For this year’s Pentair Pool Pro Awards, the manufacturer applied the theme “Backyard Legends.” That title certainly holds true for two of its honorees in particular.
Among the various categories of winners recognized in Pentair’s award program are two Lifetime Achievement Award recipients..
As the company describes it, these well-rounded professionals must set and reach a high bar for performance and influence inside and outside their own companies: “This award is designed to honor senior leadership and seasoned business owners who have made strides in their community and become local backyard legends through hard work and community relationship-building.”
Here, we meet this year’s Pentair Pool Pro Lifetime Achievement honorees: Shannon Graves and Sean Johnson.
Shannon Graves
Owner
Graves Pools & Spas
Myrtle Beach, S.C.
Shannon Graves Jones jokes that she’s not old enough to have a lifetime achievement award. But after nearly five decades inside the family business — and a career defined by steady growth, staff development, and a service-first culture — her Pentair Pool Pro Lifetime Achievement Award reads less like a capstone and more like a milestone.
Graves is the third-generation owner of Graves Pools & Spas in Myrtle Beach, S.C., a company her grandfather started in 1975. She began helping out at age 10 in the office with her grandmother. From the beginning, she says, the best part was learning the trade and the people side of it from the two men who built the company.
The experience wasn’t only educational. “First, I loved working with my grandfather,” she says. “Then I got to work with my dad — working beside him for 15 years and learning from him.”
When her father’s chapter in the business ended, Graves found herself at a crossroads about what came next. “When he left, I really had to do some soul searching,” she says. “I decided this is the best place I can be and touch a lot of lives. It’s been pure joy ever since.”
Today, Graves Pools & Spas serves both commercial and residential customers, focused on aftermarket work — service, maintenance, equipment installs and replacement, and water management. The company supports roughly 1,000 commercial accounts and 600 residential customers, with a team of about 50 employees and a 25-vehicle fleet.
In recent years, it has expanded its offerings, including a pool-cleaning division that quickly grew to more than 200 accounts.
Built to serve: Graves’ people-first blueprint
The letter nominating her for the award describes a culture anchored by five core values — dependability, faith, momentum, honesty, and teamwork.
These are communicated in a simple motto: “We are an honest, dependable, faith-filled team creating unstoppable momentum.” That faith-forward, people-first mindset isn’t a tagline for Graves; she treats it as a business operating system, reinforced through regular staff meetings and hands-on training in what she calls the ‘Graves way.’”
As Graves sees it, this ethic has served the company well. “This business is absolutely blessed,” she says. “We have not gone one year without 5% to 10% growth.”
She connects that consistency directly to the company’s identity. “I really think it’s because we are a service business,” Graves says. “Everything we do is serving our customers.”
That service shows up in the field and in workforce development. Graves worries about a shortage of hands-on tradespeople and actively recruits high schoolers by offering a path to a real career. “No matter where the technology goes,” she says, “there will always be a need for someone to install it, fix it, or replace it.”
Graves also extends that service beyond her customer list. The company partners with the YMCA, providing products and services at no cost to help keep pools ready for swim instruction. “Our big focus is making sure we can get as many children through swim lesson at the Y as possible,” she says.
When Graves learned that an employee had nominated her for the Pentair award, she didn’t take it as a personal victory lap. She saw it as proof that the culture is real.
“I sat here and cried, because that means the world,” she says. “Her letter means more to me than anything. To be recognized by Pentair is truly a blessing.”
Sean Johnson
Executive Vice President of Field Service
Amenity Pool Services
Orlando
Sean Johnson isn’t the type to lead behind a screen, even when distance and title would make it easy.
Overseeing Amenity Pool Services’ Southern operations from New York City, Johnson still finds time to work alongside technicians in the field — ride-alongs, early starts, hands in the work — because he wants to stay close to the job, the customers, and the people who keep the business moving.
That hands-on approach is a big reason Johnson, executive vice president of field service for Amenity Pool Services, earned the Pentair Pool Pro Lifetime Achievement Award. Johnson didn’t campaign for votes, he says. The support came anyway.
“I was so surprised. I was super honored,” he says.
He still remembers the exact date he got his first job in the pool industry: April 4, 2000. He was 18 and working as a lifeguard — an ironic starting point, considering that pools made him uneasy for much of his childhood. “Growing up in New York City, there wasn’t a lot of opportunity for kids to swim,” Johnson says.
He didn’t learn to swim until he was 12 or 13, and he describes those early years as shaped by anxiety around water. Becoming a lifeguard changed that. It was a confidence boost and it set the direction for everything that followed.
A couple of years into college, Johnson helped launch the New York division for swimming pool management company American Pool. Over the next two decades, he scaled the operation from about 10 commercial pools to more than 400, turning the business into one of the largest commercial pool service operations in New York City.
Why Sean Johnson still rides routes
Today, Johnson leads Amenity Pool Services, a sister brand to American Pool, focused on residential pool service in Arizona, Texas, and Florida. The shift from commercial to residential wasn’t just a change in customer type — it meant learning and adapting to new operating rhythms and regional realities.
“The way you clean a pool in Florida certainly isn’t the way you’d clean a pool in Phoenix,” he explains.
To learn it properly, he goes where the learning is. The move kept him on the road — 270 nights in hotels over the past two years, by his count — but he considers the travel essential. “I got 99 percent of my advice from the guys doing the work,” he says.
Johnson’s time in the field also sharpened his view on leadership at scale. “In a corporate environment it’s easy to lose focus on the people actually producing the revenue,” he says.
His antidote is technician-first thinking. “If you’re not improving the lives of your techs, your business isn’t going to grow,” he says.
