How Paul Sadler swam his way into a $25 million business

Over time you collect good people and good people are the best resource you can have. Around 15 years ago a man called Wayne Pollock knocked on my door and he said I am interested in talking to you about a franchise…he had an MBA…and I realised he would take it further than I could and I hired him as a CEO, one of my good career moves.

We now have 15 outlets and we have gone to Canada and we are up in Townsville. Rather than making decisions on the run, Wayne was a lot more forensic in his approach.

He started to identify 18 areas that a manager would need to run a successful swim school, and we created training elements for those areas. That encouraged a lot of young people to want to come and work for the brand.

Three years ago we had the chance to create five new swim schools in just 12 months. That meant we had to pinch a lot of personnel from existing swim schools. Some of them look like they are making a profit already.

We started in Canada two years, ago, when it was minus 28 degrees. I said, it might be smarter to start a skiing school rather than a swim school! My son went over to help start it up, and that school now has a 2400 kids and a waiting list of around 900 kids. Here we have about 28,000 kids across the schools that come for swimming lessons every week.

My son now manages a swim centre at Braybrook. I was a single parent trying to be a good parent and build a business…we’ve improvised our way through!

When we set up schools, our favourite model is to talk to the education department or a school to jointly build a pool. We make modifications to the base formula to make that design work. About six months out, we try to create a nucleus of about 30 staff and we go through a training regime with them.

In many schools, within 12 months we’ve managed to get 1200 to 1500 kids. If that is the case you know that the business is going to be successful.

Roughly the start-up capital that someone needs to get for a pool is at least $200,000, to support and subsidise that pool to get through the embryonic beginnings. 

With some of the pools we have bought the land…but it is an expensive way to do it as you need about three-quarters of an acre to put in 70 car parking spaces, and the cost of the pool is a bit prohibitive – all up capitalisation costs is around $5 million.

A model going forward may be to have some schools in shopping centres, where you have the infrastructure of parking. We’ve done one of those in a shopping centre in Narre Warren (Melbourne).

A reasonable goal would be to grow our business in Canada, and we are talking about three new opportunities at the moment. I think that we have neglected to have a presence in some of the other major capitals – Sydney, Melbourne and Perth.

We are engaged with Swim Vietnam… I heard about a lady called Jo Stewart who gave up her day job to start it. I feel proud to say Swimland has helped her to fund some new pools. One of our goals is to help her fund an education system. When you’ve been in business for 40 years, you are naturally drawn to some philanthropic end.

They think I am old and yesterday’s guy, but I am still thinking of things that drive our business! We started The Journey last year…which is video footage of what kids can do if they keep swimming. Diving, surfing, boating, all those things come out of a kid being a competent swimmer.

I have had challenges – I was too trusting and there were three partnership situations where I got involved, and once you give knowledge you can’t take it back. You can have all sorts of agreements, but if someone wants to take your intellectual property there is not a lot you can do about it. If you go into a business venture with a negotiated way in, you need to have a negotiated way out. Those are a bit despairing, those moments.

Resent keeps us living in the past, so you have to dust yourself off and say, alright I need to move on.

I think we are innovative, we work with a passion. We are strong believers and I love the business.