Business View Magazine | May 2021

34 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE MAY 2021 most gratifying to create. “We’ve done some really nice, what we call vanishing edge or infinity edge pools, where the back of the pool looks like it falls off into a lake or river. We’ve created really neat features with waterfalls and just the natural terrain and stone. We like to use the natural stone to tie it all together.” Tying it all together takes a team effort and, as a member of the Master Pool Guild, Reed has worldwide knowledge and experience at his fingertips. He acknowledges, “It’s probably the best thing we’ve ever done. Master Pools is a big part of our inhouse education and it’s also a big part of our innovation. The Master Pools Guild is a world wide organization, but there are no members in competing markets, so that allows us to meet two to three times a year (pre- COVID-19) with members and manufacturers and it gives us a leg up on the competition. We see what’s happening out west or wherever a trend started. We see new technology – in a lot of cases they will tap the Guild membership to a form a blue ribbon committee to test out new products, and the focus of the meetings are education all the way through.” He adds, “You’re not in the room with any of your competition, so you can speak freely. We have some very good roundtable discussions and people are very open to sharing things they’ve done wrong, what they lost money on, what mistakes they made and it prevents us from making the same mistake. They also talk about things they’re trying that are coming down the pipe – things we would never have thought of that are being done in bigger markets, where they build thousands of pools a year. We meet and it’s kind of like a big family sharing information. They have an app that dings six to eight times a day with membership asking questions – the interesting thing is that the answers just roll in. I mean people just love to help each other in this Guild.” Reed also values the relationship with Guild