Consulting
We read your arrangements before we offer to replace them.
Written for the person who has to take a number to a board and defend it. Five things we look at, what each one usually turns up, and the notes in the margin are the part you are paying for.
01The contract you already have
Most facilities we are asked to look at are not badly run. They are running an agreement somebody signed four seasons ago, against a pool that has changed, with a scope nobody has reread since.
So the first pass is the paperwork. What the contract says is included, what it says is chargeable, what it is silent on, and which of those silences has been costing money. That is usually a shorter document than the contract itself.
02Whether the plant is the right size
A pool that will not hold chemistry in August is very often a pool with a pump and filter sized for a smaller body of water, or for a bather load that was a guess when the building opened.
This is arithmetic rather than opinion. Volume, turnover, the head the pump is actually working against, and the filter area you have against the filter area that volume wants. We do the sums with you in the room so the answer is yours rather than ours.
03The rota, and what it is really costing
A guard schedule is the largest line in most aquatics budgets and the one most often built by adding people until the complaints stop.
We rebuild it from sightlines and closing times instead: where a guard has to be able to see, how long a chair can be held before rotation, and which hours genuinely need a second pair of eyes rather than inheriting one from a busier month.
04The pre-season walk
Everything expensive at a pool is discovered in the first hot week, because that is the first time the whole system is asked to work at once. A walk in the quiet weeks before that moves those discoveries into a month where they are a purchase order rather than a closure.
We do it with a written list and photographs, and the list is yours whether or not you then hire anybody to act on it.
05What we say when the answer is nothing
Sometimes the arrangement is sound, the plant is right and the rota is as thin as it can safely be. In that case the report says so in one page and we bill for the day, not for a programme of work.
A consultant who never reaches that conclusion is not assessing anything, and you should be suspicious of one who does not.
How an engagement runs.
- Length
- A single day on site for one pool, two for a facility with more than one body of water or a separate plant room. Longer than that and we are doing the operating rather than reviewing it.
- What you get
- A written report with photographs, the arithmetic shown rather than summarised, and a list of what we would do first. Yours to act on with anybody, including nobody.
- What it costs
- Quoted as a flat day rate before we start, agreed in writing, and it does not change because of what we find. A consultant paid by the size of the problem finds a larger problem.
- Conflict
- If the report recommends work we could do ourselves, we say so in the report and you are free to take it elsewhere. We will not price the work and the advice in the same conversation.