Pool Barrier Certification went from 3–4 hours of nightly admin to zero — and grew 200% year-on-year.
The problem
Tom and Rob launched PBC in 2020, right as Victorian pool legislation changed. When we ran a lead gen push, their phones went from 1–2 leads a day to 40–50 calls a day overnight. They were doing 11–12 inspections each, then spending 3–4 hours every night on admin. The next move was hiring a full-time admin at $85K. They were about to.
“Tom and I were punching out 11 or 12 inspections per day, then spending 3–4 hours a night writing reports, sending emails, and trying to stay on top of our admin team.”
Rob, Pool Barrier Certification
The solution
We asked one question: how much of this admin is judgement, and how much is just moving data between systems? Almost all of it was the second one. So we built an automation layer underneath the apps they already had — Zapier connecting CRM, Xero, SafetyCulture, and Slack.
CRM auto-assigns to Tom or Rob by location.
Zapier scans pool rego docs, pulls data into Smartsheets. No retyping.
Pre-filled data ready in SafetyCulture. Tick, snap, submit.
Certificate generated. Invoice drafted in Xero. Client emailed. Team notified on Slack.
Review request at 48 hrs. Payment nudge if needed.
The key move: Step 2 — PDF extraction. At 40 jobs a day, the bottleneck wasn’t the apps. It was humans retyping pool rego numbers from incoming PDFs. Once Zapier read the documents, the whole chain ran itself.
The results
The numbers
“We were three times as busy, but twice as efficient — which meant we could actually take on the extra work instead of drowning in it.”
Tom, Pool Barrier Certification
15 minutes. No obligation.
If you're growing fast but the admin is killing you, there's probably more automation headroom in your current stack than you think.
15 min · Free · You'll leave with a plan