Franchise Friday – Episode 210 Roger Ewart from America’s Swimming Pool Company

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In this episode, Melissa speaks with Roger Ewart of America’s Swimming Pool Company.

Roger has experience in emerging to multi-brand International Franchise Operations, Support, Training and Development. Brick and mortar specialty retail to home service concepts.

America’s Swimming Pool Company (ASP) is America’s leading home-based Pool Service Franchise. I am directly responsible for the development of the brand nationally. Franchise Development Strategy, Broker Relations and Candidate Cultivation are the main functions of my duties. For the parent organization, Authority Brands, I mentor new Franchise Development team members and advise leadership on the multi-brand franchisor’s strategy and tactics.

ASP – America’s Swimming Pool Company was founded in 2002 by Stewart C. Vernon in Macon, Georgia. He started ASP out of a desire to provide high-quality, honest pool services at an affordable price. Over the last two decades, ASP has met this goal (and then some) through our incredible franchisees. We’ve earned the trust of customers and have established locations across the nation. Our customers love our service because we make their pools look beautiful, last longer, and stay cleaner giving them more time to enjoy life poolside. Today, our brand is servicing pools throughout more than 400 American cities.

At ASP, our mission is to find honest, hard-working people who want to own their own business, ensuring they follow the standards that have made hundreds of business owners successful nationwide. After all, success for our locations begins with our quality as a brand. We provide our franchise owners with reliable support and offer the best resources in the industry. As a result, our locations are always ready to show customers why ASP is the most trusted pool service company in the country, and we can empower franchisees to fulfill their dreams of becoming successful business owners!

Since opening our doors in 2002, we haven’t settled with being anything but the best pool cleaning, repair, and renovation company in the nation. We’re dedicated and passionate about our work, and this translates to happy customers! Our quality service has helped our business expand out of Macon, Georgia. Since starting to franchise in 2005, we’ve gained over 100 franchisees that serve over 400 cities!

According to Melissa:

You are a wealth of knowledge. And I would love to pick your brain about all these topics. You mentioned responsible franchising, which I think should become a trending phrase. Because in that vein we’re talking private equity and different groups, and there’s a lot of different paths that a franchisor can take to grow, but which one is going to be right for the brand? How are you taking the responsibility to grow the right way, because at the end of the day, it’s not just a franchise and a company, you’re bringing in individuals who are putting oftentimes life savings on the line, and you’re asking them to invest in your brand. What are you doing to responsibly grow, so they grow with you? I want to mention the fact that we work so well together our two networks. It starts with the sales team, the development team, and then I would take that a step further and say that relationship starts with our coaches. They’re starting to nurture them and figure out their why their pain points, their motivators, where they are, where they want to go to, and then they bring them to you to continue to learn.

From Roger…

And I also want to reflect upon what I love so much about working with The Entrepreneur Source, And number one, Melissa, number two, Jackie, number three of the coaches. I just think you folks are terrific, I love the approach of the coaches, the educational approach, you really want to educate thoroughly. And as an ops guy that kind of speaks to my heart, because you really, truly want to serve the best interest of the client, which ultimately will serve the best interests of the franchisor.  I like to talk about, first, the lifecycle of what I’m seeing a trend in the last 10-15 years. What’s changed in franchising over the last 10 years, 4000 5000 more franchise concepts, that’s the big thing that’s changed, right? We’ve also seen franchise sales organizations; and we’ve seen private equity insert themselves into franchising referral networks and so forth.  The most important thing in all of franchising is franchisors must develop the franchises responsibly.  Then education is the key. I do a heck of a lot of preparation on the candidate level. It’s not complex, get them into the ops people’s roles, make them go through what the day in the life of an ops person at the franchisor level is like and send them out into the field and work with the franchisee make them understand a day in the life so they can truly bring people along that are going to be the right fit, they’re going to be really fully prepared and have complete buy in.