Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Jacqueline Follmuth. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Jacqueline, appreciate you joining us today. What’s the backstory behind how you came up with the idea for your business?
My business was an accident. The summer of 2017, I was fresh out of graduate school and had been job searching for months. I’d gone straight to graduate school to avoid having to return later in life, but didn’t expect that to make me “over qualified and over educated” for the entry level positions I was applying for. I’d been graduated, broke, and unemployed for two months when I got desperate.
At the time, it felt like I had hit rock bottom. During previous summers, I’d put in full time seasonal hours lifeguarding and teaching swim lessons with the city pools. I was good at teaching lessons and it was fun so desperate for cash, I posted on social media offering to teach swim lessons in backyard pools. To my surprise, a family took me up on it instantly. Their children hadn’t done well with traditional swim lessons at the public pool so they wanted to give private lessons at home a try. Those swim lessons proved more successful than any others they had tried.
By the following summer, I’d managed to secure a full time job. A supervisor of the aquatics program with the city had heard what I was doing and had asked me to apply to be a pool manager, but I couldn’t make the schedule work with traditional office hours. I kept asking myself how working parents were getting their kids into swim lessons if I couldn’t even teach because my full time job schedule was getting in the way. I was also drowning in student loan debt and needed to pay for a car to get me to work so I decided another summer teaching swim lessons in the evening after work and weekends would help me financially and be fun. I created a website for families to schedule lessons with me and shared it on social media again. Within two weeks of launching my website, I was booked for the entire summer. That’s when I realized I was on to something.
The following summer I launched as a full fledged business. I knew I couldn’t handle the demand all on my own so I hired two other instructors to help me meet the demand for swim lessons in our town. I muddled through lots of challenges as I learned what it meant to be a business owner and wanted to throw in the towel many times, but families kept telling me how valuable our service had been to them. We were helping lots of families that wouldn’t have access to water safety skills otherwise so that kept me going then.
Then my family moved 6 hours away from where my business was operating. I had every intention of closing the business because I didn’t think it could be done from a distance, but then the COVID-19 pandemic hit. Everything went remote. Pools and swim lessons across the country were shut down for the entire summer. Our program was different though. Since we didn’t own a facility and didn’t have lots of contact with people we were allowed to continue operating. We were the only swim lesson program allowed to operate that summer and our revenue quadrupled. This wasn’t just a side hustle anymore.
There are so many reasons why we can’t fit swim lessons into our family’s schedule, but we’ve done everything we can to break down the barriers and reduce the friction of getting instructors to families. Parents don’t have to call or email us. They can quite simply book a lesson online and an instructor will show up 24 hours later.
Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.
My name is Jackie Follmuth. I’m a stay at home mom to my one year old son. I’m the owner of Arizona Mobile Swim, a swim lesson provider and water safety company. We help families be safer around the water using research based methods and best practices.
I taught swim lessons and lifeguarded for several summers at my city pool as a college student. I thought I’d hit rock bottom when I was desperate for cash and offered to teach lessons in backyard pools after graduating from graduate school. What I didn’t know then was that my desperation would turn into a highly sought service that would make children safer around the water AND it would allow me to financially be a stay at home mom. Being a business owner has given me the opportunity to be a mom and being a mom has made me a better owner of this family focused business.
I run a business with heart. We meet families where they are and understand the chaos of life, messy homes, and noisy kids. At the end of the day, we want to make your family safer and there’s just nothing quite like the feeling of seeing your child conquer swimming across the pool by themselves for the first time.
Can you tell us about what’s worked well for you in terms of growing your clientele?
Years ago I used to invest into our marketing and advertising, but saw very little return in the analytics. After lots of trial and error focusing on our search engine optimization and client experiences has been the most helpful.
Families are looking for swim lessons by using Google primarily. When we show up on the first page of your search results it makes a huge difference. There aren’t many swim lesson providers in our area and the ones that do exist have lots of friction to getting signed up.
Our client experience has also been important. So many swim programs are hiring teenagers and college students who are just looking for a summer job. When we’re selecting instructors, we’re looking for the top talent and people who are truly delightful and committed to participants actually learning how to swim. Once families give our program a try they rave online, to their family and friends, and to us. Investing in the client experience has truly been our biggest success in growth. Once you try our program out, you’ll want to tell everyone about us and we’ll be sure to thank you when you do. Word of mouth is everything for our small business.
Can you open up about how you funded your business?
When I was just getting started I was broke and unemployed. I was drowning in student loan debt and didn’t own a car. I also refused to take out anymore debt. The first swim lessons I ever taught were for a family that lived in my neighborhood. I walked to their house with a bucketful of pool toys that my family had already and a few I picked up by walking through the dollar store. I refused to spend more than about $10 of my own money. I didn’t know that teaching swim lessons would become a business. It was just supposed to be something to get me by for a couple months until I could land a full time job.
I did have to make an owner’s investment once at the beginning of a swim season. When I had become an official business and had other instructors teaching for me I knew I needed business insurance because this industry does have substantial risk and liability. I took several hundred dollars from the money I made working at my full time job to pay for the insurance policy, but within a month I was able to make an owner’s draw to essentially reimburse myself that expense. Then as the business grew I just reinvested the profit into the business. If I don’t have the money for something, my business makes it work without it, even when it’s sometimes more inconvenient.
Contact Info:
- Website: ArizonaMobileSwim.com
- Instagram: ArizonaMobileSwim
- Facebook: Facebook.com/ArizonaMobileSwim
Image Credits
Stefanie DeMuth