After four decades in the pool industry, Karen Whitton has earned the right to slow down. She just hasn’t taken it.
At 72, she’s still opening and closing pools, swapping out motors, installing pumps, changing filters and handling electrical work across her Chesterfield, Va., route — sometimes well into the evening. When we connected for this interview, she was finishing up her last pool of the day. At 7 p.m.
“Of course this is a good time,” she says. “I have a helper — well, two actually. Jerry Peña and Otto.”
Jerry is her human assistant. Otto is her secret weapon — a battery-powered pool cleaner. Together, the three of them tackle 8 to 12 pools a day.
Uh, can you tell me more about Otto?
“Of course! I love this pool cleaner so much; I named him Otto and started incorporating him into my business about 16 years ago,” explains Whitton. “I love this thing.”
It wasn’t always a team operation. For years, Whitton ran everything solo. She drew the line at pool liners a while back — the last time she tried one alone was at the age of 60 when she found herself working in the deep end of a pool in 105-degree heat, struggling to get the liner straight, and ended up calling a competitor to bail her out. “I thought I was about to pass out,” she laughs. That competitor was Tommy at Clearwater Pools — someone she now considers a close friend.
“In other industries, we would be competitors, but in our industry, we help one another out,” she says. That support became deeply personal last October when her husband was diagnosed with cancer, and she found herself at the hospital every day. She called Tommy. He took over her pool closings without hesitation. “This industry is full of wonderful people.”
That spirit of community is one of the things that has kept Whitton going — along with a customer base she’s watched grow up in front of her. Most of her clients have been with her for over 30 years. She’s watched their children grow up and start families of their own. She once ran into a former customer’s kid in Myrtle Beach while on vacation.
“I hear this little voice saying, ‘Mommy, look — it’s The Pool Lady!’ And this kid comes running down the beach and gives me a hug.”
The nickname stuck. And so has the work ethic. “My customers gave me my company name: The Pool Lady,” says Whitton.
These days, Whitton also makes a point of recommending a vac like Otto to older clients who can no longer wrestle traditional automatic pool cleaners out of the pool. “An elderly person can use these light-weight, cordless and hoseless cleaners between my service visits, no problem,” she says.
Forty years in, Karen Whitton isn’t slowing down. She’s just smarter and has the tools and the people around to ensure she keeps pools clean and running smoothly so everyone can enjoy their pool in the summer time.
