Ryan Doyle·January 25, 2024

How to Buy a Pool Service Business | Ryan Doyle Interview

Ryan Doyle, a former Wall Street finance professional, left corporate life in 2021 to search for a business, ultimately spending a full two years and surviving one near-fatal broken deal (a different pool company he walked away from the day before closing after uncovering inflated margins and a risky stock-sale structure with unquantified liabilities) before closing on a pool maintenance, service, and retail business in Georgia's Golden Isles/Brunswick area on May 1, 2023. The business — sub-$1m EBITDA, ~20 employees and trucks, two retail locations, revenue split roughly 40% maintenance, 40% service, 20% retail chemicals — benefits from an affluent, quality-focused customer base that supports premium pricing and non-discretionary recurring revenue. Shortly after close, Doyle discovered the seller's bookkeeper had effectively been running the entire business and, when he began asking questions about financials, she disappeared, leaving him locked out of QuickBooks, POS, and 401k systems for over a week during peak season with a month of invoices unsent and a real liquidity crunch. He clawed the business back with help from a former intern who moved in for the summer and a peer support group of fellow searcher-operators, and the episode closes with Doyle reflecting on the value of walking away from bad deals, the risks of buying subscale businesses without management depth, and his ambition to grow the business 3-4x over three years along the Georgia coast.

Deal facts

multiple: described as 'right down the fairway' of reasonable market multiples for the size, no specific number given
sde ebitda: sub-$1m EBITDA (on the low end of his target size range)
revenue: low single-digit million dollar revenue
financing structure: SBA loan (bank/lender relationships lined up in advance); proprietary sourced asset purchase agreement, no broker involved on this deal
notes: 20 employees, 20 trucks, two brick-and-mortar retail locations; deal closed May 1, 2023 after roughly 4 months from cold outreach to close; prior broken deal (different pool company) had gotten to the day before closing after a 9-month process and ~4 months to LOI before Doyle walked away due to inflated/unreliable financials and a problematic stock-sale structure with unquantified liabilities.

Why this business

Doyle spent two full years searching (started 2021, blew up a Wall Street finance career to search for a business he could control the destiny of) and geographically constrained his search to the Coastal Southeast, eventually to Savannah, Georgia and then south to Brunswick/the Golden Isles/St. Marys after exhausting the Savannah market. He had walked away from a near-closed pool services deal in late 2022 after discovering inflated margins and unresolved liability exposure in a stock-sale structure. This second pool business, found via a fresh batch of cold outreach letters and an email campaign (his self-imposed 'last batch' before giving up search), fit his thesis: recurring maintenance/service revenue weighted over construction, an affluent high-end residential and commercial customer base (the Golden Isles) that supports premium pricing, and a responsive, well-prepared seller who wasn't using a broker this time (avoiding high broker fees after a prior broken deal of his own).

What's working

Premium positioning in an affluent market (Golden Isles) lets the business charge higher prices, pay employees better, and attract better talent
Business mix weighted toward recurring maintenance (40%) and non-discretionary service/retail (chemicals) rather than lumpy, low-multiple construction/project work
Large commercial/B2B-like customer base (family trusts, multi-generational estates, resorts, power washers, single-pool operators buying wholesale chlorine) that pays reliably and cares more about quality than price
Strong brand/scale advantage in bulk chemical sales lets the company undercut and eventually re-absorb 'one-pooler' single-truck competitors who can't handle back-office demands
Proprietary sourcing (cold outreach letters and email campaign) found a seller who was highly responsive and organized, having already been through a prior (failed) broker-led sale process, which sped up and de-risked the deal
Peer support group (WhatsApp pod with other searcher/owners including Chad Hyder and others) provided critical emotional and tactical support through the post-close crisis
Hiring a former intern (Carter) who dropped everything to help war-room the business back under control
Line of credit gave a cash cushion during the liquidity crunch even though it was never tapped
Growth plan to consolidate/expand along the Georgia coast (Savannah to Jacksonville), aiming to grow the business 3-4x over three years

What's hard

Post-close discovery that the seller's bookkeeper was the de facto general manager and sole holder of institutional knowledge; she ghosted (stopped responding, technically resigned) about three weeks after close
Locked out of QuickBooks, point-of-sale, and 401k systems via two-factor authentication tied to the missing bookkeeper's phone; took 7-10 days of red tape with Intuit support to regain access
A month of unsent invoices piled up during the busiest season, creating a real liquidity crunch (financials initially showed revenue down ~70%, later understood to be a reporting/access artifact)
Paper-based, undocumented 20-year-old back-office processes with complex non-flat-rate invoicing (visits plus chemicals) made rebuilding operations from scratch extremely difficult
Migrating from QuickBooks Desktop to Online mid-crisis while systems didn't sync with the CRM compounded the invoicing backlog
No real payment terms with suppliers (essentially cash on delivery) increased cash flow pressure
Being subscale (sub-$1m SDE/EBITDA) meant no management layer buffer; losing one key person (the bookkeeper) took down the whole back office, and losing field techs during busy season disproportionately burdens remaining crew
The earlier broken deal: stock-sale structure demanded by sellers for tax reasons, inflated/suspicious gross margins (unbilled inventory issues with a key supplier), and unquantified assumed liabilities that would have required litigation to resolve — ultimately killed after ~9 months and significant broken-deal costs
Recommends against buying project-based residential service businesses without direct project experience in that specific trade
Loneliness and 'existential' panic in the early months of ownership before gaining operational footing

Notable quotes

I think ultimately it was really the desire to control my own destiny... I think when you're in the corporate world career track you're always expecting the best in the next opportunity that comes along and then you realize that you're still ultimately going to be a cog in a much larger machine.

It was basically the day before closing... and ultimately walked away and that was at year end of 2022.

That was like my heart dropped because it basically showed that we were down like 70%... I get locked out, there's a two-step verification that goes to a phone that is hers that was not answering... that was at that point it was a little bit of a panic mode.

I mean nothing's gonna phase me... you have to go through a little bit of those trials for you now to be a little bit more confident going forward and a lot of those issues that you face are, you know, a lot of blessings in disguise.