304 - The Best Practices for Building a Successful Business with Your Spouse with Soake Pools' Karen Larson

Welcome to Listening with Leaders. I'm Doug Noll, lawyer turned peacemaker. I teach executive leaders how to listen to emotions rather than words so that they can become the leaders everyone wants to follow. And I teach those same leaders how to be authentically present, available, and connected to their families despite being insanely busy. I have learned that we are 98% emotional and only 2% rational. Learning how to listen to emotions is, in my experience, the foundational skill of life. Stick around to the end of the show, and I'll reveal how you can be on our next guest in 15 to 20 minutes. So let's get started. Karen Larsen, welcome to Listening with Leaders. You are the co-founder with your husband of a company in New Hampshire called Soak Pools, S-O-A-K-E Pools, soakpools.com. And you build custom pools that you deliver all over North America. Welcome to the show.

Thank you, Doug. It's a pleasure to be here and I'm looking forward to chatting with you.

Let's start off with a little bit about your backstory. How did— who are you? What— how do you get to where you are today?

Yeah, I guess It's— if you asked me 20 years ago what I'd be doing today, I would not have predicted this.

I totally get that for sure.

Who am I? I'm, well, I'm a mother of 2, and I spent many years raising 2 daughters who are both young adults now. And I'm somebody who loves design and textiles and beautiful— when I look at design, I love things that are beautiful. So that's one thing that is really great about what I'm doing now is we're creating a beautiful product and helping people bring water into their backyard with a beautiful product. So I, I haven't ever worked in concrete before. I've always worked in either design or sales. So I'm not from the pool industry. I'm not from the concrete industry. And that makes me unusual, I think, in this industry, just to start there. Mm-hmm.

So tell us about Soak Pools and what its products are.

So we have a very specific niche. We make precast concrete plunge pools. So every pool we make is small. Our largest pool is 7 by 13 and our smallest pool is 4 by 4. So we, we pre— we have our own forms and our own designs. And what we do is for the pools here in New Hampshire, most of them are custom. They're to order. We do make a few stock items. Then we take the, the concrete into our manufacturing environment. It's a controlled environment where a group of tile, tile artisans tiles the inside of the pools. All the fittings are placed. We then pack up all the equipment and from there we load these onto a truck and they go anywhere in the US. It couldn't— we actually have a few that are on islands. We have one in the Bahamas and one in Turks and Caicos too. So we can— so put them on a boat. Yeah.

There you go.

In a nutshell, that's what we do.

So are these cold plunge, hot plunge?

All of the above.

All of the above.

So, yep, go ahead. Oh, I was just going to say the majority of our pools, though, the 7 by 13 plunge pool, it was designed for year-round use. So what made us really unique in the beginning is that you could buy this beautiful pool, use it all summer to cool down, and then use it all winter to heat up. And so it's very versatile.

Wow. Okay. So that makes total sense. And these are beautiful, these beautiful sculptures that you design. And I take it that installation is pretty nominal. You've got to have power and really all you probably need is power to run the pumps and heating.

Actually, I guess I neglected to tell you that we finish the inside of the pool, but we don't finish the outside of the pool. So the other piece of our business is our, one of our whole team of people works with landscape companies all over the country because they do the outside. Oh, we work hand in hand with people that are creating our pool is sort of their canvas. And they're making the outside beautiful. We've made the inside beautiful and we've shortened the production time to basically a day. You pop it in the hole versus building a pool on site that could be anywhere from 6 to 12 weeks.

Are these typically at ground level so that you drop into a, you dig a hole, drop into it?

They can be installed at any height, so they can be fully above the ground or fully in the ground or anywhere in between. But they are in, typically there's some portion of them is in the ground.

You've been, how long has Soakpool's been around?

Been in 10 years.

10 years. And you've been in business for a lot longer than that. What is it that gets you motivated and excited to get up in the morning and say, oh boy, I get to go to work today?

The people, both our team and the people who are part of, who buy our product. We get, I absolutely 100% love, we love meeting our customers over the phone, in person, by email, and we bring, we really do change their lives when we they get this pool and I can't tell you how many times they tell me, um, they've, it's changed how they use their backyard. They get outside more, things like that. But beyond that, how wonderful it was working with us. And that really does keep me going, keeping our team positive. We hire great people and being able to be part of a positive team like this is pretty awesome.

Yeah. So I, the tone of your voice suggests that you're really satisfied and grateful that you're able to serve so many people in so many different ways.

Well, totally.

And what is it you think that's unique about you that you've brought to the table that helps make this whole project successful?

I don't know if there's any one thing. I certainly have many flaws, but some of the— I know that for a fact. Some of the things that I think I do pretty well are I do have a pretty decent amount of perseverance, and especially in the early days when it was very difficult, um, to even have people understand what it is we're doing and who is this woman who's doing this product that no one's ever heard of. I didn't give up, and so I'm pretty grateful that we're here now.

Perseverance.

Yep. So that's one of my— that's a quality I think that for me has been good. What I used to— I'm also relative— a little more fearless than I used to be. I tend to be a worrier. That's my nature. But my husband is not. So I've learned to, to put— let fear be more like a positive if fear can drive you to do things better.

There you go. So how do you, how do your, you and your husband divide up the duties of running the company?

We try to divide them as much as we can since we live and work together. I'm sorry, there's a beeper going off and I'm hoping—

I don't hear it. Don't worry.

Okay. I run more the sales and marketing side and he tends to run the operations.

I mean, manufacturing and all of that stuff.

Yep.

And then the, how do the, how do you come across the designs? Is that something that you do, or you have a team of designers that kind of think about what customer describes, what, what is desired, and then you figure out how to fulfill that desire?

The beautiful— the pro and the con both at the same time of precast is that there isn't a total— we don't pour a modular pool. Our pools are all monolithic, meaning our forms are set sizes. So the amount of flexibility in the design we have is actually pretty limited. We have 5 is. So there's not a lot of— it's more like, where would you like your bench? Where would you like your light? Those sorts of things. And then the tile itself. So we're really helping people customize their pool based on what we offer that we know is beautiful.

I see. Okay. And people, customers come to the website and they contact you, and then what's the process? They decide they want one of your products, one of your pools. Then they've got to decide on what the look is going to be. And they look at your various offerings and say, this is what I want and how it's going to look.

Yeah. And it's a very custom concierge process. So we have, they have a one-on-one consultant they work with from our team and we divide our consultants up by territory. So Kristen, for instance, might, she's our California person. So she would know landscapers in your area. If you said, hey, you could install this, that sort of thing.

What I'm just curious, I'm really curious about the business. What's the, what's, which from the time of first contact to delivery, what's the typical timeframe?

Anywhere from 3 to 4 weeks.

Oh, fast.

Be ready in 4 weeks. Oh, sure. Sometimes sooner. If someone buys a pool that we have, we call a quick ship. If sometimes someone last minute decides they want one of these, but they only have a couple weeks because maybe a garage is going in or something. But anyway, to answer your question, typically 4 weeks to 6 months. The 6 months wouldn't be on our end. It might be that you ordered your pool, but you had a project delay, or you knew you take it right away.

Exactly. Oh, so you can manufacture these things pretty quickly and get them out the door. Yeah. Interesting. This show's called Listening with Leaders. You're obviously a leader in your business, co-founded with your husband, and in business with your husband, which presents its own set of unique relationship challenges, right?

Sure does.

Yep. Sure does. So tell me about how you learned how to listen.

That's a great question. I learned actually a time ago, I went to, in high school, to a leadership conference and I learned a lesson there, believe it or not, that it was called Hugh O'Brien. I don't know if you've ever heard of that. It was a Hugh O'Brien leadership conference and I was very young and I remember the person who was voted best leader was the quietest one and I was shocked and I thought that leading at that time, at my age of whatever I was, 15, thought leading would be you were somebody who had charisma and you could talk people into whatever it is you were trying to do. So I think at an early age I understood that listening was important. And as I learned how to— in sales, I've been in sales before, in design— I've also learned that the best salespeople listen very carefully, because if you ask your potential client a lot of questions, you will learn what it is they want and why they want it, and you're so much more able to serve them. And if it's not the right product, knowing that too and saying, I'm not sure this is exactly what you want, because we want happy customers. So I guess that's how I learned to listen. And over the years just by practicing it.

And obviously you find listening to be a pretty crucial skill today.

Oh, it's absolutely critical. Yes.

Tell me about listening to your husband. How well do you listen to him? And how well does he listen to you?

If you asked him the same question, I'm not sure you'd get the same answer.

I wouldn't be surprised.

No, I, we do listen very carefully to each other. I think when it comes to business decisions, we do need to, when we make decisions, We, we wanna understand how it's gonna impact us as individuals and as a business, right? Especially when it comes into putting maybe more investment back into the business. Mm-hmm. Um, we have our disagreements for sure.

I'm sure.

Yeah. Over what, who to hire or how to run a particular part of the business. And so I guess I don't quite know how to answer that, but I do try to listen to him the same way I do everybody else.

Do you think he, uh, what kind of a listener is he?

He's a good listener. He's a very good listener. Yeah.

So when you guys are talking about something, you got to make a decision, you feel, you feel like he, you feel heard by him when you're expressing your perspective?

Yes, for sure. Yeah. Yep. I think I'm pretty, I think we're pretty well matched in terms of both having a pretty strong opinion, but being open to listening to why that my opinion might not be maybe the best one in a particular situation.

You're not wedded to being right all the time.

Nope. I'm very often wrong. And sometimes when I'm wrong, I'm happy to know I was wrong before I made a big mistake.

There you go.

Mm-hmm. Yep.

So you've been at this for 10 years. Where do you see the future of the company going?

We're definitely growing. We love what we do and we want to bring our product to more people, but we're growing in a way that's controlled so that we're not growing and we, it's so important to us that the customer has an excellent experience. So I wouldn't want to grow beyond what our team was able to keep up with in terms of providing that experience. So I think you'll see us— we were the first people to come to the market in the US doing this. We were the only people for quite a long time doing it. And so we are thought leaders in the industry. We hope to continue to be the leaders in the plunge pool market and continue to kind of everything from helping to guide the codes. I'm on a task force right now about defining plunge pools. What is a plunge pool? Things like that are very important in our work.. And so we want to continue to be leaders and we want to continue to grow. But I don't want to ever get to a point where I can't know a lot of our customers by name, by face. One of my mottos too is if I run into a customer in an airport or a bar or a restaurant, I want to be able to sit and chat with them and have a nice conversation. And it's actually happened quite a few times. Really? Yep. And I've always thought that I need to be— that's so important to me the way we, no matter what happens during a project, when we're done or when we're whatever, if there's something that needs to be resolved, I, my motto is if I see them, I wanna be able to sit next to 'em at a bar and not run out the door or something.

There you go. So you folks live, you're based in New Hampshire.

Mm-hmm.

And that's, that was a lifestyle choice, I think. Tell me about that.

We're both, I grew up in Vermont and Brian grew up in New Hampshire.

Oh, okay.

So we, we really are, we're New Englanders. And when we started this company, we had a goal, but we didn't know we'd be, our company had, would grow to the size that it is now. And had we known that, we might have thought we should locate somewhere else because New Hampshire isn't close to, for instance, California. Maybe we would've tried to locate more centrally, but here we are still in New Hampshire.

And, and you, all your employees are local people?

Most of them are, yes. We have a couple people in Philadelphia that work out of that location, but everybody else is based right here and we do everything out of New Hampshire.

What's the largest big city? Not that there are any big cities in New Hampshire.

Oh yeah. I was gonna say, uh, Manchester.

Manchester. Okay. So you're down in Southern New Hampshire?

Yes. Yes.

Yep.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, that's right, Doug. You said you were from—

Well, I went to Dartmouth, so I, you know, I'm a Dartmouth, so you know, I was up in Hanover and spent 4 years learning about New England.

Yeah.

Yeah. It was a different experience for a California guy. One more question and I'll, I'll let you go, Karen. What's one thing about yourself that we would never know about unless you revealed it to us?

Ice cream is my favorite food.

Ice cream?

How about that?

There you go. Have you ever made ice cream? Have you ever made ice cream?

I have. Ah. It came out terrible. I'd rather buy Ben Jerry's.

Ben Jerry's. There you go. Good for you. That's something that most people probably would never know that—

Probably not.

An ice cream fanatic. Good. Thank you so much for taking time out of your day today. It's been a great conversation.

Thank you, Doug. Thank you very much for having me on your show.

You're welcome. Doug Noll here. Thank you so much for listening to Listening with Leaders. If you are a successful executive leader who would like to be on this program, please visit podcast.dougnull.com/podcast. If you got something out of this interview, would you please share this episode on social media? Just do a quick screenshot with your phone and text it to a friend or post it on the socials. If you know someone that would be a great guest, tag them on the social media to let them know about the show and include the hashtag #ListeningWithLeaders. I love seeing your posts and guest suggestions. We are regularly putting out new episodes and content. To make sure you don't miss any episodes. Go ahead and subscribe. Your thumbs up ratings and reviews go a long way to help promote the show and mean a lot to me and my team. Want to know more? Go to my website, DougNoll.com, or follow me on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. That's @DouglasEnoll. Thanks for listening, and we'll see you on the next show.