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Pool Corporation distributes the chemicals, equipment, and supplies that pool builders and pool service companies need to keep swimming pools clean and working.
Pool Corporation is, in the simplest terms, the wholesale warehouse behind the swimming pool business. It does not clean pools or build them. It sells the chlorine, pumps, filters, heaters, cleaners, and replacement parts to the people who do — the pool builders and the thousands of small service companies that show up at your house every week. It also sells to a smaller group of retail pool stores, who mark the goods up and sell them to homeowners. It is the middleman, but it is the middleman that almost everyone in the industry leans on.
The business runs on a very specific customer. Roughly a third of its sales go to pool builders, and who builds a pool swings with the housing market and with interest rates, since a pool is an expensive luxury that people often finance. The steadier, bigger half of the business is the recurring stuff: chemicals, replacement parts, and repairs for the millions of pools already sitting in backyards. That installed base is the quiet engine of the whole company, because a pool is a machine that constantly needs feeding. In good times and bad, algae grows, filters clog, and pumps wear out. The key structural fact is that this is a distribution business, and distribution lives and dies on logistics. PoolCorp runs a network of local distribution centers — hundreds of them across the United States, plus operations in Europe, Canada, Mexico, and beyond — so that a service tech can order parts in the morning and have them on the truck the same day. Local density is the moat. The more centers and customers it packs into a region, the cheaper each delivery gets and the harder it is for a rival to undercut it. That scale helped it become the biggest player by far in a fragmented industry, though regulators have taken notice: the Federal Trade Commission sued in 2024 to block one of its acquisitions on antitrust grounds, arguing the company was already too dominant in some local markets.
Frank St. Romain spent years running warehouses in the pool distribution business, which meant he knew exactly how the products moved and what customers kept asking for. So he teamed up with Richard Smith and started South Central Pool Supply in New Orleans, and the young company quickly built a name for service and product selection. Sales centers followed in Baton Rouge, Oklahoma City, Jackson, Little Rock, Nashville and Houston.
To get ready to grow nationally and overseas, the company brought in the private equity firm Code Hennessy & Simmons. Out of that came a new company, SCP Pool Corporation, with industry veteran Rusty Sexton as CEO and St. Romain as President and COO.
The company went public on NASDAQ, and at the time its annual sales were $161 million. Anyone who put $10,000 into the IPO would be sitting on around $4.5 million today with dividends reinvested — an early hint that this quiet distributor was building something serious.
In 2006 the company changed its name to Pool Corporation, or POOLCORP, giving the growing national business one clear banner. It was a small change on paper, but it marked how far the company had come from its single New Orleans start.
Peter D. Arvan joined in 2017, was promoted to COO, and then took over as President and CEO when Manny Perez de la Mesa retired after twenty years of leadership. Arvan's focus on operations turned Safety, Growth, Profitability and Employer of Choice into the company's guiding principles.
COVID lockdowns and low interest rates pushed people to build new pools and fix up their backyards, and demand for pools, remodels, equipment and supplies went through the roof. The stock peaked above $500 a share, and CEO Arvan said the demand was 'unparalleled' — unlike anything he could have imagined.
The stock had fallen more than half from its 2021 high as rising rates and weak new pool construction cooled demand, and that is when Berkshire Hathaway started buying in 2024 and kept adding into 2025, reaching an 8.24% stake. Berkshire later trimmed its position at prices well below its roughly $320 average cost.
John Watwood was appointed President and CEO effective May 4, 2026, as Peter Arvan stepped down from his roles and the board, an unexpected transition that led the company to postpone its planned Investor Day while keeping full-year guidance unchanged. Board chair John Stokely became Executive Chair, and the board said Watwood had the right skills to lead the company into its next phase of growth.
Here is the part people miss about the pool business: it is a recurring-revenue machine disguised as a hardware store. Most of the money comes from small, frequent, non-discretionary purchases, and PoolCorp earns the trust of the service techs who make them. It also expands by buying up rivals — it has made dozens of acquisitions over the years — and uses its cash to do more of the same, while also paying a dividend. The risk is the obvious one: when new pool construction slumps in a slow housing market, that swingy third of the business takes a hit. But the dirty secret of pools is that the water never stops needing attention, and that is what keeps the company's engine humming.
Saved answer · last researched 22 Oct 2026