PoolBrain Pulls Back the Curtain on the Future of Pool Service Operations

In this episode of the Talking Pools Podcast, host Natalie Hood of The Grit Game sits down with Adam Beech, founder and CEO of PoolBrain, for an in-depth discussion about the operational challenges facing modern pool service companies and the technology being developed to solve them. Adam shares his journey from operating a 20-truck pool service company in Phoenix, Arizona, to creating one of the industry's fastest-growing software platforms after realizing that technician accountability, customer retention, and operational scalability were problems traditional management methods could not fully solve. 

The conversation explores PoolBrain's latest breakthrough: fully automated LSI (Langelier Saturation Index) chemical dosing. Adam explains how PoolBrain now integrates with the Arenda calculator to automate complex water chemistry calculations, allowing companies to establish their preferred LSI methodology once and have the system consistently execute those calculations for technicians in the field. The result is reduced training time, increased consistency, improved water balance, and fewer chemistry-related mistakes. 

Natalie and Adam also discuss one of the industry's most persistent challenges: technician turnover. Adam explains how PoolBrain was originally built to solve the difficulties of managing field technicians, maintaining service quality, and scaling operations without increasing administrative burden. The discussion highlights how automation can reduce training requirements, standardize procedures, and help companies maintain quality regardless of staffing changes. 

The episode takes a deep dive into the growing role of automation in pool service operations, including:

•  Automated chemical dosing 
•  AI-assisted tablet recommendations 
•  Customer communication systems 
•  Route management 
•  Billing automation 
•  Service verification 
•  Preventative maintenance alerts 
•  Equipment monitoring 
•  Inventory management innovations 

Adam explains how modern software is shifting pool companies from reactive management to proactive operations by identifying problems before they become customer complaints. Examples include tracking PSI trends to detect clogged impellers, identifying recurring chemistry issues before pools turn green, and automatically notifying customers when routes change. 

One of the most anticipated segments focuses on PoolBrain's future inventory management system. Adam outlines a vision of fully automated inventory tracking that follows products from supplier purchase to truck stock to chemical consumption at individual pools. The goal is a closed-loop inventory ecosystem that dramatically reduces waste, improves accountability, and eliminates countless hours of manual inventory management. 

Natalie also challenges Adam on several common industry myths, including:

•  "Software is only for large companies." 
•  "All pool software is basically the same." 
•  "Technicians hate software." 

Adam explains why smaller companies often benefit just as much as larger operations and why modern pool software is evolving far beyond simple digital service logs into comprehensive operational platforms. 

The discussion concludes with a look at the future of the industry, including remote equipment monitoring, automated chemistry management, AI-assisted operations, integrated supplier purchasing, and the increasing role of data-driven decision-making in pool service businesses. Adam shares his belief that many operational tasks currently performed manually will become fully automated within the next five years, allowing service companies to focus more on customer relationships and business growth. 

Whether you're a single-pole operator, route manager, service technician, or owner of a multi-truck operation, this episode offers a fascinating look at how technology is reshaping the future of pool service.

Key Topics Discussed

•  The origins of PoolBrain 
•  Technician turnover and accountability 
•  Automated LSI dosing 
•  AI-driven chemical recommendations 
•  Customer communication automation 
•  Service verification and photo documentation 
•  Inventory management and purchasing automation 
•  Operational scalability 
•  Customer portals and self-service tools 
•  The future of AI in pool service 
•  Remote monitoring and predictive maintenance 
•  Why software is becoming essential for competitive pool companies 

Guest

Adam Beach
Founder and CEO of PoolBrain, former pool service company owner, and software innovator focused on solving operational challenges within the pool service industry.

Host

Natalie Hood
Director of Education and Events at The Grit Game

Learn More

PoolBrain Official Website

#TalkingPools #PoolBrain #PoolService #SwimmingPoolIndustry #LSI #PoolChemistry #PoolTech #PoolBusiness #PoolIndustryTechnology #AutomationInPools

Transcript

0:00

Let's do it. All right. Welcome back to the Talking Pools podcast, your go-to source for everything wet, wild, and wonderfully misunderstood in the pool world. I'm Natalie Hood, Director of Education Events for The Grit Game. And today's episode is one every pool owner, service manager, and technician should pay attention to. And if you don't know, PoolBrain is the number one platform built to eliminate operational problems pool companies battle every single day from technician accountability, inventory blind spots, communication breakdowns, inefficient billing, operational bottlenecks, and constant struggle to scale without losing control. You know, there's a lot of assumptions in this industry about software that it's too complicated, it's too rigid, it's too expensive, or that it can't keep up with the real real world demands of growing service companies. But today we're going to pull back the curtain on what modern pool operations are starting to look like and why companies that you know truly embrace operational technology may actually have a massive advantage moving forward. And today, joining me is Adam Beach, founder and CEO of PoolBrain. And you know, Adam's journey from pool operator to software innovator is one of the best examples of what happens when someone, you know, inside the industry decides to stop tolerating the operational chaos and starts building solutions for it instead. And so, Adam, I can't thank you enough for joining us today on the Talking Pools podcast. It's always a pleasure. Um, can you kind of give our listeners a brief history of how you got into this industry and created pool brain? The sponsors of the 2026 Talking Pools Podcast, Pool Industry Mentor Award are Blu-ray XL, Lamotte Company, Revved Up Apparel, and the Aqua Comfort Water Group. These manufacturers truly understand the importance of mentorship in the industry. You know what time it is? Wednesday vibes on the Talking Pools Podcast! No more is no inventory strata. So you can focus on the ground. Whether you're a single folder or managing the whole fleet, this is how you hear it hard and stay start. Check out restuparil.com. Don't fit up the pool pearl. Adam, um, can you kind of give our listeners a brief history of how you got into this industry and created pool brain? Yeah, so I had a pool company and I started once in 2007, and I grew it to about 20-ish trucks on the road, five, six years, something along those lines. And I just could not uh expand it past that. No matter what I did, uh, you know, pay the companies more, have t or the technicians more, have tons of supervisors out in the field, you know, $30,000 in marketing through the top funnel every single month. We were getting customers in the top who were losing them out the bottom. And it was all due to mistakes that quite frankly couldn't be controlled after, you know, six years of trying to do that. And so I realized a software platform was probably needed. And I talked to my business partner at the time and basically said, hey, we either have to solve this problem with software or we need to sell the business because I can't keep just spinning my wheels, doing the same thing over and over again. Um I also realized when I looked out of the industry that pretty much all companies have the same problems with technician turnover and accountability and you know, customer churn and complaints, and it's always the same thing. Like you didn't you didn't do X, Y, or Z, uh basket didn't get emptied, you know, leaf didn't get taken out of the pool, the chemistry was wrong. A damn leaf. Yeah. And so uh and so we set about solving it for our own company, really. We weren't even trying to change the world at that point, we're just trying to run a business, and it worked so freaking well that we doubled the company in the next couple of years with way less effort and what less office staff. So we knew we had something pretty special, and we really built full grain around that core solution for the industry's problems. That's awesome. That is just uh absolutely amazing. And what part of the country were you a surf uh uh service tech? And I guess when you started all this? Phoenix, Arizona. Phoenix, Arizona. Wow. You know, I I grew up in California and I did uh you know, so it's obviously close to Phoenix, but I actually I visited Phoenix uh during Christmas one year and I could not believe how hot it was. It was I I was waiting for that, like, you know, kind of brisk morning, but it was hot. It was like 83 degrees when I woke up in the morning. Well, it's about 108 now, and it's getting getting hotter as we speak, so you probably don't want to visit now. No, not really. Not really. No, I'm kidding. It's gorgeous there. But yeah, that's that that's amazing. And so you definitely realize that there were quite a few things missing from the industry. But, you know, talking about pull brain, you know, you guys just recently launched a new update. You know, and you guys tend to launch quite a few updates, which is amazing. I don't say quite a few, but you guys you do a lot of updates, and I think that's because you see what is missing in the industry and you're staying up to date with trends. And so let's talk about this new release that you just recently did. Yeah, we we launched so many updates, honestly, because there's so much we want to do. Right. Yeah. We have a lot of plans going out a lot of years, and we're trying to get there as fast as possible. Um, in the new release, we're very, very excited about it, mostly because it's something I've always wanted in my own company, as most of these releases are, quite frankly. Uh, and then also it's something that's literally never been done before. Um, it's never been possible, and it opens up complete new doors for you know all the companies in the industry. And so the update we just launched is the ability to fully automatically dose using LSI methods. So if you're not familiar, yeah, if you're not familiar with LSI, it stands for Langley or Saturation Index. It's a different kind of method for dosing water versus uh a simple range target method, you know, for example. That's what most of the industry uses. It's what I used in my company. I knew LSI existed, and I knew and I chose the range target method specifically because, not because it's better. In fact, it's probably not better. There's there's schools of thought on both sides, and I'm not, you know, gonna debate that out here. I'm not the chemistry expert to do that, but there's a lot of arguments for why LSI is a better method, but no matter how you slice it, it is a far more complex method. It takes many weeks of training, you know, four to six weeks is what I hear from most companies that they train their technicians on LSI. And then you have to hope that they're doing those complex calculations at every pool, every time without fail, where all that training was for naught anyway. And that's really why I didn't use it back in the day, is I had, you know, I could barely keep technicians in the field because the turnover was so high, so I didn't have four to six weeks to train, quite frankly. And then I I just did not trust that they're gonna be out in 115 degree heat doing these complex things when they could just be pouring chemicals the way they normally do in a simple way. But the way we solved that is now instead of training a technician on this very specific recipe, for lack of a better word, for how you want to dose via LSI, you can train Pool Brain on how you want to dose via LSI. And then it's going to move the sliders in the arinda calculator and the exact order that you want, for the exact conditions that you want, and then produce the exact LSI output that you want. And then it just fills in the fields for all of the chemical dosing that needs to happen that day. So the technician doesn't have to, yeah, they they don't have to understand how to dose, you know, as far as how to calculate the dose at least, and they don't have to enter the dose amounts into the field. It just happens automatically. The only thing the technician has to do is enter the readings that are required, and then they just say, I confirm I put these chemicals that the the system's telling them to put in into the pool. And it makes chemistry completely different than what it's been for the entire history of the pool industry prior to that. Right. Well, shoot, I know people go out and they, you know, education is not always sought after these days, right? A lot of people kind of shy away from it. There's, you know, the the the good old the good all learning. Well, I learned it from, you know, Jack and he's been doing it for the for the last 30 years, and he learned it from Tim, who's been doing it for this many years. And, you know, like you said, getting out and getting a training for the for four to six weeks is not realistic in these days. Even taking a a two to three uh hour course or even a two to three day course is not realistic, especially during right now, pools are open, right? They just opened this last weekend. And so that is absolutely amazing. And so, gosh, so it sounds like you've done something that people can do in seconds. Yeah, I mean, literally zero effort whatsoever. They it's repeatable over and over and over again, no matter what the knowledge, uh what knowledge the technician on site has for that body of water, because every body of water is different, but the process doesn't change, and even down to the readings, you know, that you might argue like, oh well, now I have to train them to take the readings at least on these certain frequencies, you know, or or I have some, you know, hey Adam, I have some complex thing I do where I use simple range targets three weeks out of the month, but I use LSI one week out of the month. Your system can't do that. Well, yes, it can. So you can actually require the LSI panel on any frequency you choose. And if all the LSI readings are entered, it will trigger those LSI steps. And if all the LSI readings are not entered, it's gonna default back to your range target chemistry. So you can really dial this in. Um, we even release uh uh another feature we're calling pH4 based on some feedback we got from some people when we really researched this. And you can even automate the fail safes. So the the conditions where you'd say, hey, you know, uh sure, I want you to dose it like this, but you need to check to make sure you're not gonna lower the acid below just you know using a random number 7.0, for example. And the system will now do that automatically. The the company can say, here's the pH floor, 7.0. And so then it does all the steps the way it wants, and then it checks with if there's an acid dose, it's gonna check and say, hey, will this acid dose low rip below that 7.0 mark? The answer is yes, it's gonna change the acid dose to only go to 7.0. So protection from the surface, protection or for the surface, protection for bathers, and just peace of mind for the company and liability reduction and training reduction. Yeah, that's definitely handy too, especially if someone's, you know, I mean, with the high turnover rate you have in this industry, especially with techs, that's extremely handy, especially too for God forbid, sickness is going around and you can't have someone you can't if you only have one tech available that day and you have all these different pools to service, it definitely saves time on their route. It's easily one of the biggest challenges in the entire industry is technician turnover management. That and that was the core solution we built Wolverine around to solve that. Mm-hmm. That well, yeah, definitely right there, the labor shortages. I mean, my goodness. That's insane. You know, this definitely seems so with with building it for this, you you know, you obviously you saw that companies were struggling with this. When you're coming when you're thinking about doing these upgrades, uh kind of how let me ask this. And you know, you say that you try and stay up to date with what's going on in the industry, which is clear, but how do you time your your uh the upgrades that pull brain does? There is I know I'm you I'm I'm doing this to you on a Friday. I'm so sorry. You know, part of it is you know, where we're ready, because there are things that depend on other things. We've got this grandvision, for example, to fully automate chemical dosing entirely. Uh, I believe that chemical training can be 99% eliminated in this industry. Chemicals are a chemistry in general, it's just math. And there's a myth out there that you know, you know, the math that somehow doesn't work for your specific pool, but that's completely false. A lot of people say, oh, well, the environment's different. Well, if you manage the variables for the environment, because we can see the weather and things like that, you know, you can take that into account as well, and which we do in many cases. So it can be fully automated. It is being fully automated right now for the common cases for some of the largest companies in the entire industry that use pool brand very successfully. I did it with my company very successfully. We saved 40% on chemicals. So it can be done. We are doing it. We did it in order of what the most common and impactful things would be. So the first thing we did was simple range chemistry automation, uh, because just that's what most of the industry uses. That was a low-hanging fruit, and that's what my company used. So we did that. Right. Um, then we developed an AI proprietary model to automatically dose uh chlorine tablets. So that's always a guessing game. There is. That's one of the few things of chemistry where there's no perfect formula because that is a guess based on unknown variables like better load and you know how much it's is the tree dumping in the pool, dog swimming in it, et cetera. There's just so many things. Yeah. And in including weather. But we developed a model to see the things we can see, like the weather, the chemical history, the schedule frequency, the the you know, time, etc. And then we we developed a model that can guess that better than a human in in almost all cases. And we're refining that. That one's in beta full disclosure. But we're we're refining that and it gets better and better and better. Um, but that's one of the examples where AI actually works better than math, just like straight math. But you know, for the simple targets, that's math. And for LSI, that's math. And to be clear, you know, it's not pool brain's formulas doing this. This is uh it's a very trusted company, trusted calculator called Arenda Technologies. That's the calculator we integrate into the um application we have. And what we're doing is letting you set all of the requirements is if you're training a technician, but you're just training the system to use that calculator. So you don't even have to train your thinking of how you how you uh you don't have to change your thinking of how you're training it. You can just take what you're using now, what you understand now, and apply it to full brain, and then it just works through the same calculator tool you're already using. That's amazing. I love that. Not having to to go through all of the that that whole process and and the steps of that, that is very useful because having to re- having to go through a brand new process and retraining is an absolute headache. So that's pretty cool. But you don't have to do it, you're completely wasting your time. And and we've just made it to where you should never have to do that again. So there's really no need. Well, and I I I won't lie, I would say math is definitely not my my strongest suit. Nor mine. No. I I always that was I I got really good grades in high school and I got really good grades in college, but I definitely skimmed by when it came to the math portion. Definitely that part was not very good at. Uh don't don't listen to that part, Johnny. I use Excel um now. But you know, and I guess that's that's one thing that I I find interesting is that, you know, pool companies are becoming um increasingly operationally complex, right? And, you know, owners are managing routes, chemicals, you know, customer communications, staffing, inventory, repairs, and profit profitability all at the same time. Do you think that the industry is reaching a point where software is no longer optional? Yeah, I mean, if you ask if you're asking me that what you are. Yes. That point was reached in 2009. Right. When I moved my company paperless and when we, you know, with the product that back then it was called Service CEO, and then eventually Service Bridge. But yeah, it's now especially it's table stakes to compete. Before it was about efficiency and it was, you know, you were improving your own destiny essentially, but you can still compete with the old way. Now, if your competitor is not training technicians four to six weeks and they're just turning them over and they're doing a better job than your technicians are training four to six weeks, because the calculator that that executes all the time faithfully, no matter what, and never gets sick will do a better job than it, you know. And that's just one example. Like, how are you going to compete with your competition when you're manually billing and they're doing it automatically and you're offering a customer portal that's fully self-served to your customers? You know, customers demand that these days. If you know, they expect immediate results now, now, now, now, now. Yep. And if your competitor does it and you don't, they're going to switch. You know, it doesn't matter if you're a little bit cheaper. You turn that pool green once because of something that you could have prevented with pool brain showing you an alert to you know, proactively prevent it, and that's what the competition's doing, and you couldn't see it, and so the pool goes green, even if it wasn't your fault, they're gonna leave you and go to the competitor. So it's definitely table stakes at this point. Right. What would you say, you know, with your experience, um, what pool companies are still doing manually today that will seem completely insane, let's say five years from now? The one that the one that seems insane today to me that I hear a lot is billing. Uh, there'll be giant companies that you know come sign up with us and they're still manually billing or billing out of some, you know, just just QuickBooks, for example. Oh my gosh, QuickBooks. Oof. I used to work in QuickBooks. I remember that manual entry every time like an order would come in, you'd have to switch over and manually enter it. Oof. Yeah, and QuickBooks is a good accounting platform, you know, but it's not it's not your operational platform for a reason. So so the that that number one I think is just crazy because that's so much effort and there's so much potential for loss there for money. I mean, directly, both on the the actual billing portion, payment receiving, and then uh accounts receivable follow-up as well, is automated and full brain. So all of that can be just a thing that happens. But the other thing, the thing we were just talking about, is the main thing. The the number one pro the number one training, uh, or I should say the longest training factor for a technician by far is chemistry training. It's the most complex, it's the thing that people have no concept of when they come in, because why would you? And it's it's also the number one reason a pool will turn green and that you'll lose a customer or have customer complaints. It's also the number one source of your wasted money in your business because you know, if you're not calculating precisely every single time, you're either underdosing, which will turn the pool green, which takes a lot more chemical after that to turn it back, you're overdosing, which is just straight up wasted chemical, or you're misdosing. Just use the wrong chemical, which is straight up wasted chemical. And that ends up hitting your bank account for about 40% of your total spend, is what we're seeing. So, so the fact that people haven't come over to, you know, if anyone hasn't come over to pool brain to automate that yet, that seems wild to me because that is the number one problem in the industry by far is chemistry, chemistry training, chemistry execution, and it's fully automated now. Wow, yeah. Sign me up. Well, I mean, I I I do have your app, so it's funny. My husband So we're military and we don't have a pool in our backyard right now, but we have one more move and then he's gonna get out. And he's like, you know, you you know all these people in the pool industry. And I'm like, yes. And he goes, so we're gonna have like an amazing backyard with this amazing pool, and you're gonna take care of it, right? And I'm like, yeah, and I'm gonna have all these different apps on my on my phone to help me get through it. Because, like you said, I chemistry is is not in my strong suit. But with what you're describing, I would definitely have a lot more tools in my back pocket in order to get that done. So yeah. You know, what is what would you say kind of moving on, um going back to service text, if you will, would be one of the biggest complaints that they would usually have about software or you know, that would they might typically see slows them down in the field from your perspective. Yeah, so we we used to back in the day get a common uh concern. I wouldn't say it's a complaint because most people, once they actually use the software, did not think it slowed them down. They actually were pleasantly surprised that it saved them time, which it definitely does. But we don't even we don't even hear that too much these days. So I think people largely do understand the benefits of software and that you know, taking taking photos, for example, is just again, it's table stakes now, the customers demand it. But it also, even if they didn't demand it, you'd want to do it. And that's how this came about. The customers weren't really demanding it. It's that this the pool companies were trying to figure out ways to have the phone stop ringing with people screaming at them, that their guys didn't do something. It's just you know, and if you're a technician that doesn't have to deal with those calls, then maybe you don't understand why that has to happen. But if you're an office person or a company owner that has to field those calls, you fully understand why you've got to have pictures. But the myth surrounding that is that that takes a long time. We've we've timed it on an average stop that you have, even if you require before pictures, after pictures, pictures of the baskets, etc. And a PSI gauge picture, it's about five to six pictures roughly, and each picture takes between two and three seconds. So you're talking about 18 seconds a job, maybe, and and you're talking about 15 jobs a day, you're talking a few minutes a day to save you all customer complaints that would take even one customer complaint, just that one phone call to conversation takes a lot more than that. And then you usually have to go back and make them happy, and it just cascades. And then, of course, you know, there's the whole dosing thing. Yeah. Um, you know, that's a that just straight up saves you time. It saves you time to having to figure out how to calculate it, and you don't have to enter it. You don't have to pull it out of your pocket and you know, dry out your hands and do all the fields and figure it all out, you just look at it and it's there and you tap I confirm I put these chemicals in and you move on with your day. Mm-hmm. And that communicate. And so let me ask this. I'm a c so I'm a tech and I'm working on a customer's pool and I've come in and I've serviced their backyard. As the customer, am I getting an email saying that my pool has been recently serviced from am I getting that email from my tech or am I getting it from pool brain? You're getting it from pool brain. So technician does the work. Purposely asked that. Yep. Yeah technician does the work. And of course to be clear you can include things in the email and you have the option to customize the email however you want. There's a full open editor we have for the template. But you could say include technician photo, include technician first name, um, you know, however you want to do it there. But so it might you could make it look like it came from your technician if that's what you want to do. But it's coming from Pool Brain and you could format it any way you want and include a link to the customer portal would be my uh suggestion. So then they can click in and see their whole self-serve thing and they don't have to call you for literally anything. Right. But that's cool though. So that that way the the um the owner I guess the the owner of the pool they can go in and they can pull up the past months or anytime the tech has gone there, they have access to it too. It's like so it's like the tech has access and so does the owner. So that's pretty cool. Yeah that's really cool. I really like that. And it also gives them like that peace of mind. You know if they're out of town they can you know go in and see oh okay you know guy came over he did the job and I know or if they're you know especially two of I would imagine that would also be extremely helpful you know if you're renting your place out or if you have like an Airbnb. Mm-hmm very helpful and for that we actually made sure to design the customer portal to be compatible with like property management companies and Airbnb owners multiple sites because yeah I I dealt with that with my own company and they love the fact that they can have one portal to see all of their properties and I I think we're the only platform to do to do that, but I'm not sure. That is fantastic. I have um a a girlfriend of mine she's in California and she started doing she inherited a couple different houses um when her parents passed and she started doing Airbnb because they were gorgeous lots. And she was like man I don't know they have these great pools in the backyard and so I'm actually going to have to start talking to her about this because she was like I I need to make sure when you know I'm people are coming in and out that I have people in the backyard taking care of the pool and the spa while people are kind of transitioning in and out. And they're in California and so there's different rules and regulations but she's like I want to make sure that they're clean and Airbnbs are kind of different. So that's that's good to know I was gonna I wanted to know about that. So very cool. Definitely good to have that peace of mind because it's kind of like they're kind of like HOAs in a way right they're like a different species over there in that corner, right? Yeah. So another thing is you know I think a lot of pool companies they tend to operate in reactive mode you know kind of all day long, right? And so there's like calls, texts, route issues, inventory problems, customer complaints going back to pool brain, how does pull brain help owners kind of regain that operational control? Yeah so one of the very first features we built when we were trying to solve the problems that we were trying to solve for scaling and essentially controlling the product which is ultimately a technician in the field one of the reasons one of the things we realized very early on is that the technician could be doing everything right and still there's an issue and how do you see those issues? One of the ways that we did it for a while that was very time consuming and only marginally effective is we would look through all the pictures and all the stats and we would try and like farm the chemicals for reporting. Yeah and just like see if we can find problems the the needles in the haystacks. So instead we developed guided workflows in the field that made sure that the data came in really clean um and that it was always there consistently and once you have clean and consistent data coming in you have the power to alert based on that data. So we built a powerful alerts engine where you can really customize exactly what you want to see under what conditions and we just started playing to see what we can see with the data and and one of the one of the cool things that we saw is that if you take a PSI reading before the the technician leaves the property like it's the very last thing they do a couple things happen. Number one you know that the pump is always being left in a good prime condition. And if it's not you'll know that even if the technician doesn't some you know filters run at 20 psi and they're fine or or even five psi and they're fine and then some at like five psi are basically going to turn the pool green. You know it you just you just can't know on the PSI alone but you can know on a specific body of water psi over time you can see that graph and then if it starts dropping off predictably which we create an alert that would monitor that um we realize with like 95% accuracy you can tell what the pump impeller's clogging on before it actually affects the pool and turns it green. Oh that's really yeah so you can get that alert and the technician will never see that. Technician period but a computer will see that and so you know you can just completely prevent green pools that way. Same things for persistent chemical issues. Like if the technician shows up and the chlorine is zero that's not necessarily alert worthy because a lot of times it'll spike up and go down and spike up and go down but if every single time is showing up it's zero so let's say four or five times in a row is what you're setting you say I want to know if this corine is zero five times in a row that's just a you know arbitrary number it will tell you and what you know at that point is the pool is riding the edge. It might still be clear and blue but it is always right on the edge of turning green if it's always zero when he's coming back. And so you can fix that. You just get ahead of problems without having to look that's well and it always goes back to just because it looks you know crystal clear doesn't mean that it's actually it's clean, right? It's good to swim in. And that's such a big myth. And I mean it's my husband always jokes with me whenever we go out into the pool in the summer I'm always the girl that brings like the test kits and he's like oh you're really gonna do that and I'm like yes I'm gonna do that. And he's like oh my gosh and you know we're out there with our kids and I'm like you don't know I'm like just because it looks clean and clear doesn't mean it's actually safe to swim in, right? And so yeah I love that you're able to prevent a lot of those issues before they come hazards. And it's you know you're you're getting ahead of the game. That's fantastic. Yeah and even on the opposite side you know if the chlorine's too high a lot of times again it'll be blue and clear if the chlorine's a 30. Yeah but if you're if you're seeing the chlorine always coming back high high high high high forever then then something's wrong on the opposite side you're just wasting chemicals and it's not safe in the other direction. Right. So you can just you can find all that stuff. Right. That's awesome. That's awesome. Well I have another uh I want to touch on another subject and I told you I was kind of a geek about this but we're gonna gently touch on it. And you know it's inventory management and you know it that's always one of the I think it's one of the hardest things for uh companies and to control. And it's something you know like chemicals disappear and trucks get overstocked products run out immediately and unexpectedly you know how does pull brain approach inventory differently and just how how what is what is your approach in general with inventory? So my approach in general with inventory is to actually have the industry use inventory. That's a good one. I like that now most of the industry you know doesn't use inventory at all and and and even in my own company up until the last couple years you know when I really got deep into being a a platinum warranty station for Hayward at the time I didn't have a need for it or at least I didn't think I did. I quite frankly always did have a need for it but I didn't have the dollars to have four people managing an inventory system you know between like tracking the receiving and the distribution and the deductions and the audits and all the crazy things that go in with inventory ultimately the industry just kind of looks at that and goes I know I'm losing I know I'm getting stolen from I know things are getting lost I know things are probably not where they're supposed to be but ultimately I have a profitable business and I can't afford to you know do a staff or something I I don't understand. And that's just going to be a lot of manual effort. But we're taking that away we're we're changing that because when you put it into the system you make it easy and automate it then that equation flips to where you kind of can't afford not to have it. We're we're on phase three of like a seven phase project for inventory. But what we're releasing next month is going to be that phase three and it's gonna have unit breakdowns like consumption units that align with dosing units. Because it's very difficult when you break down units in general it's where it gets complex but you also have to make sure your automatic dosing works with it just seamlessly without having to set things. Right. So we've done that. And the vision eventually the hopefully honestly by the end of this year or early next year is that we'll have a full closed loop system. And that means from purchase uh product purchase to product consumption at the job it's full automated and full closed loop. So the vision is that a technician wakes up in the morning they have a shopping list pre-populated with what they need to buy that day based on their settings for the truck because it can see what's on the truck it can see what they're scheduled for and you have your settings for your stock. So it just says you need to buy this fully automated and they can tap it and say where is it at Mike Bloss's heritage branch for example or deliver it to these properties or however they want to purchase it through a supplier that's integrated with us they can then do that and then they go pick it up from Will Call I'll just use that example. And we can see that it's picked up from Will Call and it will automatically come off their shopping list and go on to their truck. So there's no manual swiping or tracking of any of that and you know it's accurate. That'd be yeah and so then once you go to a job or a route stop and you complete it even if it's chemistry it's going to be deducted off the truck including the consumption unit. So if you have a tab or a 50 pound bucket of chlorine tabs and use three tabs of that job it's going to pull three tabs off that bucket. Wow so then you always that's the future right there and you always know what's on the truck and you always know what to buy. And it's a full closed loop system and the technician does almost nothing they just tap purchase really and and that's that's it. And so they will have a really solid tracking system that the industry will will use. That will save company employee I mean all of the above so much time. I mean I managed inventory for a couple different companies and the the headache alone there there's not enough Tylenol in this world to manage inventory I'll tell you that and then obviously you know that I think many of this many of the listeners can agree with that inventory is such a pain in the butt and that just sounds can you do that for my house? I mean I know they have the smart fridges right but like I need something like that for my that's a phase 10 okay well I'll I'll okay I have faith in you Adam I know you can do it. All right you know I know communication kind of moving along a little bit is one of the biggest friction points in service businesses and you know customers they want immediate results right quick quick quick they want updates they want photos they want transparency and again that fast response how does pull brain improve the customer experience you know I've heard a lot of it but I kind of want to hear from you you know about that real-time communication yeah I mean it improves the customer experience in a lot of ways but if we're focusing on communication you've got a few different output number one the customer portal I can't stress enough because that's the future of all communication is self-serve most people don't want to be talked at or have to call in to an office and start asking questions and wait on hold and maybe get accurate information that they can't visualize. Just an easy portal they can log into where they can see everything at their own fingertips, take actions on their own, you know, add their own say payment methods or manage them or say which properties are going to get auto paid by which cards or just to be able to do that on their own and know it's accurate and done quickly that that alone is huge. But then on the other side of that, you know, proof of service so that you can do that with the customer portal. You can even leave feedback in the customer portal but um you can also do it via email uh and we're working on text messaging for that as well. But the emails come automatically you can see all the pictures um you can see the well you know whatever the company wants to share with them like I said fully editable templates uh and then also they can leave feedback directly on that that applies to the technician and the customer record and then leaves like satisfaction scores overall based on all the feedback for the technicians that you can compare and um you know it just really makes it easy for the customers one other thing I would say that is definitely unique to pool brain that benefits customers and pool companies communication wise is that when you know a like a route changes that goes from Tuesday to Wednesday, whether it's permanent or whether it's temporary, you can set automatic notifications to go out to the customer to say, hey, this is permanently moved from this day to this day or temporarily moved and here's the technician that's coming or whatever you want to do and just fully automate that away so you don't have to track what was moved and you don't have to reach out to the customer. The system just fully handles that in the back end and that's it. I mean there are companies that have full-time jobs devoted to that that now don't need to have that. Right. That is so nice. I mean it so pull brain's really taking away all of the additional steps a a company owner is having to do and it's really doing it for them, right? It's it's providing them that software and that communication tool and resource between that company and their customer. Yeah I mean I I believe anything that can be automated should be automated. Yeah it's all obviously easier said than done but that's what we're working on and driving towards for everything. Yeah. And and yeah that was that was a no-brainer for me because we spent so much time in my company tracking and chasing down and notifying and customers would still get mad sitting saying they were notified and we didn't have any history of it. But this just fully eliminates all of that with you know zero effort. Right. That's awesome. Well and it really I think it really strengthens you know the the customer experience right because first and foremost the customer experience means so much. And as you said people don't want to call in and have to press one to get this and they're directed to a different number. Unless you're my husband who I you know he's he's still there he he's uh he doesn't want to email he doesn't want to text he wants to actually talk to someone and I'm just like why? No I'm kidding there's still there's a few out there. There's a couple of them he's one of them. But no I I absolutely love that. And I again I that type of support it it's it's rare these days. And I think you know when I I just recently did a podcast um with uh Fred Ross and we were talking about AI right and where the future is and you we were talking about how you know the next 10 where we're going to be in the next 10 years and he was saying how right now there's these AI agents that go out and they're actually interviewing and how you can't actually tell if you're speaking to an AI agent or if you're actually talking to a real person. And he and I went back and forth and I was like I don't know I think I'd be able to tell he's like I don't know if you'd be able to tell Natalie and he had told me me where he had a conversation with I think it was a a lady or a gentleman on the phone and he finally asked them are you is this AI or is this a real person? They said back, oh I'm actually AI and he was absolutely stunned. He was like that's that's insane. And I forgot where I was going with that. But the point of that is I remember now is that while pool brain is still you know you're using AI, you're using technology, you're still providing that strong customer support experience which is a concern that I had with AI is as we move forward with AI, we we need to make sure that the customer isn't lost in that transition. But it sounds like pool brain is they're keeping that vision strong for that customer. No exactly um there's definitely great uses for AI AI right now. And then there's uh some bad uses for AI there's a lot of bad uses for AI and then there's a lot of in-between no one really knows where AI is going to end up obviously if it you know goes on the trajectory people think where you're not gonna be able to tell the difference between a human and they're gonna be accurate 99.9% of the time. Yeah uh it's very hard to predict the outcomes but what I'll say is right now AI is not there for mission critical things it makes way too many mistakes. Customer service can definitely be augmented by AI but you're not re fully replacing humans for anything other than menial tasks typically at this point. And in really you're not replacing humans you're you're replacing tasks that humans do and then they can focus on the the better tasks. But who knows what's going to happen in five years, 10 years it it just depends. Yeah you know I I I agree again though I mean if we there's a if there's an AI agent that can fold my laundry I'm about it. I'm about that because folding laundry is still I I never liked that chore. Well some of the things that we do like to do on Wednesdays is bust a few myths we can't get away with not busting a couple myths and so who better to bust some of those uh software myths uh than with you and so one of our myths is that software is only for large companies so who better to ask that than with you about pool brain what would you say to that that software was really only for large companies I would say it's definitely not only for large companies because all companies experience the same problems um they just experienced them at a different scale so you know we focus primarily on medium to large companies as far as who we build software for just because they feel the pain more acutely but that definitely doesn't mean that smaller companies don't drastically benefit from software even just with the automated chemicals chemistry we talked about, you know, that I don't care who you are, that's a 40% savings uh you know over your guessing on big pool, big poor, little pool little poor or however you however you do your chemistry math yeah you know and and it saves you time. Billing too you know whether you have five customers or 500 customers manually doing the billing and the follow-up takes a lot more time than automatically doing it. Again all the same problems just at different scales and everyone can benefit wildly I couldn't agree more. I have the the same respect honestly for a company of a hundred employees and a company of five employees absolute same respect. Yeah in some ways it's easier to operate a company of 100 employees yeah yeah right agreed here's a fun one all pool software is basically the same I know you're gonna like that one in in in 2020 that was true you know it would they're all basically glorified paperless log books because we looked at them you know obviously I was looking for something like pool brain I wasn't trying to build pool brain I was trying to find something like pool brain and the only reason we ended up building it is because it just didn't exist. And so we had to do something very unique and it was targeted I would say the biggest difference just at the core is we targeted the main problem that we had which is the industry's main problem is how do you manage a product that is a person. And that person is miles away from supervision and it's incentivized to move fast because they for obvious reasons and dealing with so many complex variables that they can't possibly be trained enough to know especially if they're switching pools and routes or they just got thrown on a route it's just we're setting them up for failure. It's impossible to control the outcome of that product. So we went and solved that problem and then built everything else around it. All the other platforms for the most part especially at that time uh from what I can tell they built a platform to be a like just kind of more of the same like marginally better paperless logbook. Like isn't it convenient that you don't have to leave a paper in the slip anymore and an email goes out like that's cool. We were doing that in 2009 with a generic platform. You don't need a pool specific platform for that you're just it's that it's that kind of stuff. So we really went after the things that made it unique in the pool industry like multiple body of water you have to be able to track your everything at the body of water level instead of a property level you need to be able to track custom pool equipment that is very specific or you can't control backwashing frequencies and automate filter clean and salt cell clean scheduling you have to track chemistry very very deeply or you can't automate it. And that again I think that's the number one feature full stop. Yeah and and and so it's just yeah so no they're not all the same pool brain is very unique from the other platforms. Well and also too I mean if we're if we're looking back at 2009 and 2015 I would say um minus maybe a a couple different apps I think a lot of the apps back then were just focusing on one thing. Oh the industry needs this well there's only a couple other people doing it let's just focus on a calculator. Let's just have one calculator and let's do that right that's what I remember. And but what you guys are doing I mean you guys are taking it shoot you're talking about inventory right like you guys have all this other stuff going on and you're like well let's okay let's talk about inventory. Let's I mean the inventory thing that is really cool. I know you don't want to talk about it I won't I won't make you talk about it if you're like Natalie Friday leave me whatever you want to talk about Natalie. Well thank you. But no but I I absolutely love what you guys were doing because again like I said I think so many apps out there, they really just focus on one thing and what you're doing is you've taken a step back as a service pro yourself, right? You looked at all the different areas of what pool techs were experiencing their frustrations right of what homeowners' frustrations were the customer experience frustrations and you were like well wait a second put it down on the map and you went okay we don't just need one app. We need an app that services all the different areas of the market but let's not stop there. Let's continue and let's provide further resources and tools. And then just to have fun with it let's add on inventory. I'm not gonna let you go on that inventory. We we yeah we add on whatever is going to create serious value for pool companies. And then yeah think we we hire from within the industry Nine times out of ten, because I feel like, you know, you could hire software people and they might be good at software, but how are they going to be good at making pool software if they don't really understand the pool industry or even talking about it in a demo or or any of that? So we have, I want to say the last time I calculated like 210 years of combined pool experience in in our company. And that just makes a really big difference for what we target and why. Right. Well, and I think it's so important too, and I've always been a strong believer. Um, gosh, what is it, the UPS way? I've I've heard a couple of people different, a couple different people tell me this is that when you start, I think you have to start at like the midnight time, right? You start at the midnight shift, right? You work the worst shift, and you don't get to start at the best shift. And that's one thing I've always truly enjoyed is working every different position at a job so that you you really truly understand the ins and outs of what you're doing. And I think that's what you know you really understand with what you're doing here and why pool brain is so excess successful. And so that's why this this uh this next myth is really gonna hurt me to say, and it's that tech hate software. But but let's let's look at it from this way, right? And so we have different, we have so many different generations in the pool industry. And there is a high turnover in the industry, right? I think sometimes it can be the younger generation because they're like, well, I'm gonna get in for the summer, I'm gonna make a quick buck, and then they get in and they see all that chemistry, and they're like, whoa, maybe this isn't for me. But I mean, kind of what would you say to that that tech hate software? Honestly, so my experience generationally is we we got a wide range. I mean, uh, you know, from from 18 to like 50s, uh, we had a lot of people coming and going. So so I wouldn't say it's generational, and honestly, a lot of times, you know, younger people would come in, especially with with software, and they are like, yeah, of course we're using software. I wouldn't work here if we would had to do this on paper like pavement. Like, what yeah, why wouldn't I use software? So honestly, if any if anything, the the older generation is a little bit more resistant, but I think it's just natural because people in general are are resistant to change, and it's just not something they've done their whole life. But I I would say if it's a myth that tech hates software, um, but that's definitely not true because technicians, you know, I I have the privilege at these trade shows of of talking to a lot of customers and a lot of the customers technicians at those trade shows, which I wouldn't have the opportunity otherwise. And it always surprises me how much the technicians love it. Because I I would think, you know, maybe they just don't appreciate it as much because they don't see all the direct benefits. They definitely see benefits, but you know, they're not focused on the billing efficiencies and the customer communication and all the stuff that really it's magical, but they love it. And the what I keep hearing from them is the visibility. Like they can see exactly what equipment's on site before they even show up at a glance. They can see all the chemical history on graphs and charts, reading history, they can see uh exactly when the filter needs to be backwashed, when the filter needs to be cleaned, when the salt cells next to for a clean, and it just makes their life so much easier. And then, of course, you take automatic chemistry in there, and they don't even have to worry about that or enter that, and it's it's just uh it's night and day. And the last thing I'll say about that is everyone likes their job better when they show up and the pool is mostly clean and it is not green. That is true. Pool brain really, really reduces green pools or like incorrect settings or anything that can contribute to the pool being a nightmare to clean. And so their route in general is just easy because they're showing up to clear and blue pools and doing the maintenance and not showing up to nightmares and having to do big work for things they don't even really understand why. Right. Well, especially too with you know, with the pool with pools opening, that's the worst thing is showing up and seeing a green pool and your pool's opening in 15 minutes and you've got a long line and you know everyone's got their coolers. What do you hmm? I would I would hate to call the boss and have to explain that and explain to the moms and the the little kids of why they can't get in the pool yet. I mean, you can ex- as I was telling you before we jumped on, I have a four and six-year-old little girls. I would if mm-mm, you can explain to them why you could they can't get into the pool. Not mom. Mom's not explaining that who you are. But you know, going back to the customer service aspect of it, you're absolutely right. Some service techs might not even think about that, but I think a lot of the times customer service can sometimes be missed. And I think that's a big part that is missed in this industry. Not saying that people purposely missed it, but there's so much education. And I've talked to Eric Knight about this with Watershape, is that I think customer service is missed and that there's not enough education out there on customer service, right? So people go out and they get educated on to be an operator or you know, to be a tech and um aquatic facility operator, but where and there did they get the customer service? How do they know to communicate with the homeowner, right? What should they put in their email to their boss, to the the pool owner, to the HUA? They don't know how to do any of that. And so by working with, you know, you guys, it it sounds like you've kind of like laid out the blueprints and kind of gives them like a general understanding of, oh, well, I probably shouldn't be like, you know, hey John, here's your invoice. Yeah. Maybe go a little bit further, like, hey John, saw your pool today. Maybe maybe go a little bit more in depth. Yeah, and gives them the the ability to adjust that very easily once and then have it repeat out infinity. Right. Right. Right. So I mean, I guess as going back to you know, talking about the the the update that PoolBrain has done with the the LSI, what would you say were some of the biggest hurdles you saw or kind of I guess came up against as you were pr trying to get this launched? Kind of like behind the scenes, if you will. Never getting nitty-gritty. Now the biggest issue was uh number one, it was a feature that I didn't use in my own company, meaning I LSI was not something we did in our own company. I had been to LSI classes, I understood uh you know largely what LSI was, but I didn't have my own recipe established. So it's one of the very few things I've developed that was a complex feature for Ful Rain where I didn't already have really intimate personal knowledge for years doing it. So I had to kind of you know go back to school a little bit on it. Um and I also had to talk to a lot of companies. We we we spoke to about 20 companies we picked up that we felt were really solid LSI-based companies. And what became clear very quickly, I was hoping I could find some commonality and figure out how to do just a couple different settings and make it super just like click, click, you're an LSI master. Yeah. Just turned out that that was not the case because 20 different companies. Yeah, 20 different companies had 20 very strong opinions on why their way was the only way. And of course, some of its regional and conditional to the surfaces they service and all this other stuff. There's just so many variables, which is why it's never been done before. And so I I I quickly realized that the only thing that would work well is we had to let any company train the system any way they want it. And and once you train it, it's done, but you have to just do your steps and knock yourself out. If you want to do it what people think is right or wrong or anywhere in between, you have the power to do that. And that was the big challenge, just kind of like understanding all of the different cases that we had to accommodate there. And I think that's I I think that's a very um it's a different approach, but I really like that approach, right? Because with different jurisdictions regulations, it's different everywhere. And everyone has different beliefs and how they're gonna do things. And so again, I think that's a really smart approach in how to to to uh let someone kind of train the system and how they want it to work. Yeah. It makes everyone happy. That's yeah, it does make everyone happy. But definitely I can imagine on the development side, that's it's probably was stressful kind of getting that develop, I mean, the direction and and and and allowing the system to do that. Yeah, I mean it's it the more complex you get, the the harder it is and the more stressful it is. And this is definitely a very, you know, behind the scenes it's complex. It's not complex to the user that's using it. It's of course not. Yeah. I mean, is your IT guy still talking to you? That the the gentleman that wrote the the guy or gal that did the codes, are they still talking to you? Because the the team of eight that worked on this is thankfully still talking to me. Good. Just for that one feature, honestly. We had to really, really figure it out to make sure we're doing it correctly. But but yeah, it's uh it's it's a great outcome. And this is phase one. I always tell people, you know, none of these features are the end all be all. We know there's other things we could do take a step further now, like uh you know, surface type, you know, how you vary things based on surface type. We're gonna start including that uh and some other things. Like you can already do it based on water temperature. We knew that was gonna be something from our conversations that was important. And we we have some other things planned, but we we love feedback. Please give us feedback on this. And again, our plan here is to automate all chemistry, including the edge cases of what happens when there's algae in the water, what happens when there's clarity issues, what about phosphates, what about salt system configurations? Fully, we're gonna fully automate it. I love it. I'm all for that, especially when I get that that pool in my backyard. I'm gonna need some help because it's been a while. So, you know, as you know some people. Yeah, I I do know some people, staring at one. You know, so you know, we we kind of talked a little bit about it, but you know, as as you look ahead, where do you think pool service operations are heading over, let's say, the next five years? Just in general or from like a software standpoint? Software standpoint, yeah, software. Yeah, so over the next five years, I think a lot of things are gonna finally come to fruition that though are actually now coming to fruition as we speak, but it's going to start becoming really commonplace to where the industry will go, yeah, of course it's this way. Why didn't we do it? We've never done it a different way. One of those things, not to beat a dead horse, full automatic chemistry automation. It's just gonna be fully automated away. And then two, it's going to be remote data management. So we already integrate uh with Water Guru and Pinter for remote data management to pull things in from the equipment off the pad. And eventually the vision, I've I said in on many podcasts, the vision is that we can walk into a backyard full tech. And no matter what equipment is on the pad, whether it's a heater, a pump, an automation system, salt cell, whatever it is, if it can talk to the internet, then you can connect it to pool brain very easily. And then it will automatically send data into pool brain every day so that even when you're not there, you have the benefit of that site to where it'll trigger alerts if there's problems that you need to see when you're not there. Because you know, a pump can go down the day after you leave and you're gonna come back to a swamp. And it and it will be your fault, according to the customer, every single time. Yes, it will not even know what happened or when it happened, especially if somehow, like let's just say it was a switch that got turned off. Yeah, and then they realized they need to go back on five days later after the pool's green, they flip it on and they blame you, and you genuinely don't know if it's your fault or not. But that eliminates all of that because you're getting the data in, and you can take you can get alerts automatically and you can take actions automatically and just fully take the the last piece of the liability out of the equation. And then I'm sure there are well, there's there's something else I'd I'd rather keep a little bit close to the to the best on that, but there's there's lots of cool stuff coming. But main things are gonna be more automations and remote data management, and then I think inventory as well. I think inventory is gonna be, I know you want to talk about it. Inventory is gonna start being widely adopted in the industry, including purchasing products through the suppliers through the platform automatically. Um, just because there's no reason not to when we have the ability to do that, the benefits are just too huge. Yeah, no, I agree. Well, I will definitely be waiting to hear about inventory. I I'm very excited about the LSI update. I very much appreciate you sharing that with me here today. And I will be waiting to hear about that inventory update for sure, as you can tell. And I'm already ready for it. But I'm gonna definitely dive in and play around with the LSI update. Is there anything that you would like to leave our listeners with before we uh dive off today? If you own a pool company and you haven't tried pool brain, please reach out, schedule a demo, poolbrain.com. You will not be disappointed and you'll see why we're very different than other platforms. Yes, yes, yes, yes. So as you heard, you know, what I think that stands out most, it's not that, you know, pool brain, it's not just about software. It's truly changing the operational standard of the pool industry. And companies that are willing to evolve operationally, embrace technology, and improve efficiency are going to have a massive advantage moving forward. And so, Adam, thank you again for joining us today and to our listeners. This really gives you an inside look into the updates of PullBrain, the LSI feature. Go on, check it out again, pullbrain.com. And if you have any questions, you can always reach out to me at nhood at thegritgam.com. Until next time, guys, have a good time.