‘ON THE ROUTE’
By Marcelle Dibrell and Renee Dibrell
“ Military training sets up success in the service sector”
Like any leader brought up in the U.S. Army, Colonel Jason Briggs was trained to be, to know, and to do.
“Be, Know, Do,” is a central leadership philosophy of the Army. It means developing all aspects of yourself: your character, your competence, and your actions.
Today, after three decades of military training, embodying “Be, Know, Do” is how Jason Briggs — the co-owner of Paradise Pools and Spas in Torrance, California — might define success as a small business owner.
“Success is a journey,” Briggs said. “It’s an infinite game. If you get 100 customers — Great. Now get your next 100.”
For Briggs, there is never an endgame for success, unless you count the occasional vacation.
“That’s success in my mind — I get to take my family on a trip,” Briggs said. “But when I get back, I’m going to say, ‘OK, what’s next?’” According to the Army, leaders are not born but forged from experience. It’s a simple fact that explains why the Army invests so much training in its leaders. It’s also why so many young people continue to volunteer for the privilege of being judged, broken down, and rebuilt to the Army’s standards.
Remember that old commercial from the 1980s?
“Be all that you can be. Find your future in the Army.”
Briggs was nine years old when that commercial came out. And he did find his future in the Army.
Although he retired from active service in 2022, Briggs continues to find his future through the lessons that were instilled in the years he spent following the Army’s “Be, Know, Do” philosophy.
Army leadership begins with what the leader must be: The values and attributes that shape character. They make up a leader’s identity.
Be: A leader of character. A leader with presence. A leader with intellectual capacity.
For Briggs and for others trained within this philosophy, being these things is not an act. This is who he is.
In partnership with Adam Morley, Briggs is the co-owner of the largest independent pool service company in the South Bay region of Southern California — an area roughly 20 miles south of downtown Los Angeles.
Briggs thinks that to be successfully self-employed — which was all he’s ever really wanted to be — you have to be self-motivated.
“Most pool service people are independent; the vast majority work alone; a few have one or two employees,” Briggs said. “To be that way, to have any level of success — you have to be self-motivated. If you’re not, you can’t be selfemployed. There’s a whole litany of failed businesses because the owners shouldn’t have been self-employed. They just weren’t made up for it.”
Briggs and Morley co-manage more than 1,000 accounts, with the help of 42 employees. Of those employees, more than 30 are service or repair technicians. The rest are support staff —office managers, service and repair managers, and reception staff.
As a successful business partner, Briggs is a fan of Simon Senek, a leadership speaker and author, who says, “If we were good at everything, we would have no need of each other.”
“You don’t want to develop a level of arrogance where you make bad decisions because nobody else can be right,” Briggs said. “I take input from everybody. I love criticism. I need people to tell me I’m wrong from time to time. If all my employees always tell me I’m right, then I really don’t need their advice.”
Most of the Paradise office staff work from home. It allows Briggs and Morley the ability to hire from anywhere in the U.S. Three of their employees actually live in Georgia, managing a three-hour time difference.
“For what we’re paying them, they’ll work our hours,” Briggs said, “because we pay them based on what we pay California employees.”
Georgia’s minimum wage follows the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour. “And with the state’s lower cost of living, they’re making more than they could in a similar job where they live,” Briggs said. “And they work from home, which has all kinds of employee retention advantages: no commute time, better quality of life, and fewer work-related expenses like gas and lunches out every day.”
Remote working is a win-win strategy for both the business and its employees.
That’s because as an employer, it provides Briggs with the flexibility of hiring from a much broader pool of people, and it doesn’t change the number of lightbulbs burning in the office or the amount of toilet paper they need to stock in the bathrooms.
“If I had everybody working in the office, I couldn’t afford a big enough property,” Briggs said.
Meanwhile, Briggs is currently writing a doctoral dissertation on the advantages of working from home.
Briggs values education. He holds an undergraduate degree in finance and has two master’s degrees: his first is an MBA; the second is a masters in strategic studies from the U.S. Army War College. In 2022, after he retired from the military, he realized that he had some extra time on his hands. He decided to pursue a business doctorate, which he intends to complete this spring.
That’s the “Know” part of “Be, Know, Do.” In the Army, without knowledge, your command will lack substance. Having an understanding of and competence in basicArmy skills has given Briggs the ability to tackle new challenges with confidence.
To ask subordinates to perform to a standard, you must first master the standard yourself.
And that’s why Briggs, Morley and most of their employees carry CPO and Los Angeles County Health Certification. It is why they and their start-up techs have National Plasterers Council Start-up Certification. And it’s why they and their repair techs regularly attend manufacturerbased training from Jandy, Pentair, Hayward, and Raypak.
Jason Briggs and Adam Morley, owners of Paradise Pools, Torrance, California.
To be service and repair technicians, this is what they have to know.
And that brings us to what you have to “Do” to “Be” the co-owner of the most successful service firm in your area.
For Briggs, that’s easy: Do what you are good at.
“Be successful at the things that you do,” Briggs said. “Some things you have to do. But if there is something that you don’t have to do — if it’s something that you’re not good at and if you are not going to develop that trait — find something else to do.
Briggs was good at being a leader in the military, having joined the National Guard in high school. He has been a logistics officer for most of his career. Until he retired, he was the chief of staff of the California Military Department. He served in Iraq, where he managed Global Logistics as a support operations officer.
There, he learned organizational skills and how to put a plan together for anything that moves things, handles materials, and manages people.
Briggs says this training and expertise have translated directly to both the construction and service sides of the pool business, both of which involve efficiently managing and correctly placing people and supplies in the right place at the right time.
“I honestly took the military’s model, and overlaid it on top of our company,” Briggs said. “It was an easy answer for me.”
Briggs got into the pool business because he wanted to be selfemployed. He wanted to be selfemployed because he was selfmotivated — that’s who he was and who he wanted to be.
Briggs entered the pool and spa industry in 1993. At the time, he was pursuing a BS in Finance at Cal State Long Beach when Morley, a family friend, asked him to help out cleaning pools.
Morley started Paradise Pools in 1989, and it was a relatively small pool service company that he had grown to around 80 service accounts. Morley was a skilled service technician, but just starting out in the swimming pool business and needed help while growing.
In between cleaning pools, Briggs was taking business classes, and he began analyzing the pool and spa industry from a competitive standpoint.
“When a topic was assigned for my classes, I applied it to the pool business and wrote papers about it,” Briggs said. “I realized that there was a lot of room for growth in the pool industry at the time.”
The two worked together, with Morley providing the company framework and his considerable pool and spa technical knowledge as Briggs learned the ropes.
“I liked the business, so I stuck around and I partnered with him and we just grew from there,” Briggs said.
Eventually, Morley offered Briggs the opportunity to join Paradise as a partner, which has proven to be a winning combination.
“Success builds on success,” Briggs said. “If you do something well, develop it from there.”
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