned back. I feel like that's a common theme in the pool industry. It is, and they told me that and I said, no, I can still go do whatever I want to do after this if it doesn't work out. But it didn't take six months before I said, no, I'm not wasting the money anymore. This is not that college is the money, but once I found that I could do this and be successful at it, that's where I was going and I knew it. I think a lot of people don't realize how many opportunities there are, you know, not just within this industry, but in different industries when you don't have a college degree, what you can still accomplish, you I have a lot of friends that I went to college with that are very, successful. And I have a whole lot of friends that didn't even graduate high school that are very, very successful. So I don't, I don't, think it's an avenue. If someone can afford to go, they can get in, they make good grades and they like studying and being on a regimen like that. I think that's a great way to go. But for somebody like me, somebody like you, somebody like my partner, Jeremy, who, I mean, I gained all my experience straight from the field. are, unfortunately there is no college class that teaches you how to design a swimming pool, how to sell a swimming pool, how to be good at customer service, how to talk to people. They just don't exist. it's you know, that's kind of what I did. I just learned from, I hate to say it, but from a lot of mistakes. know, if you put a nice smile on and people like it and you treat them the way that you tell them you're going to, you're not selling anything. You're just creating a, you're creating something for them that they know you got, they, you have their back through thing and you don't they don't care whether you went to Harvard or whether you went to Tarrant County Community College or any college at all. That's exactly right. I like to tell people I'm in the relationship business. That's exactly, that's actually on our website. We're not in the, this is not what we do. We don't just create goals, we create relationships one backyard at a time. love that, that's awesome. you know, I don't think there's enough companies out there that are like that, that really truly develop a relationship with their clients. I know of a couple, but you know, they're few and far between for the most part. Yeah, to be successful in industry is not that you can build the best pool or you can design the best product. It No matter what you do, you do the best that you can and you make sure that those people are happy. And making sure they're happy doesn't mean you have to go broke to go out of the way for something that's irrational. But it does mean you do everything that you can, including exhausting any dollar that you need to to make sure they're happy until that line gets crossed. And then you just make sure that they're happy and fix whatever you gotta fix and go on to the next family that you're making happy. That's exactly right. So tell us a little bit about, tell us a little bit more about your business. So how did you guys get your business started? You have a partner, obviously, we kind of talked about that briefly. Explain to us how that kind of that partnership came to be. So I'll go back to being, I was a bartender. That was, was in the restaurant industry from 19 till about 24. And that's how I found out about the pool industry was just a pool superintendent from a company came in and sat at the bar, came in two times, three times, four times, six times. I got interviewed without knowing it and then got offered a job, started at one company and then got offered another job and recruited to a different company. Went there and worked there for almost eight years. And during that time I was, I mean, I think of myself as an entrepreneur just because I'm gonna go outside the box. I'm not scared to take a risk. I will gamble if I need to. I told the owners of that company, said, you all aren't doing pool service. You all aren't doing remodels. You're not doing just standalone outdoor living. You only do stuff that has to do with the pool. I'm gonna start a business that does the other stuff, cuz I feel like there's a lot of opportunity being left on the table for clients. I have to tell them, in their referrals they called me, but they just want a pavilion and an kitchen and fireplace. Well, I can't do it through this company. I need somebody to do it. So why am I referring that out when I have all the capability, software and knowledge to do it myself? And so I started it with a five -year plan of I'm going to stay here and sell however many more pools I can, create more relationships. Well, that only lasted about three years because the last three years after I told them that, I didn't take one single lead from that company. Everything came straight to my phone. And I loved that company. I'm still very, very good friends with the owners of that company. But. Going back to the opportunity being wasted, I said, I'm not getting any younger. Let's go ahead and do it. And my wife looked at me again. This was the third time. Cause when I said, I'm not going to finish school. I'm going to sell pools. She goes, you don't know anything about pools other than how to swim. Then I left a year and a half later to go do another job at a different pool company. And she said, all right, here we go again. We're starting over. And then she trusted me. But when I said this, she goes, I really can't take much more of this. So proof to me that you can do it. I have I not proven to you that I can do it? She goes, yes. trust you. And so Jeremy and I, my partner and I, we're just sitting having dinner at some mutual friend's house. And I was frustrated over having to refer out other people and then getting a phone call. And now, only am I not part of that. I'm responsible for the referral part of it. So the people I referred, if they didn't do perfect, it was a bad reflect, reflection on me. And I was telling Jeremy about this and we're literally sitting at an iron table at probably 8 30 at night after finishing a hamburger. And he goes, well, why don't we it?" And I said, that's a great question. I'm not going to say, I'm not going to answer why we don't, I'm just say let's go do it. And literally the next week we went up to the courthouse or wherever you have to go and we started a DBA and I said let's just see how far this can go before we just fully commit it. I'm not leaving the job I have, so let's just see how far we go. And it didn't take very long for us to grow. that's very to, it's very, very nice to be able to say that your advertising budget for your business is $0 a year. And it has been that way since we started in 2011 and not everybody has the luxury of doing that. organic growth, think is by far the one thing that a lot of people don't get. want to go, I mean, I love ambition and aspiration, but they don't go hand in hand. if you have all aspiration and zero ambition, you're stuck sitting on your couch. If you have ambition and you wait for the ambition to show you what you're aspiring to do and what you can do, then I think that's exactly what happened with us. And so we didn't go out and spend tens of thousands of dollars trying to buy new people or look and buy the pool permit list. here's what we need to do. Let's go figure that out. said, let's just use the referrals. Let's go. We built maybe 16 pools the first year we were in business. But it was just he and I. It was just he and I. And that was perfectly fine. And then the next year, that's 16, every one of them referred us to at least another person, and that person referred us, and it just continued to grow organically. And we didn't put the cart before the horse. We put all the horses in line, and then we started adding carts to it. we got to, I mean, we have built a team right now. There's not a single person that works at our company that wasn't a friend or a relative before. It's very rare. None of them had pool experience before. And I'm a big fan of hiring people that are customer service oriented. I can teach anybody how to design and sell and build a swimming pool, but I cannot teach anybody how to have a good personality. I've been preaching the same thing for a long time of as long as you have a good attitude and a willingness to learn, you can be successful and we can teach you to be successful, but you just have to have a good attitude and a willingness to learn. That's right. If you have a people like buying stuff from people they're comfortable with who they consider to be friends. And the guys I have right now, they are friends with every single person. think one of my sales guys right now just loaded up for Baja loungers in the bed of his truck and he doesn't get paid to do this. And he's going to take them straight over, fill them up and install them in the backyard and then take pictures with them. The thing that you don't see a lot of people, a lot of designers, salesmen, they design, this is what I get paid to do. I'm just not going to go above and beyond. I'm not going go any further I have to where these guys want the clients want them at their house and that's hard to do in the pool industry is Have somebody after two to three months of construction like hand grenades blowing up every day in the backyard And then we finally clean it up and it looks beautiful and they still want someone from the company to come hang out and have a glass of wine with them You know, that's to me that says a lot about personality It is. Well, that's how they both are. They spend more time over there than the job supervisor does. So that's good. I love it too. They get phone calls on their cell phones for new leads, people that want calls. They're not out there having to search for them. That's awesome. That's hey, if you can do it that way, that is the way to do it. Cause not only are you not spending any money, but also those leads, you're going to have a much higher closing rate when it's a referral like that. then if you were paying for advertising. coming from the sales portion of it, I'm very much on the side of the salesperson as far as, I I spent the first two to three years of my career just getting random leads that I didn't know anything about. They had no idea who I was, no relationship prior to this. They just called the pool company or searched in the Yellow Pages or saw a flyer in the Keller local or weekly paper and they called up there. So I would go over there, but I had to spend my money, you know, as commission only as a salesperson. It's my money, my gas, my time, unless I sold something. So with these guys, I 100 % want them to have the best leads and best opportunity. And they take full advantage of it. That doesn't mean that they don't need help every once in a while with someone to step in and answer a question. I mean, they've been doing it for a few years, but I feel like even with almost two decades of experience, the minute... to learn. I decide that I've learned everything there is to learn is when we're going to go downhill. So if I don't learn something new every day or at least every week, then I'm just going to end up flatlining. I'm not going leave that. I'm not going to continue to climb that mountain to the top. they, I instill that in them too. So they want to learn everything almost to the point where it's annoying sometimes to, I want to go watch this. I want to see you do this. I want to listen to you talk to them about this, but that's good. They want to learn. They don't think they know everything. Well, and that's how you stay ahead of the game, quite honestly, is you continue to evolve, you continue to learn. You only get better when you continue to learn like that. I think that's a lot of salespeople's downfall as they get kind of complacent in their day to day. And if you continue to learn about the product, you continue to evolve your people skills, you will continue to meet those goals day after day, month after month, year after year. But if you don't do that, eventually you do get complacent and things start to decline. That's just the nature of sales. to do is to call somebody during construction because you obviously have to manage your time between the people that are under construction making sure that they're taken care of. But you also have to manage the people who you're trying to design and create a new relationship with. And you can't make it a 70 -30 ratio. It's got to be a 50 -50. I think that's one thing I taught them was there is nothing wrong with you turning your phone off in a meeting and not answering it because you're the people that you're in front of that are looking at a design for the first time need to be the most important people right then. That doesn't mean the people that are calling you that have an issue or just a question aren't important but you need to let them know that I will do the same thing when you're under construction so if I don't answer my phone it's because I'm giving these people the time they scheduled with me and then I'll call you back I promise as soon as it's over and so they do a really good job with that. Yeah, I think that as long as you can continue to respond to people in a timely manner, that's really what matters. mean, there's no way that you can answer every single call as it comes in. People just, we have lives outside of work. We have work lives, meetings. You know, if you're a salesperson, you're designing pools, you got to have that time set aside where you're designing, where you're actually in there on the computer without distractions. So yeah, I mean, you have to be able to do that. Have to. you really never have a day off. I hear friends that say, we want to go to New York for the week of Thanksgiving. But I only have two days of PTO. I'm like, what is PTO? I've never had PTO in my life. I don't know what that means. What do you mean? I said, well, I've never worked for a salary or an hourly wage in my entire life. So it's really nice because you do have time and you can do what you want, but you also have to balance that with, yes, I can do what I But I still have to be available on the phone and there's nothing wrong with being busy and nothing wrong with spending time with family outside of work I'm available 24 hours a day to be called that doesn't mean I'm gonna answer 24 hours a day and I tell everybody that you can call me anytime It could be three o 'clock in the morning, but if it's an emergency, I'm gonna forward the number to 911 for you I like it's there is no urgency at three o'clock in the morning for your There is not yes, but that doesn't mean I'm not here to talk to you or to walk you through it I can't tell you the amount of times I have I have left my house at nine o 'clock on a Friday night to go chase a dog down the neighborhood because the mother -in -law is watching the house while they're out of town and their Dobermans are out running around Trophy Club or Southlake. Well, if our dogs get... Okay, I'm sorry. You're out of town. I want you to enjoy it. I will go over there and I will take spotlights and I will try to find these dogs. And I don't get home until midnight. Hopefully that doesn't happen very often, but I mean, that's kind of things that we do. I want to make sure that everybody's taken care of. Again, I'm available 24 hours to be contacted, not 24 hours. I do have to respect my family time, my children, my wife. Absolutely, absolutely. And so talk to us a little bit about the lounger business. How did that idea come about and kind of walk us through that business a little bit? What does it look like? I actually met a client, this came through a client who just happened to have a whole lot of contacts in the plastics industry and access to a plastics engineer. And one of his best friends is a plastics distributor or supplier. He's a sales rep for plastic. And so this was probably two years in the making. probably when COVID happened, that's when he started doing this. And I was like, okay, I'm doing this mostly by myself. And I mean, I can remember days I had 11 appointments in the same day, new appointments in the same day. I mean, I would get out of my truck and then go to my phone and map the next one and then have to get back out because it was next door. But I was so I had so much going on. So we didn't push it too hard. So after 18 months of going through this, we've got the engineer, we've got the plastics supplier and then Jeremy and I. And so we have the warehouse, we have the place to store everything, we have the capability to go pick it all up. But I started looking again, this goes back to me saying, you when I started this business, there's opportunities. out there and I'm not looking for an opportunity to retire tomorrow, but I want an opportunity to give somebody a quality product at a price that I can still make money at, but they can save money at the same time. So we changed a few things based on, looked at all different types of specs for all the chairs that are already out there. And we changed just a few things. We actually had our wives, cause I can't sit in one of those. I'm too big to sit in one. It'll break. So we had our wives sit in and they're like, let's just raise the back up a couple of degrees. this, you know, to hear would be more comfortable. That way I can read a book and the sun's not right in my eyes. And so we said, I said, all right, let's do it. I don't care what it costs to get in. We had a tool made in Minnesota shipped all the way down to Houston. We went through probably six different rotary molding companies. So we ended up with one out in Gainesville and they're incredible. They're awesome. we figured that we had the opportunity to be able to sell these chairs at under $500 that are equivalent to some of the chairs that are out there that are close to a thousand dollars a piece. No, they're not. And they're not cheaply made. It's not inexpensive to make them. And everything that goes into it, not even just the bookkeeping and the inventory and the loading up a trailer in my truck and driving an hour north to go load a hundred chairs by myself in the back of it. never have I done it by myself, but that's kind of what you feel like. You're out there carrying one chair at a time. And then you come back and you've got to unload them. And then as a new company that we don't advertise that company either yet. you still have to go deliver them. I I literally delivered two of those chairs to somebody in Crawford Farms just down the street from us. were three and a half miles away because she was going to have a party on July 4th and her husband said, yeah, you can't get those until next week. And I said, I will bring two chairs over. You can enjoy them. And then I go over there, fill them up and put them in. But I mean, those are the things you have to do. So we created a product. We are still trying to make it even better, but we're not changing our mold. The tool can only make one chair, so we can make one chair an hour. That's how long it takes to make those chairs. So with two shifts, we can make 16 chairs a day, but we can only make 16 of the same color of chairs a day. So it's one of those things where again, I don't wanna spend $50 ,000 to load up a whole warehouse full of chairs and then wait to recoup that money one chair at a time. But we are actually right now in the process of working with trademark and patent attorneys to, we're gonna add a add a piece to it to where it's not just the typical chair that curves and then goes back up, like you've seen them at our office. We're gonna have one where it's attachable or it can be detached. just be the normal chair, but the chair slides and locks into it and each one of the, I probably shouldn't talk too much about this before the tray. We'll wait, we'll wait, we'll wait and talk about it after you guys. an attachment that's going to, that's going to make it superior to anything just because it's not a solid molded product. It's going to be two different pieces and you can have it or not have it. And yeah, it's going to be nice. And when that happens, we'll fire up the website and we'll start again, organic growth is, is by far the best. I told these guys were ambitious and ready to just rock and roll. I was like, so when we get an order for a thousand of them in California, Southern California, do we have any way to, are the logistics on I don't know. That's your division. No, it's not. I'm selling them. I'm marketing them. But you know what? I have to drive for a day and a half to go to Los Angeles to drop off a thousand chairs and spend three days there and come back, I will do it. But then I got to be away from here for seven days or six days. know what I mean? Yeah, we're going to market them. We're going to advertise them. We're going to do it. It's just one of those. They're not made. They're not. They're actually made with a little bit thicker plastic than the top of the line guys. I won't name any names, we made them better. These are not made more cheap so that we can sell them cheaper. That's not our goal. Our goal is to provide a product that they can save money and we can make a little bit of money out I love that and so I mean eventually you're gonna have to go hit up all the pool shows and stuff like that It's gonna be a full -time gig. You'll have to have a cell staff Absolutely, absolutely no, that's awesome and a half with all the people they have on staff to just say, I can steal this and I'm gonna go do it. And then they'll end up with a trademark on it and I can't do anything with it. That's exactly right. We got to get you that trademark first and then we can then we can take over the market, right? it over slowly. Hopefully by kids who are 19 and almost 16 can take over that market. Maybe one of them can take over the chair division and one of them can take over the pool division. That would be my goal. That would be happy for me. Yeah, that'd be. that. I like that. That's awesome. And then dad still gets a paycheck in retirement. month, I'll be happy. That's exactly right. Well, Ethan, man, I really appreciate it. I appreciate your time today. I appreciate you coming on. I love what you guys are about. If people are looking to get ahold of you for the pool company, what's the best way to get ahold of you? And if they're looking to get ahold of you for the loungers, what's the best way they can get ahold of you? just the jetaquatics .com or jetpools .com and there's an info page you can fill out and the business phone number that's on all of our signs and even on the website is my cell phone number still. So I haven't even given that control up to where I've got somebody that's answering the phone and hope it gets in the right place. I still make sure that everything gets in the right place, whether it's a chair, whether it's a service, whether it's a new design or a remodel, I'm still gonna be the one that either forwards it to the right or talks to them and makes sure they get in touch with the right person. But yeah, our website is just www.jettpolls .com. And I think it actually redirects you to Jet Aquatics. And the reason we did jet pools for that is because I got so tired of having to try to spell aquatics to everybody. Trying to make it easy. Jet, like the flying aircraft with two T's and pools, like you swim in is plural. And that's it. And then my phone number, yeah, the phone number you can reach me as 817 -372 -2771. Cool, and we'll link it below for everybody as well. So if you guys need anything, reach out to Ethan. Ethan, appreciate you man. I hope you have a wonderful rest of day.