Desert storm: they took over their father's company during a recession. But within a decade, brothers Buzz, David and Edward Ghiz had swept through Phoenix and Las Vegas. Here's how they did it

Pool & Spa News, May 7, 2004 by Rebecca Robledo

To compete with mass merchants, Paddock went into the product design business. David Ghiz helped start Casual Classics, a buying group that manufactures and designs custom-label patio furniture, barbecues and accessories.

"We utilize paints that nobody else uses, and our chairs are designed wider, bigger and deeper," he says. "We did things that we knew would make our products better than everyone else's."

To increase winter business, David Ghiz dreamed up a Paddock line of prelit artificial Christmas trees. He and a key employee do most of the design work. "I'll be leaving for New York to fine-tune our tree program," he says. "One of our people will go to China to sign off on the final samples."

The end result inspires fellow retailers such as Quint. "I was more challenged to take even my smaller-footprint stores to a higher level," he says. "If you walk out of there without a handful of new products to research, you're crazy."

Building alliances

Buzz Ghiz began courting home builders for their business during the economic slowdown of the late 1980s and early '90s. He wined, dined and pitched Paddock to anyone who would listen.

"I knew that if we were going to grow the residential side of our business, we needed to attach ourselves [to home builders] because they knew that pools were an important amenity," Buzz Ghiz says. "I figured as they grew their business we would automatically grow with them."

Over time, the numbers proved him right. In 1990, single-family permits to the nine of 11,000 were issued in the Phoenix metro area. In 2003, new homes were built by 47,000 families.

Once they began getting the business, Paddock attended home builders' sales and construction meetings, and took key homebuilder personnel to meals and ball games. More than anything, the company needed to stay visible. "I enforced a policy with my construction supers that they must hit [our clients'] subdivisions weekly and turn in a report, even if they had no pools going in at that time," Edward Ghiz says. "We went from 791 to more than 1,600 sales in a matter of a year or two."

Buzz Ghiz predicts 2004 will be a 2,900-pool year, where home builders will supply approximately 60 percent of these projects. To accommodate the business boom, Paddock now devotes an entire sales division to home builders. Eleven of the company's 34 sales representatives handle these accounts.

"Everybody wants to be in the home builder [side] because it's a different ball game," says David Reiter, general sales manager. "There's a little more prestige and opportunity to sell.

"But it is a bit more work. Rather than just having to take care of one customer, they're taking care of a whole account. If the [homeowner] is unhappy, they'll go back to the home builder, and it could lose us the whole account. So the responsibility is much greater."

Even with its volume, Paddock doesn't shy away from high-end construction. Pools range from $ 13,000 to $750,000. Most of the more expensive pools are commercial projects, but the company commissions luxury residential pools as well.