
After a frustrating 2024, Michael Panella is ready to get back on track in 2025.
His company, Swimming Pool Services, of Waukesha, Wis., was managing the economy just fine. For him and his team, the weather seemed determined to frustrate workflow.
“Our production teams did not string together a Monday-through-Friday work week until after the Fourth of July,” says Panella, CEO of the PSN Top 50 company. “That’s so unheard of for us. Yes, we deal with the weather like everyone else. But to literally have 14 or 15 straight weeks where it rained or we were dealing with the aftermath of rain? We were basically two months behind all year, strictly due to weather constraints.”
But that was last year. Panella has high expectations for 2025. Thanks to some changes the company has made over the past couple years, it’s well positioned to manage whatever comes.
Proactive billing
One recent move by the company secures a significant portion of its service revenue for the year well before the season even starts.
For years the company incentivized clients to sign up and pay for pool openings early in the year, then approached them again mid-summer to do the same with pool closings. Recently, it moved to ordering and scheduling both openings and closings in January or February.
Regular clients receive agreements for the year’s opening and closing, prepopulated with the relevant information and price based on services they received the prior year. The client need only approve the payment if they want the same services as the last year, or let the company know what changes to make to the order.

“We used to be content just sending out the blank forms and waiting for people to fill them out,” Panella says. “Now we play offense. We’ve gotten a little smarter and proactive about going after clients.”
He borrowed the idea from his friend, Dan Lenz, vice president of All Seasons Pools, Spas & Outdoor Living in Orland Park, Ill.
“This is our second year doing it,” he says. “Between our service and maintenance teams, we’ll probably have one-third to one-half of our revenue booked by the end of February, paid for in full.”
Clients also receive a discount for early openings. “We tell them, ‘Why don’t you let us open your pool before everybody else? Not that you’re going to be swimming in April, but let us open the pool and [you'll] get a smoking good deal,’” he says.
There has been a slight learning curve. Last year, some of the customers who had taken care of the early-bird deal forgot by late summer, so they signed up for pool closings again, leaving the staff to notify them and issue refunds. This year, they’ll set up a system to avoid that.
Culture refined
Like any change, this one posed a couple challenges and evoked some resistance from the staff. Thanks to work that Panella and his team have invested in reshaping company culture, they got through that change.
It's been a process of evolution. The team began by articulating the company mission, then writing out its “Seven Points of Culture,” which lists its core values. These include customer satisfaction, integrity, communication, excellence, teamwork, balance and fun.
“Everyone on our team is subject to live by those seven core values,” Panella says. “And nobody is exempt from it. That culture also applies to our clients and vendors who we purchase products from.”
The core values were meant to serve as the foundation for the company’s culture, and to seep into everything the company does. Job candidates are told about it at their interviews. Performance reviews are performed through the lens of the core values. And if disciplinary action is needed, the staffer is told which of the core values they have violated. The Seven Points are used in the company’s rewarding system as well: When staffers nominate each other for Employee of the Quarter, it’s based on which values that person exemplifies.
“So many companies… their culture is, ‘We have this poster on the wall that has our core values.’ But that’s it. They don’t really live it; it’s not part of the fabric of who they are.”
Seeing the values at work made an impression on the staff. “As we started filtering our decisions through the core values, slowly but surely everybody got on board or found a different place to work,” Panella says.
To let employees know they’re appreciated, Swimming Pool Services gives a monthly Member Appreciation Gift. to each employee. They receive such items as company logo jackets or various types of gift cards. Employees also receive an annual bonus in spring.
While several components -- both big and small -- went into building the company culture, Panella takes particular pride in one.
“I would say where we’ve made the biggest strides is in regards to work-life balance,” he says. “We used to be like everybody else where we worked 80 hours per week, then got burned out. And it stunk.”
Even Panella himself transitioned away from his 80-hour work week. If an employee doesn’t ratchet down their hours, Panella says he’ll deduct from their bonuses. “We said, ‘We’re willing to pay you more to work less,’” he explains.
One of the biggest initiatives toward promoting work-life balance is providing two paid weeks off for the holidays.
Positive outlook
Looking at the year ahead, Panella can see how the work paid off.
“We’re in a great spot,” he says. “This is the first time in the last number of years where we’re not going into the season thinking, ‘Okay, we need to hire four people or we’re in trouble,’” he says. “We do have turnover, but we don’t lose a lot of people.”