How a former warehouse manager’s Metairie pool supply house became Pool Corporation
Frank St. Romain’s regional supplier grew into the world’s largest pool distributor, and the company still starts its future managers on warehouse floors.
Covington, LA
Frank St. Romain started in the pool business as a warehouse manager. By the time he went out on his own, the Louisiana native had spent more than 20 years in the trade, part of it with Seablue Corporation, a Dallas company. When a conglomerate bought Seablue, St. Romain left to pursue other options.
The option he chose was South Central Pool Supply, founded in 1980 with a single service center in Metairie, outside New Orleans. It opened as a small pool supply and construction company. It did not open its doors right away. It waited for the start of the 1981 pool season.
From that one location grew Pool Corporation, which calls itself the world’s largest wholesale distributor of swimming pool supplies, equipment and related outdoor living and irrigation products. It ended 2024 with 448 sales centers across North America, Europe and Australia. Headquarters is in Covington, Louisiana, another New Orleans suburb. Pool Corporation has been a public company, traded on Nasdaq under the symbol POOL, since 1995.
The size is what most people notice. The more interesting thread runs back to where St. Romain started. The company sells to small operators: pool builders, service professionals and independent pool stores. And its published history says many of its senior managers began their careers the way the founder did, in the warehouse or behind the sales counter.
For its first dozen years, South Central grew slowly, adding a location every year or two across the south central United States. Branches opened in Baton Rouge, Oklahoma City, Jackson, Mississippi, Little Rock, Nashville and Houston. As a private company it had little access to outside money, so earnings and borrowed funds went into opening the next branch. The company’s history credits Rusty Sexton, an industry veteran who served as chairman, with guiding the network into the computer age.
The turn came at the end of 1993. On December 31, the Chicago private equity firm Code Hennessy & Simmons and members of South Central’s management bought substantially all of the business in a leveraged buyout. The plan was to use the regional distributor as a platform and grow it, mostly by buying other distributors.
At the time, the company had 16 locations. In January 1994 it acquired assets of Aqua Fab Industries, including eight service centers in the Midwest and Southeast. In 1995 it bought Orcal Pool Supplies, a service center in Scottsdale, Arizona, and another in Las Vegas, and that October it went public as SCP Pool Corporation. In 1996 it took on the assets of The B-L Network, a wholesaler with 39 service centers in 12 states, which widened its reach in Florida. In 1998 came Bicknell Huston Distributors, with 11 locations in six northeastern states, carrying the company into Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York and New England for the first time.
By the end of 1998 the company operated 89 service centers in 32 states and one in the United Kingdom. Code Hennessy & Simmons had sold half its stake in 1997 and distributed the rest to its fund holders at the end of 1998.
Manuel Perez de la Mesa, who became president in February 1999, later summed up that stretch in a single line. Through acquisitions, new openings and organic growth, he told CEOCFO in 2005, the company went “from sixteen locations to one hundred locations.”
St. Romain retired early in 1999. Perez de la Mesa came from Watsco, a heating and air conditioning distributor, where he had been vice president of distribution operations. He became chief executive in May 2001 and held the job until he retired at the end of 2018. Sexton stayed on as chairman of the board until his own retirement in 2017.
Perez de la Mesa saw pools as a very young industry with a lot of room left. “There are almost 70 million homes in the U.S. that have the economic capacity and yard space for a pool. Only 12% of those homes currently have one,” he told CEOCFO in 2005.
By his count then, about two-thirds of the company’s locations had come through acquisitions and one-third through new openings. When the company bought a distributor, it tried to keep the people. “This is an industry, like many industries, that suffers from a scarcity of talent,” he told CEOCFO. “We attempt to work with the existing management team and employee base and provide them the tools and resources to help them grow.”
His explanation of why customers chose the company was plain. “Time is money and it is important to have readily available products as well as a full fleet of delivery vehicles to our customers and their destinations,” he said in the same CEOCFO interview.
The products run from pumps, filters, heaters, cleaners and lights to chemicals and replacement parts. The unglamorous side of the trade carries much of the weight. In a 2021 filing, the company noted that almost 60 percent of consumer spending in the pool industry goes to maintenance and minor repair of existing pools, work that has to happen whether or not anyone is building new ones.
That mattered when construction slowed. About 61,000 new in-ground pools were built in 2024, according to the company’s annual report, roughly half the 117,000 installed in 2021.
The company changed its name to Pool Corporation on May 16, 2006, and goes by POOLCORP. It had reached beyond pools in 2005, when it acquired Horizon Distributors and moved into irrigation and lawn management supplies. In 2021 it bought Pinch A Penny, a network of independent franchise pool stores; that network had grown to 295 stores by the end of 2024.
Another 2021 deal was much smaller. Pool Corporation acquired Pool Source, a single sales and distribution center in Nashville, a city where South Central had opened one of its early branches. “John Gwaltney and Chris Curtis have done a terrific job leading Pool Source and have built a talented team,” Peter D. Arvan, then the company’s president and chief executive, said at the time, according to Service Industry News.
Where the company looks for its leaders has not changed much. Each year it runs a Managers in Training program, a six-month entry-level course for recent college graduates, military veterans and others headed for jobs in operations management and business-to-business sales. Trainees work in the company’s warehouse distribution centers and take classes at its EDGE training facility. Some people the program brought into the trade have gone on to work for manufacturers and suppliers, and some have started businesses of their own.
“We take great pride in promoting from within and are fortunate to have the growth that allows us to create even more opportunities for our team,” Luther Willems, vice president and chief human resources officer, told PoolPro in 2025.
The company also kept a tie to the city where it began. Its swim safety program started in 2021 as a pilot with the YMCA of Greater New Orleans, paying for swim lessons and lifeguard training. By 2025 it had funded lessons for more than 42,000 children and training for 3,000 lifeguards, and employees staff swim safety events and hand out swim gear.
The company that waited for the 1981 pool season to open one counter in Metairie now runs hundreds of branches on three continents. Every year a new class of trainees starts out in its warehouses. Frank St. Romain’s career started in a warehouse, too.