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Hot Tub Re-Up

Bill Renter gave hot tubs a second chance

Photography by Mike Koehler

In the early ’80s, Bill Renter walked into the backyard where his company was subcontracted to build a deck. It completely changed his life.

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Bullfrog Spas
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“I was inspired by this project; it was absolutely breathtaking,” Renter says. “It looked like a tropical garden, even though it was in New York. It was a truly amazing thing, and I fell in love with this type of work.”

At 19, Renter started a decking company and worked his way through college that way. But after this particular project, he began taking landscape-design classes and found his passion. He formed relationships with swimming-pool builders where Renter’s company, The Deck and Patio Company, would function as the landscape designer and contractor.

“That way they could make their money building pools, and I could make my money doing all the things around it,” Renter says. “Almost all the time, the project around the pool is significantly more expensive than the pool itself. That interested me, quite frankly.”

By the mid ’90s, Renter began selling hot tubs to his clients. For awhile, it seemed like a great pairing, until he realized he wasn’t prepared to be a service company.

“After about five years, I discovered hot tubs tend to wear out and break,” Renter says. “I found myself as a landscape contractor spending half my day fixing hot tubs. It was beyond what I could do.”

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He set up his existing customers with a hot tub service company and swore off hot tubs. “I said I would never go back in the hot tub business again,” Renter recalls.

But all that changed when he ran into Bullfrog Spas’ founder David Ludlow in the company’s booth at the International Pool | Spa | Patio Expo. After Ludlow explained the unique design of Bullfrog’s Jetpaks and the thought process behind them, Renter was hooked.

Unfortunately, the Bullfrog territory where Renter operated was spoken for, so it was several years until the opportunity to sell Bullfrog came around. And by that time, the recession found Renter in a much different environment than when he entertained the thought of adding hot tubs back into his business. But he took the chance anyway, and began selling them at home shows and out of the small showroom at his decking company. “We did so-so business,” Renter says.

A falling out with the local home show caused Renter to rethink his hot tub business. With the help of his Bullfrog rep, Renter realized he could get a retail store off the ground using the money he’d been spending to attend four home shows a year.

“We opened [Long Island Hot Tubs] in April of 2013, directly across the street from Costco,” Renter says. “I’d never owned a retail store before, so this was a big leap for me. The first year, we sold 107 hot tubs.” The year before, he estimates, the number was just 35. “We pretty much tripled the number of hot tubs that we sold,” he says, “spending the same amount of money.”