Watershaping Inspired by an Italian Restaurant
Chuck Baumann believes that the process of designing and installing custom swimming pools and their surroundings is best served with a personal touch, not unlike the experience of enjoying a great meal in the comforting warmth of his favorite Italian restaurant.
By Chuck Baumann
I always enjoy meeting the owner of any business that I support and do business with, mainly because I value the personal touch in business and life in general. That is why I try to run my swimming pool company based on the same idea. It is personal, always has been, and although the business has changed dramatically since I started at my father’s side at age five, in many fundamental ways, the process remains based on trust and a distinct understanding and appreciation for each individual customer.
Many years ago, I realized that if I keep my business up-close and personal, the chances of success are greatly increased. This is why we’ve set a bench mark of doing only 15 beautiful high-end projects each year. It enables our company to give each client the attention and, indeed, oftentimes the friendship that makes the entire process a pleasure for everyone involved. Could we take on more projects? Yes, but what would that look like, and at what cost?
The way we do it now, projects are extremely profitable, and we are able to carefully control the process at every step of the way. We have the time and know-how to respond to problems and changes, and most important of all, we let our clients know that their satisfaction with the process and end result is always our top priority.
PERSONAL TASTES
To illustrate my point, I often tell the story about my favorite Italian restaurant that was started by the mom-and-pop Italian family near our home in Alamo, CA. They rented a small restaurant building and through their love of preparing their family recipes that have been passed down from generations they eventually decided they wanted to share their traditional dishes with others.
After opening a small hole-in-the-wall restaurant, almost to their surprise, others in town fell in love with the experience of dining there in the friendly and welcoming atmosphere, all while enjoying their delicious home-style cooking.
Mom was in the kitchen doing the cooking, while Pop was in the dining room to help seat and serve their guests. It was a beautifully personal approach to doing business and they experienced tremendous success. Like many others, our family enjoyed every meal we had there.
Their space was limited, however, and they had to make the decision to either knock out the wall to the building next door, expand their dining room and serve more dinners to make seemingly more profit . . . or not.
The reality was that the primary reason people were so attracted to this little Italian restaurant was not that they could get a quick fast meal but rather that they could experience the close family connection of this Italian family serving high-quality food at a pleasurable little restaurant. Expansion might disrupt that formula, which had served them so well.
In the end, they stayed the same and continued to enjoy their success. You almost always need a reservation.
Point being, my family and I have always considered our small pool company as being akin to this little Italian restaurant. We aren’t going to serve everyone that wants to dine with us tonight, however with some planning and forward thinking, you can make a reservation and enjoy your meal when your turn comes.
ONE OF A KIND
Like my dad and his pool company, my son, Nicco and I treat every client we have as if they are our one-and-only client at any given time. We provide very personalized service, which among other things means that either he or I work on every pool we build.
Also, like the Italian restaurant, our company is very much a family business. As I approach the end of my long career, the concept of succession becomes evermore important. As fate would have it, my son, Nicco Baumann, is carrying on the family tradition of not just building pools, but of entrepreneurship and innovation.
When Nicco graduated from the University of Colorado with a degree in neuroscience, he realized that this was just the opening chapter in the book of his career in the medical field, and he was discouraged by the prospect of several more years of study. He was eager to get to work and earn a living. I encouraged him and told him that getting a higher education was most important and what he does with that education would only help him in the future. I also asked him if he would like to help me build a few pools as he figured out where he might decide to do as a profession.
With that, we both realized that the father-and-son team effort made for not only a great story to tell (kind of like the Italian restaurant), but also it might be an opportunity in the future for Nicco to be the third generation of our family to design and build swimming pools in our community.
And, I’m not shy about saying our family has been building swimming pools in our market for the past 70 years, since 1955.
As Nicco started to invest into our family business, he first talked about knocking down the wall of the building next door so we could put “more tables in our restaurant” and serve more people to make more money. I cautioned him about losing the essence of what made our boutique pool construction company so desirable. It was about being consistent with the product we delivered, giving a great value for what we served and to keep it personal.
That is why we limit our projects to a very select few. No two pools have been the same, and yet the materials we use are all the same basic elements. Nicco did the math and said that if we turned up the heat a little, we could soon do 20 pools or maybe even 25 pools.
GREATER COMPLEXITY
Since then, he has made the commitment to be my partner and eventually take over the business, and over time, he has reevaluated his position on the number of projects we will do each year, settling on the 15-project benchmark.
Pools today are much more complex than when my dad was designing and building. In my dad’s day, there were few pools with heaters, they typically had one skimmer, one or two returns, white plaster, six-by-six-inch aqua blue tile and white coping stones. They had one 500-watt light with 2,400 hours service life, a diving board, nine-foot deep, wedding cake entry stairs and inset steps with grab rails or a in the deep end.
Today, our pools have spas, 400,000 Btu heaters, multiple LED lights, Baja shelves. raised bond beams with water features, different plaster textures, hundreds of tile choices, along with endless variations with the stone, masonry and precast materials.
We install electronics on every pool, most have self-cleaning in-floor cleaners, two or more skimmers, multiple returns, vanishing edges or zero-depth edge designs along with a full ensemble of water treatment systems. Diving boards and slides are not requested very much anymore, replaced by auto safety covers.
As I stood on my father’s shoulders to build my business, and advance the swimming pool construction industry, Nicco is now standing on my shoulders to do the same. I believe he will reach even higher.
ELEVATED GAME
In my dad’s era, most all pools were built in the flat lands with very basic engineering. Early in my career, there were a hand full of us that thought outside of the box and wanted to take our designs and construction to the next level.
Prior to my starting Creative Environments 46 years ago, most all pools were at one level. My generation started doing things with pools that had never been thought of before. Nowadays, almost every pool we are building is an engineering marvel with large sections of the pool out of the ground and engineered piers under the pool to stabilize the pool shell. Of course, my dad’s era built pools for $2,000 complete. My first pool was $27,000 and I thought I killed it by grossing $3,000, after I plumbed the pool myself and managed everything.
As time went on and I joined a pool builder group called Carecraft, I met a founding member and industry legend, Lew Akins. He and I would design pools on napkins, whenever we meet at Carecraft functions. He started to share with me how he designed and built “negative-edge pools” and was pushing the design and engineering boundaries of residential pools. (I later chose to call them vanishing edge pools because it sounded more positive.)
Lew told me one time when I visited him in Texas, to see what work he was doing, he said “Chuck, you are never going to sell a $100,000 pool if you are only asking $30,000 for it. I didn’t understand his comment at the time buy when I came back to California, I started to design pools and break them down to show a value for what I wanted to build a pool for someone. That mind set has been a big change in our pool and designs today. Nicco came into the company when our average pool priced out at $250,000 and now more.
Yes, the pool business has changed a lot over the years, but in many ways, we’re never far from that Italian restaurant.
Chuck Baumann is founder and president of Creative Environments, an outdoor living design and construction firm based in Alamo, CA