Melanie Brzozowski remembers going into her interview with All Seasons Pools Spas & Outdoor Living in Orland Park, Ill., on her birthday. She already had customer service experience, having worked in retail at Walgreens, and was studying interior design. So she thought her background might complement the needs of the company.
Her intuition proved accurate. “I ended up getting the offer that day,” she says.
Though All Seasons might have given her a birthday gift in the form of a job offer, co-owner Dan Lenz would say Brzozowski herself was the real gift.
“She’s one of the most dedicated employees a company could ever hope to employ,” he says.
Grace under pressure
Lenz cites the pandemic as an example of how she truly shines.
As service office manager, Brzozowski worked with five others in the office before COVID. When the pandemic hit, she and one other staffer stayed on while the rest were sent home. However, as demand for swimming pools rose, the office was inundated with calls. “It was almost impossible to keep up with it,” Lenz says.
He also notes that Chicago has a short swimming season. The huge consumer demand coupled with the short window of opportunity to build left the team under immense stress.
“But [Brzozowski] managed to not only keep her wits about her amidst everything going on around her but also managed to keep that end of our business running at that high level — above and beyond.”
Not only that: As a single parent, she was managing a toddler at home — a child whose daycare was unpredictable due to the pandemic. Brzozowski worked remotely on days when her daughter, Olivia, was home. She took client calls, organized service schedules, and oversaw the office all from her laptop.
Brzozowski’s ability to get the job done from home led to a policy change the benefited both the company and its employees. She proved that it was possible to have remote employees so, when it came time to re-hire positions, Lenz — who was initially nervous about the idea of remote employees — agreed to hire people who didn’t even live in the same time zone. He says they have also proven to be exemplary at their jobs, even from afar.
Brzozowski didn’t think she would stay indefinitely at All Seasons. It’s true that she took to the company like a fish to water: She was even named Employee of the Year award one year after she started, which she considers her proudest moment with the company. Still, as Lenz puts it, she was in her early-to-mid-20’s and “wanted to see what else was out there.” So she left the Chicago area and moved to Salt Lake City, where her sister lived.
Not much time passed, however, before Lenz received a message from her saying that she missed working there. Lenz had just created the service office manager position and asked if she wanted it. A month later, she was back in Chicago.
The role model
Brzozowski says it’s important for her to set a good example for her daughter about success, in the same way her own mother had for her.
“I want to make sure Olivia sees that if you put your all into something, you’re going to be successful — make sure Olivia sees you’re on top of your game.”
That includes seeing Brzozowski working late at night or early in the morning to make sure her work isn’t neglected, but neither are her parenting duties.
Brzozowski is driven to make sure things are getting done in the office and on the job sites. When she first started, she would take all the questions from customers and talk to Lenz, write it down, and commit it to memory. Soon, she didn’t even need to ask Lenz most of the questions from customers because she already knew the answers. She says she wants to understand why something is the way it is, believing it’s the best way to take care of a customer.
She has even gone through some training to become a certified maintenance specialist and certified service technician. “She never just took a response,” Lenz says. “She always took the next step: ‘Why?’”
Brzozowski also contributes to the industry at large, serving as a WAVE committee chair for the Midwest Chapter of the Pool & Hot Tub Alliance (PHTA), as well as a member of the national WAVE Young Professionals Network steering committee. She says she loves meeting others, learning from and socializing with them.
She believes that the pool and spa industry has many opportunities for people, including sales, building, customer service, marketing, design, and more, and that it’s a cozy industry of friendly, like-minded people who love what they do.
Most of all, she feels at home with All Seasons as a company. “I feel so important and loved,” she says. “You can’t get that kind of feeling from a corporate environment. You can feel like it’s your second home.”
