It’s not very often that you hear someone say they love retail, but Debbi Leclerc, co-owner and vice president of The Pool Doctor of Rhode Island, loves retail. In fact, a lot of the backstory of The Pool Doctor and the Leclercs involves love.
Ron Leclerc worked for a large pool manufacturer and, at the behest of his boss, would help customers with pool openings and closings. He eventually started a service company on the side, which is what he was doing when he met Debbi in 1989. In order to spend time with Ron, Debbi quickly realized she had better learn a thing or two about pools.
“The next thing you know, he and I were working as a team opening and closing pools and I had my own weekly maintenance routes,” Debbi Leclerc says. As it so often has happened in this industry, the basement service company grew into a thriving pool building company and retail store.
“And I fell in love with retail,” Debbi says. “I just knew it was my niche.”
Two of the biggest milestones, and scariest moments for Debbi, were when the time came for her to quit her steady health-care job to start working at the store full time, and when they decided to build their own store. The new building provided her the opportunity to design it to her liking, something for which she’d been preparing.
“In the years that we had dreamed of owning a new building, when Ron and I would travel, if I saw someone’s pool store that I thought was attractive, we’d go in and see if we could come up with some ideas,” she says.
The result was 7,000 square feet of retail space that allowed Debbi to let her imagination run wild. From the cobalt-blue walls that imitate the antique blue glass she collects, to the neon waves on the wall accidentally inspired by a favorite sushi restaurant, to the artwork from an artist they found at a favorite vacation spot, everything in the store is uniquely Leclerc’s and Pool Doctor’s.
“I love it when customers ask me, ‘Are you a franchise?’ That means we’ve done a good job — we’ve branded ourselves.”
While a beautiful store will only go so far to bring in customers, Debbi says they’re fortunate to have so many profit avenues — each department helps generate leads and revenue for the other departments.
“Every single one of our divisions helps feed the others in one way, shape or form,” she says. “It’s a combination of us being such a full-service company, having so many years of experience, looking as professional as we do, conducting ourselves in a professional manner with customers, seeing the results that they are happy with — I think that is why customers keep coming back.”
And while pool builds and hot tub sales slowed during the recessions, retail and service remained strong. “Retail didn’t ever feel the recession, not really. Our chemical end never felt it, our pumps and filters and things that need to be replaced because they need to be replaced, never felt it.”
Fortunately, everything seems to be on an upswing now. “We are experiencing very positive behavior across the general public, very positive,” Debbi says. “This is not the first downturn in the economy that we’ve gone through. Each time you go through a downturn and you can emerge you become that much stronger.”
Working side by side with her husband and a team of great employees, doing something that she loves, Debbi Leclerc can’t think of a downside.
“Retail is my passion,” she says. “I love doing what I do. I love the customers, I love my employees; my employees like their jobs. You know some people need to go home from work and they need to turn off work and go into another mode. Work is part of our mode.”