Multiple Locations
Owner: Brent Slater
Two Edmonton, AB stores
Browsing the help wanted ads during lunch at a boring summer job lead Brent Slater to a lifelong career in pools and hot tubs. A year later, the pool store job he found skimming those pages was in jeopardy, so he decided to venture out on his own running a pool service company from his garage.
“Within a year or so we had opened our first retail outlet which was just a little 900 square foot [store],” Slater says. “The stores today, we have one store that’s 19,000 square feet and one that’s 11,000 square feet.”
Like many good retailers, Slater has built his business on referrals and relationships.
“Over the 25 years we’ve been in business, we’ve really tried to build a relationship with our customers. We want them to tell [everyone] where they bought their hot tub from, and [the] referrals have been very good for us over the years,” Slater says. “We don’t want to just help somebody buy a hot tub we want to help them make a purchase that they’re going to enjoy and they will refer their friends and relatives to us.”
And like many good Canadian retailers, Slater’s company has built some of those relationships through a national pastime.
“One of our guys is involved in hockey. [He] knows a lot of people through hockey, and it’s amazing how many people, the customer and he know; it’s really a small world out there. Build that relationship and what you have in common with the customer, it’s those types of things that I believe makes us different than a lot of the other people out there.”