Poolwerx focused on global growth as it celebrates 30th anniversary

The Brisbane entrepreneur behind one of the country’s most successful franchise firms is looking to ride the global pool construction boom and expand overseas.

POOLWERX is celebrating its 30th anniversary and founder John O’Brien has his sights set firmly on global expansion.

Since he started the pool maintenance and supplies business on Australia Day, 1992, the company has grown from a small shop in Jindalee into a franchise powerhouse with more than 630 vehicles and 165 stores in Australia, New Zealand and the US.

In the past five years Poolwerx has grown by 50 per cent and a whopping 21 per cent in the past 12 months, having just cracked $150m in revenue in Australia and New Zealand.

O’Brien says there’s plenty of room for expansion with global pool construction up 30 per cent since the Covid-19 pandemic hit.

“People have rediscovered and fallen in love with their backyards,” he says.

Poolwerx founder John O'Brien.

In June O‘Brien and business partner for 22 years Sirromet Wines founder Terry Morris, ceased being the majority shareholders in PoolWerx when California-based Norwest Venture Partners took a stake in the business.

Now executive director of the company he founded, O’Brien says he focused on expansion.

“Five years ago we set up an office in Dallas, Texas, and we are now in nine states across the US. We’re registered in 15 countries and we’ll take the opportunity to expand further in Europe,” he says.

And making a splash globally was always on the agenda.

Coming from a business entrepreneurial background – one side of his family started Breville Electric – O’Brien went overseas to find a “disorganised industry that I could organise globally”.

“I travelled the world and saw pool servicing being done poorly in California with leaky oil trucks and surfer dudes with a pool pole and surfboard hanging out the back going into expensive homes,” he says.

“I came back did some homework and found out globally that the pool industry was a disorganised Ma and Pa industry. That’s what franchising does, it organises disorganised industries.”

Pool maintenance and supplies franchisor is celebrating its 30th anniversary.

WHOOPS!

AUSTRALIA’S biggest private building company’s brief brush with voluntary administration set the phones running hot.

Hutchinson Builder’s chairman Scott Hutchinson says a mistake was made but “everyone now seems cool about it.”

“Our solicitor simply put the wrong company in the wrong box,” he says.

“It set off a lot of phone calls from everyone including the government and we had to man the phones for a while. We had to explain and send emails to all of our employees.

“It really turned into a bit of an ad because we’re so solid. Our accounts are so good that it got people to check us out.”

Chairman of Hutchinson Builders Scott Hutchinson.

Hutchinson admits there was a fair bit of angst early on over the solicitor’s mistake.

“The joke was that we were in VA for an hour before it was annulled, like you would a bad marriage,” he says.

“I’m not angry. It’s a mistake. It wasn’t vindictive. I think over lunch everything will be sorted out. They made a mistake, they corrected it and they did everything they could.”

This week the 110-year-old five-generation family business was named the busiest construction company in Queensland and the third most active in Australia in the HIA-Colorbond Steel Housing Top 100 report.

Hutchinson, who returned from the Burning Man Festival in the US two weeks ago, is also expecting to be a grandfather soon.

“Age has been hitting me slowly for a long time but I’ve been fighting it,” he says.