Pool construction is a long-cycle, multi-phase business. A single project can run weeks or months, involve multiple trades, span residential and commercial properties, and require documentation that holds up for warranty claims, insurance purposes, and client sign-off.
Managing that across multiple active jobs, in multiple states, with crews who are often working in places homeowners never see, creates a documentation challenge that most pool companies are solving with tools that weren’t built for it.
Three businesses — Pool Works, Premier Pools, and SSG Pools — all hit that wall at different scales. Each one was using a different workaround and each one had the same core problem: photos that weren’t organized, weren’t accessible, and weren’t helping the business the way they should.
The Problem: Photos That Were Impossible to Find When It Mattered
Kim Sanders at Pool Works describes the pre-CompanyCam process with the kind of specificity that comes from having lived it for too long. For years, the company used digital cameras in the field. Crews would shoot photos throughout the day, bring the memory cards back to the office, and someone would download and organize everything at the end of the week. Sometimes months would pass before photos from a specific job were actually accessible.
The personal phone approach wasn’t better. Crews took photos on their own devices, personal pictures mixed in with job site photos, and the company tried using Google Photos to create shared links. “If I had a big project, I would create a link in my Google pictures so the client could see the progress, but it was far more complicated,” Kim said. The problems this created were consistent across all three companies:
- No reliable way to tell which photo belonged to which job
- Clients and inspectors couldn’t access documentation without significant manual effort
- Office staff had no visibility into field progress without calling the crew
- Supervisors managing multiple jobs across multiple states were working blind
- Poor documentation was costing the business in ways that were hard to quantify but easy to feel
The Part That Arrived in an Hour
The story that best captures what CompanyCam changed at Pool Works happened on a service call. A technician was on site and needed a part immediately. He didn’t have the part number, and describing what he needed over the phone wasn’t working. In the past, he would have had to leave the job, drive back, source the part, and return — a delay that could stretch the job across multiple days.
Instead, he took a photo of the part in CompanyCam. The office staff saw it instantly, identified it without any back-and-forth, and got it delivered to the technician on site. The customer was up and running within an hour. “In the past, our technician would have needed to return at a later date with the part needed,” Kim said, “but with the help of CompanyCam, we were able to get the customer up and running within an hour.” That kind of real-time field-to-office communication is the difference between a one-trip job and a two-trip job, multiplied across every service call the company runs.
How SSG Pools Runs Multi-State Pool Operations
For Kelly Skelton at SSG Pools, the value of CompanyCam shows up most clearly at scale. SSG builds and renovates gunite pools across New England, with supervisors overseeing projects that may be running simultaneously in multiple locations. Before CompanyCam, following the progress of several projects at once required either being on site or accepting that you were working with incomplete information.
“It is impossible for a team of supervisors and coordinators to fully visualize the progress of several projects that may be underway in multiple states without effective photo documentation,” Kelly said. CompanyCam gave SSG the ability to track construction job progress without driving to every site, with photos organized by project and accessible to anyone who needed them.
For their renovations department, the before-and-after photo feature became a marketing tool as much as a documentation tool — turning completed project photos into content that shows prospective clients exactly what a pool transformation looks like. Creating them in CompanyCam takes seconds and produces the kind of visual proof that closes renovation sales faster than any brochure.
How CompanyCam Got Previously Resistant Crews Taking Photos
At Premier Pools of Central Florida, the “aha” moment wasn’t a specific job or a saved cost. It was the moment previously resistant employees started taking photos without being asked. Before CompanyCam, there was always an excuse. Emailing photos was hard. Uploading took too long. Nobody wanted to deal with it.
“The ease with which our employees are able to pull up a job and have pictures automatically load to that job was the game changer and the end of excuses,” said Tracie Theune. When taking a photo means opening the app, pointing, and shooting, with everything organized automatically on the back end, the resistance disappears.
Office staff can see photos in real time as they’re taken in the field. Managers can answer questions and solve problems without leaving their desk. Projects, photos, and organization in CompanyCam removed every obstacle that was keeping crews from documenting consistently.
The Case for CompanyCam
Three pool companies. Three different scales of operation. Three different use cases. The same result: documentation that actually works, crews that actually use it, and a business that runs more efficiently because the office and the field are looking at the same information in real time.
Kim Sanders’s advice to pool companies still on the fence is as direct as it gets: “Dive in.” Kelly Skelton puts it in business terms: “Any pool company that has aspirations to scale beyond a handful of ongoing projects needs CompanyCam.” For a part delivered in an hour, a renovation sale closed with a before-and-after, and a supervisor who can oversee multiple jobs across multiple states without leaving the office, the case makes itself.
