When Alec Small first began working at MCM Pool Service, he had no plans of building a career in the industry.
But, as has happened to so many others, the industry would soon draw him in.
Small, who studied computer arts and computer science in college, says he had bounced from employer to employer after graduating. “[MCM] was a job to pay student loans when I didn’t have other work,” he says. “I would come and go ... before I settled into seeing the pool business as a long-term vocation.”
Small, who now has been with the company for about five years, started as a pool cleaning technician. At first, he toggled between work at MCM and a tech company, where he taught kids computer animation, programming code and Photoshop. He soon recognized some internal gaps he could fill at MCM.
“So, one year, I just put all my eggs in the MCM basket,” he says.
Small brought the tech, teaching and leadership skills he’d learned in roles outside the pool industry and applied them at MCM.
“I really took to the pool maintenance operations because I enjoy teaching people, and there’s a large part of that in cleaning,” he says.
Giving it his all paid off, both for Small and the company. In less than five years, he rose from maintenance technician to head of the maintenance department, and now to general manager.
Immediate impact
Matt Small, a co-owner of MCM Pool Service, and Alec Small’s brother, was impressed with the progress. “He turned the least profitable section in the company into probably one of the most profitable sections,” he says.
In terms of profitability, Matt Small calculated how much income each service generates per minute. As it turned out, the dollar-per-minute income rate on maintenance is about double what they see on other service work. Alec Small achieved the profit increase by restructuring the company’s maintenance pricing and route scheduling.
“Our pricing was not competitive, and for a number of reasons, it needed a major facelift,” Alec Small says. His experience working as a cleaning technician gave him an understanding of what customers wanted and how to create a price that matched the quality customers believed they deserved.
He got rid of biweekly cleaning services, which made scheduling more complicated and created more work. He replaced them with twice-weekly cleanings: More frequent visits meant there wouldn’t be enough time for the chemistry to go askew, making each visit quicker and easier.
Additionally, Small approached pricing like streaming services do, developing a subscription system with three-tiered pricing for maintenance.
“The customers like it, because it’s just a flat rate that they understand,” he says. “If there are [water chemistry] recovery fees, they understand why they are. ”
Matt Small says the tiered subscription program got MCM to the point where maintenance is pulling in big money. Even chemical sales have increased dramatically, despite the lack of a retail store. “Last July, we had around 100 weekly maintenance customers, and we did about $65,000,” Alec Small says. “This year in that same month with probably 120 [weekly maintenance customers], we did $92,000.”
Communication upgrades
Small also used his background in tech to improve communication systems with customers and with staff internally.
He led the team in switching from paper-based systems to using Skimmer, an app that allows techs to track service calls and communicate with customers, and in adopting Discord, a communications app commonly used for video gaming communities, for peer-to-peer staff communications.
“I grew up as a gamer, you know, living behind a screen, so I’m very familiar with the techie side of things,” Small explains. “And I try to implement those things into the job in ways that can help overall user experience, so for Skimmer specifically, the customer doesn’t need to download the app, and I think that’s why it’s the most user friendly.”
Small is responsible for creating all of the infrastructure for MCM in the Skimmer app and routing the technicians to the jobs for the day.
He chose Discord for internal communications because it was a platform he was very familiar with as a gamer and could easily adapt for MCM, to improve communication between office staff and field technicians. Team communications now occur in one place, and people know how to reach one another. This helped build team culture, Small says, because it gave people a forum to share things that went on in the field, whether it was a product they liked, an animal they saved, or a job they took pride in.
Finally, Small implemented one more crucial element of building team culture and communication: a daily meeting where team members go through the post-job notes of the day with a manager. He calls it Day Review and says the process allows for himself and other managers to provide guidance and build rapport with staff.
“He started at the bottom here, and he worked his way right up to the top,” says Matt Small. “Now he’s the GM running the show, and he did it with hard work, and he did it for himself and for the team.”
