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New year, new opportunities Chief operating officer at Poolwerx, Nic Brill, outlines what he sees as three key trends in 2022, following two years that presented myriad challenges but also opportunities for the pool industry. By Nic Brill
ABOVE: The new year is likely to have its challenges, but there will be plenty of opportunities as well RIGHT: Nic Brill, Poolwerx COO
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lients expect the “new normal” of servicing options – and there’s no going back to the old approach. Rewind two years, and the majority of us didn’t give a great deal of consideration to things such as online shopping, or contact-free service options. While there’d been a shift to increased e-commerce for retail like clothes, books and gifts, in Australia getting your groceries delivered to your home or your car boot remained something only used by the very busiest of people.
“There’s no longer any acceptable one-size-fits-all approach to managing your pool.” And those who were too busy to spend an hour at the shops were almost certainly too busy to manage the health and maintenance of their swimming pools! A lot has changed in that time, and there’s no longer any acceptable one-size-fits-all approach to managing your pool. To ensure our franchise partners kept their businesses operating successfully during lockdowns, as well as protecting the health and safety of our clients and backyard pools, we diversified our service offerings. Want to test your own pool water and send us the result to review? Sure – we can mail you a 34
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testing kit or wait at your front door while you go and do it. Want to continue to treat your own pool, but don’t want to enter our retail stores? Not an issue – we have a simple click and collect or home delivery option. Want to come in and chat to us in-store? Great – as long as you’re double-vaccinated and follow all local government restrictions, come on in! If not, use our drop box option to leave your water test and we’ll call you with the results. These are all services that we can quickly turn on – and based on the needs of our clients and safety of our teams, we’re able to amend, adjust, or turn off accordingly. We may have fast-tracked and innovated some of these approaches based on our circumstances, but for our clients, this is something they have come to expect. Establishing service options which are convenient, safe and easy has helped grow our customer base.
Rethinking operations
New initiatives off the back of covid learnings shouldn’t end with client services – there is an opportunity to rethink the way our industry operates and move forward more strongly and efficiently. That may be learning to be more flexible and approaching business with a multipronged attitude; adopting a hub-and-spoke model of varying revenue streams; or finding ways to forecast trends by observing global challenges. Alongside the introduction of our innovation team, our footprint in the US means our Australian network can leverage industry insights six months before they hit local shores. The immediate