Premier Pool Service
Charles Lauller, president of Premier Pool Service
Pool construction franchiser Premier Pools is starting a similar operation for the service side of the industry.
Called Premier Pool Service, the franchise will become available across the country in January 2018. And company officials have set an ambitious goal: 48 franchisees in the first 12 months.
“It’s an aggressive and large number, but we believe that there’s a latent demand for something like this in the industry,” said Charles Lauller, president of Premier Pool Service.
The service franchise has been established as a Texas limited liability company owned by Paul Porter, CEO of Premier Franchise Management, and Lauller. It stands as a separate firm from PFM, Porter said, to make each operation accountable for its own profits. The service franchise will be headquartered out of the same offices as PFM, in Granite Bay, Calif. Lauller will manage and train from his office in the Dallas suburb of Flower Mound, Texas.
This new operation will join a handful of other companies that have begun franchising pool service in the U.S. over the past few years, including America’s Swimming Pool Company, Poolwerx and Pool Scouts. Porter believes his company’s brand recognition from the builder side will give it an edge over the other franchisers.
While the firm is open to considering potential franchisees throughout the U.S., it sees this partly as an opportunity to leverage the hundreds of pool customers it has gained through its construction arm, Lauller said. So they may seek to open service franchises in areas already served by a Premier construction franchisee. These would serve as warranty stations for the paired Premier builders.
“We thought it would make a lot of sense if we put some service companies in those areas,” Lauller said. “It would be a natural evolution of that business. We have a presence there; the brand is known there.”
Partnered with a Premier builder, the service franchisee could perform start-ups and maintenance for those who buy new pools. “You’re talking about somebody who could literally build routes for a couple trucks off that relationship,” Lauller said.
The new service outlets also would perform diagnostic work and repairs.
Some of Premier’s current builder franchisees have formed partnerships with local service firms. These builders will not be required to partner with a local Premier service operation, Porter said, however it will be encouraged. Those service companies that already partner with Premier builders would get first consideration to become Premier Pool Service franchisees, if interested. However, they would still have to go through the vetting process.
In the long-run, the company will be open to granting franchises to both existing service companies and individuals outside the industry. But in the first six months, Premier will mostly look at existing companies who can bring their experience into the fold and streamline the learning curve, Porter said.
The franchisees would receive infrastructure support from Premier, including established processes, protocols, software, buying power from economies of scale, along with administrative and marketing help.
“[Non-franchise owners] would need to get to where they have 500, 600, 700 accounts, and are generating millions of dollars to be able to break even supporting a staff that could do all those things,” Lauller said. “Most small business owners will never have that kind of support outside a franchising opportunity.”
Lauller previously served as a business consultant, largely in the health care and banking industries, helping companies bolster efficiencies, partly through software. He has created software programs for those industries, as well as for the pool service company that employed him for two years before he took the post with Premier.
Premier Pools started as a single-office builder in Sacramento, Calif. After branching throughout the state and into Arizona, it became a franchiser in 2010. It now has approximately 50 offices across the country. The company says it has built more than 50,000 pools to date.
