What Every Good Marketer (Manager) Knows

Seth Godin’s post What Every Good Marketer Knows has some great applications for management.  Please read the entire post, but here are a few good ones:
Making promises and keeping them is a great way to build a brand.
When you deal with employees, consistency and trust are two of the keys to success, just as they are [...]

The Pool Management “Team”

When we hire employees for the office, we always evaluate where that employee fits into the “team” and what values and skills that person can add.  Unfortunately, we do not always apply that same standard to when we are hiring employees to work at the pools.  We often tend to stop our scrutiny at the [...]

Lifeguard Olympics

These events are always fun.  Here is a good one.
A story on TPPC’s HERE

Word of Mouth Marketing (WOM)

There is much written on the marketing side of business about word of mouth marketing or WOM.  It is, by most accounts, influence of friends, colleagues and family that make the difference on whether someone chooses a product or not.  This has been written about extensively from blogs, to magazine articles, to Gladwell’s The Tipping [...]

Malcom Gladwell disputes all of my theories..

Malcom Gladwell, who is an absolute genius, has an interesting video on the New Yorker about “hiring mismatches”.  His point is that we are using outdated methods and barometers and not matching the true purpose of jobs (in general) to what the employee is actually doing.  So are we?  What outdated job descriptions are we [...]

Hiring Interns as a recruiting method

When recruiting budgets are tight, and many areas are seeing lifeguard shortages, it helps to get creative.  There is a good article over on Lisa Orrell’s blog about hiring interns HERE.  Many colleges are offering recreation and aquatic majors, and if that is not the case for a college in your area, then you could [...]

Communication, Communication, Communication

This is like a social media post part 1.5.  Anyone who works with teenagers or young adults know that one of the biggest challenges is the ability to actually REACH them.   Anyone who is raising children knows how difficult it is to keep all of the activities straight.  If you put those two together, one would [...]

The Best Seat in the House

Across the country, rules for swimming pool supervision, and lifeguards vary, but here is an interesting story.  How would you like to be in the stand watching olympic swimmers go for gold? Very cool stuff.
Lifeguards keep watch at Olympic trials

Focus on the outcomes when recruiting

Often we get so bogged down in the day to day grind, that years can go by and we will not step and evaluate our recruiting process as a whole.  If you get into the management “geekdom” you will read a great deal about focusing on the outcomes, then working your way back.  Develop a [...]