Pool Corp Sells The Chlorine Every Pool Needs
Hello business enthusiasts,
Welcome back to Business Knowledge, where every week we look at one public company that sells something forgettable and earns serious money from it. We tell the story, then dissect the habit worth stealing for your own business.
- Company in focus today: Pool Corporation, Covington, Louisiana (Nasdaq: POOL)
- What they sell: chlorine, pumps, filters, and parts, sold wholesale to the people who build and clean swimming pools.
- Read this twice if: Your sales rise and fall with new customers, and you've never counted how many old ones still need you
In today's issue, we look at a pool cleaner's weekly supply run in Phoenix and the Louisiana wholesaler that grew by stocking her shelves. You'll learn how to measure the upkeep hiding in your own customer base, all in about 5 minutes.
Tuesday begins with no water in sight
Before 7 a.m. in Phoenix, a pool tech backs her truck up to a supply counter. She's loading chlorine for every backyard on today's route.
She is a composite, built from how Pool Corporation describes its service customers, but her week is real enough. Each pool on her list needs chemicals every visit and a filter cartridge every so often. Eventually, a pump motor fails in the July heat.
When that pump fails, the homeowner calls her, and she needs the part that day. None of this work depends on whether anyone in Arizona is digging a new pool this year.
The supply run before there was a Pool Corp
In 1980, Frank St. Romain opened South Central Pool Supply in Louisiana. For more than a decade, it was a regional wholesaler that grew slowly across the Southeast and Texas.
Money was the limit. Manuel Perez de la Mesa, who later ran the company, said in a published company history that "virtually all the earnings and whatever could be borrowed was used to fund the growth."
So a pool tech in 1985 bought from whichever small local supplier was nearby, and hoped it had the right pump in stock. Pool Corporation's own filings still call it a fragmented industry, and in the 1980s the wholesalers were smaller still.
What changed in 1993
In 1993, the Chicago private equity firm Code Hennessey & Simmons bought the company with mostly borrowed money. Its plan was to use South Central as a platform and buy up regional pool distributors across the country.
The renamed SCP Pool went public on Nasdaq in 1995 under the ticker POOL. Perez de la Mesa joined in 1999 from Watsco, the air-conditioning distributor from issue five of this newsletter, and spent almost two decades running the company.
By early 2026, Pool Corporation ran 456 sales centers and more than 300 Pinch A Penny franchise stores. Our Phoenix tech now has a counter near her route with the pump on the shelf.
Five and a half million pools and one small number
Pool Corporation's latest annual report puts the US base at about 5.5 million in-ground pools. In 2025, the company estimates, just under 60,000 new ones were built.
New pools are about 1% of the pools already in the ground. The other 99% still need chlorine every week, and every one of them will eventually need a new pump and filter.
A hobby's upkeep is steadier business than the hobby itself.
Installed base: every pool already dug, each one needing chemicals and parts whether or not anyone builds another.
The year new pools collapsed
The recession tested this idea hard. Between the 2005 peak and 2009, new pool construction in the US fell by about 80%, according to the company's own filings.
Pool Corporation's sales fell too, but by far less. Net sales dropped 14% in 2009, to $1.54 billion, and maintenance and minor repair products grew to about 70% of sales.
Construction dropped by four-fifths while the company lost one-seventh of its sales. Homeowners who could not afford a new pool still had to keep the old one clean or watch it turn green by August.
The difference was the weekly supply run.
The same test in 2025
New pool construction is down again from its pandemic high. Sales held anyway, with 2025 net sales of $5.3 billion, level with 2024.
CEO Peter Arvan told investors that maintenance items made up roughly 64% of pool product sales in 2025. The swing now sits in the other third (new builds and remodels), and it has hurt the stock. Shares were down about 63% from their peak by March 2026.
Inventory rose 13% to $1.5 billion as the company bought ahead of price increases.
Orders are moving to phones as well. Digital sales reached a record 15% of revenue in 2025. The company is pushing its POOL360 ordering app, which for our Phoenix tech means ordering tomorrow's chlorine from the cab and picking it up on the way to her first pool.
A steady base will not stop a share price from falling. What it did was keep sales flat through a building slump that cut new pools roughly in half from the peak.
Find the chlorine in your own business
You can apply the following tips in your business as well:
- Split last year's revenue in two. Pull twelve months of invoices and tag each line as either upkeep of something the customer already owns or a brand-new purchase, which takes two or three hours. You'll know it worked when you can state your upkeep share as one percentage.
- Count your installed base. Spend an hour listing every customer still using something you sold them, whether or not they bought this year. The signal is a number larger than last year's count of new customers.
- Build one upkeep product for that base. Call five existing customers this week and ask what they rebuy or repair most often. If two of the five name the same item, stock it or sell a plan for it.
- Keep the emergency part close. Pick the single item whose failure stops your customer's day, and make sure you can get it to them within hours. It worked when you won a job because a competitor had to order that part.
Every pool dug during the pandemic boom is still in the ground. Each one will need a new pump someday, and the counter nearest its owner's pool tech will sell it.
