Most Route Owners Are Flying Blind
You know your monthly revenue. You probably know your chemical spend. But do you know what each individual pool on your route actually puts in your pocket after everything is accounted for? Most operators do not. They have a rough feel for the route as a whole, and they leave it at that.
That rough feel is costing them money. Some pools on your route are genuinely profitable. Others are breaking even. And a few are almost certainly losing money right now, today, on every visit. The only way to know which is which is to run the numbers properly for each stop.
This is how you do that.
The Four Numbers You Need
To calculate pool route profit per pool, you need four inputs for each stop:
- Your monthly service rate for that pool
- Your actual chemical cost per visit
- Your time on site in minutes
- Your drive time to that stop from the previous one
That last one is where most operators stop keeping track. It matters just as much as the others.
Your Loaded Labour Rate
Before you can do anything with time, you need a loaded hourly rate. This is not what you pay a tech. It is what an hour of your or your tech's time actually costs the business once you account for payroll taxes, workers comp, vehicle costs, insurance, and your own time if you are running the route yourself.
A reasonable starting point for a solo owner-operator with a truck is somewhere between $55 and $75 per hour all-in, depending on your state, your truck payment, and your insurance situation. Work out your own number. Do not borrow someone else's. For this example, we will use $65 per hour, which works out to $1.08 per minute.
A Worked Example: The $130 Pool That Loses Money
Here is a real-looking stop. Weekly service, so four visits a month. The customer pays $130 per month. On paper that sounds fine.
Monthly rate: $130.00
The pool is a 15,000 gallon plaster pool. It runs through chlorine. Each visit you are putting in about 1.5 lbs of trichlor and topping up the phosphate remover. Your actual cost for chemicals on this pool, averaged across the month, is $9.40 per visit. Four visits means $37.60 in chemicals per month.
Revenue minus chemicals: $130.00 minus $37.60 equals $92.40.
Now time. You spend 22 minutes on site. The pool has a cartridge filter the customer never cleans and a salt cell you are always brushing. Brush the tile, test the water, adjust, backwash or clean as needed, log the visit. Twenty-two minutes is honest for this stop.
Drive time from your previous stop is 14 minutes each way. That is 28 minutes of drive time per visit, plus your 22 minutes on site. Total time per visit: 50 minutes. Four visits a month: 200 minutes, or 3.33 hours.
At your loaded rate of $1.08 per minute, 200 minutes costs you $216.00 in labour.
$92.40 minus $216.00 equals negative $123.60.
That pool is losing you $123.60 every month. You are paying to service it.
Why the Drive Time Kills You
The chemical cost in that example is not the problem. Fourteen minutes each way sounds like nothing, but 28 minutes of drive time per visit on a weekly pool is 112 minutes of drive per month before you have done a single thing. At $1.08 a minute, that is $120.96 in drive time alone. The pool never had a chance.
This is why route density matters so much. A pool that is two minutes from your previous stop and two minutes from your next one is a completely different business proposition from the same pool sitting eight minutes off your path in either direction. The service is identical. The profit is not.
Running This on Every Pool
Do this calculation for every stop on your route. It takes about ten minutes per pool if you are being honest about your times. Track your on-site time with your phone stopwatch for a week if you are not sure. You will be surprised how often your gut estimate is off by five or six minutes, and five minutes at $1.08 is $5.40 a visit, $21.60 a month on a weekly pool.
When you have run all your stops, sort them by net monthly profit. You will likely find a cluster of genuinely good pools, a big middle group that is fine, and a tail of stops that are marginal or negative. The negative ones need a price increase, a route adjustment, or a hard conversation about whether to keep them.
A price increase of $25 on the example pool above would still leave it unprofitable. What that pool actually needs is a new customer closer to your existing route, and a goodbye letter to this one. That is a hard call, but the alternative is continuing to pay $123 a month for the privilege of servicing it.
Making This Easier to Repeat
The calculation itself is not complicated. The hard part is having clean data for every stop: actual chemical usage, actual time, actual drive. If you are tracking this in a spreadsheet, it is doable but tedious, and it tends not to get updated.
We built getLucci specifically to track this stop by stop, because running a 100-pool route and guessing at profit per pool is how you stay busy and broke. If you want to try it, it is free for your first 50 pools.
But even with a spreadsheet, do the math. Know your number on every stop. Pool route profit per pool is not a metric for big companies with accountants. It is the one number a working operator cannot afford to guess at.