Deep Dive
Mylin’s Pool Water

Why support small businesses? Because they earn it.

It’s hot. Brutal hot. Dog days of summer hot. And because it’s Maryland, the 90-degree temperatures come with 90-percent humidity. Out in that heat, on the side of a local backroad, there are a couple of guys wearing safety yellow tee shirts and heavy waterproof boots, hopping out of the cabs of tanker trucks. They’re grabbing a few coils of fire hose, three inches in diameter, each weighing more than 60 pounds when empty. Sweating, the guys trudge through weeds and high grass, unrolling each coil of hose, connecting them at the ends so they’re about a football field in length. Back to the truck now to yank on a pump and empty 6,000 gallons of water into a swimming pool. Relief for someone, but not for the workers because when that job is done, it’s time to empty those heavy hoses, reroll all 300 feet, and drive to the next job to start the process over again. If today is a 10-hour day, that’ll be a nice break.

What’s the first thing you’d do when you got home after a day like that? Show of hands, how many people thought, 'change a few truck tires, complete some invoices, and return some emails?'

Didn’t think so.

“If there were eight days in a week, you would work them, and if there were 25 hours in a day, you’d work 25 hours a day.”

That’s how Chuck Mylin, owner of Mylin’s Pool Water, explains what it’s like to be a small business owner. Sounds exhausting. But Chuck is clear, as exhausting as it is, owning and operating a small business is a challenge he feels privileged to take on.

At the time of this article, Chuck has owned Mylin’s Pool Water for seven years. The company was established in Harford County, Maryland years before Chuck was born. His grandfather, Don Ewing, Sr., founded the company in 1972. Chuck has been around the truck yard since before he can remember.

“I’m 34 years old now,” Chuck says, “and I grew up around these trucks and around this business.”

He’s speaking literally. There are photos of him, barely old enough to stand, balancing on two feet in front of a tractor trailer tire taller than he is. Those photos were taken on the same property where the business is located today.

When his grandfather fell ill, Chuck purchased the company, planning to learn all of the things that were less familiar to him than what’s behind the wheel of a big rig or what’s covered in grease in the garage. The “business stuff.” Unfortunately, time wasn’t on their side.

“[My grandfather] passed away in the first year of me owning it,” Chuck recalls, “so it was kind of a trial by fire. I knew how to drive a truck, how to work on a truck, and how to do a job, but then on the backside of things, the business side, it became ‘figure that out as you go.’”

There were plenty more things Chuck would have to contend with in that first year of ownership, including a name change and rebrand of the business. Even though Chuck had inherited a substantial clientele list, holding onto those customers under a new name wasn’t easy. The small band of employees at what was now Mylin’s had to remind the regulars of the family legacy.

“It came down to getting the understanding out there that, yes, it’s now another name, but it’s the same family, it’s that same little boy that was riding in the truck with his grandfather 20 years ago, who is now driving the truck.”

Chuck not only owns and operates the business, he’s also one of the company’s full time tanker drivers and the sole mechanic. Right, eight days a week, 25 hours a day. That begs the question, “WHY?” Chuck’s answer is simple: “Why not?” Touché.

“I’ve always wanted to be in some sort of supervisory role where I can control the aspects of a business and do what’s right,” Chuck explains. “It’s about making a business local, in the area, that’s trustworthy and reliable, and that people enjoy working for.”

He says he’s held jobs where supervisors have been unbearable and where he’s dreaded going to work, and he’s determined to do the opposite.

“I make sure that [the employees] are taken care of at the end of the day. Even if that means that I can’t afford to eat dinner on a certain night, their paychecks will have their money that they’ve earned.”

Right about now, you might be thinking, 'Can’t afford to eat dinner? He owns a business. Pretty sure that’s never a concern.' Chuck would stop you right there.

“For some reason everybody thinks that if you own a business, you’re a millionaire. ‘Oh, you own a business? You’re loaded! You have all the money in the world.’ That is actually the complete opposite of reality. My employees make more money than I do.” He’s firm when he says it, enforcing that this point is fact. You can hear in his words the pride that the company’s employees are priority number one on his watch. And, as Chuck sees it, the community is the other very necessary half of that equation. “When you buy from a small business, that trickles down.”

Shop small. Shop local. Hoo-rah! We’ve all heard them before and they’re nice sentiments. In reality, though, the economy is tricky right now. Money is tight for everyone. Convenience is worth the dollar. And the bigger guys can simply do it for less.

Pause here.

This is the point of the interview when Chuck says something that seems confusing at first mention: “Money in small business is no different than drinking a bottle of water and throwing that empty plastic bottle into the recycling bin.”

Huh?

Chuck doesn’t give enough of a gap to ask for clarification; he goes on to explain his analogy. He’s calm, and there’s a clear undercurrent of passion beneath his words when it comes to this stuff.

Step 1 of the “recycling process”: someone in the area books a job and makes a purchase from Mylin’s Pool Water.

“The customer gives that money to me. That’s going to go to the employee who lives locally here. That’s going to go into their paycheck. That money then is going to pay bills that support other local businesses in the area. Whatever is left over as a profit goes to the business and the owner. I spend that money in the community for groceries, shoes for my kid, whatever, and now we’re back at zero. So now we go back out, get another job, and start the process again.”

The “recycling process” happens with the larger businesses, too, Chuck concedes.

“But what do those larger businesses reinvest in?” he challenges. “Are the big CEOs going out and buying another beach house in another state, or another large yacht? Or are they giving it back to their people? When you use a small business, it’s helping me and my employees buy that baseball uniform for their kid, or put food on their table, or buy those shoes for the dance recital.”

Cue the old adage: What goes around comes around. Recycling.

“I think if you don’t keep money local, it could affect people all the way around the community 10, 20 years down the line.”

The employees of Mylin’s Pool Water are a tiny collective example of the many small businesses that form the patchwork of communities around the world, all of which earn their success through the blood, sweat, and tears of owners and the employees who put in the hours. The sweat might just be a bit more prevalent in the case of Mylin’s.