A St. Louis pool feed argues with the subdivision pool down the street

Limestone turns up in the middle of a St. Louis dig and changes the number

Excavation here can hit stone nobody could see at the estimate, and the conversation that follows sinks jobs that were going fine.

Ground across St. Louis County and out toward Jefferson County can dig soft for a few feet and then stop being soft. The machine stops, a hammer goes on, and a day becomes three.

Homeowners hear the word rock as a word for a bigger bill and nothing else. They have no way to tell an honest change from an opportunistic one, and they will hear stories from whoever they ask next.

So publish it in advance, from a job where it happened and nobody is angry. Show the hole, the stone, the hammer, the extra days, and say what your agreement does when the ground turns out different from what was under it when the price was set.

The video does its work months later in a room you are not in, when somebody is comparing your proposal against one that quietly assumed clean digging. The company that explained rock first is the one that sounds honest when it appears.

This metro reads brickwork, so film the masons and not the water

Everybody here has an opinion about mortar, and the coping and walls around a pool are where they will form one about you.

A city built out of brick produces homeowners who have paid for tuckpointing and stood watching a mason work. They look at a joint the way people in other markets look at paint.

A pool in a backyard here is largely masonry anyway. Coping, a retaining wall on a lot that falls away, a patio meeting an existing brick garage, steps and a wall matched to a house in Webster Groves or on The Hill that was finished long before anybody in it wanted a pool.

So the footage that earns you credit is the wall going up and the coping being set, not the aerial shot at the end. Viewers here can tell a clean job from a fast one, which is a rare and useful audience to be talking to.

Name the trade honestly while you are at it. If the masonry is subcontracted, say so and show the crew you use. Locals know how this business works, and a builder claiming a skill in house loses more than one who says plainly who does it.

Your competition is a membership the family already pays for

In a metro this full of neighborhood pools, a buyer is not comparing builders. They are comparing a build against a summer they already have.

Subdivision pools, swim clubs and municipal pools are ordinary here, and families in Kirkwood, Ballwin and Florissant often belong to the same one for years. The membership is already in the budget and the kids already swim on the team.

The case for a backyard pool against that has nothing to do with swimming. It is about the ordinary weekday evening, the hour before dinner, and friends who turn up without a car ride and a bag.

So film that hour instead of the party. A yard being used at six on a Tuesday says more to a household weighing a membership than any finished poolscape does.

And get the shape of the money conversation right. Nobody expects a pool to cost what a club costs, but a family who never gets past the comparison never calls. Explaining what water in the yard changes about a normal week gets you further than another rendering.

Subdivision trustees meet all winter and nobody has made a single video for them

Not all of the pool work in this county happens in a family's backyard.

Subdivisions across St. Louis County are run by elected trustees, and neighborhood pools, swim clubs and country clubs sit under boards that decide by vote rather than by feeling.

Those boards meet through the winter and plan capital work well ahead. A homeowner wants to watch a shell go in. A trustee wants sequencing, what a shutdown does to a summer season, and how a proposal is normally put in front of a board.

Make that content deliberately. A walkthrough of a commercial resurfacing, an explanation of what a season looks like from the board's side, and a plain description of what a board tends to want documented before it votes.

It is a small audience and it repays the trouble twice, because one board decision reaches more water than a season of backyard posts, and because a trustee is a homeowner in Clayton or Brentwood the rest of the week.

The parts of the craft that are the same everywhere, who should be filming and what should never be settled in a comment, we wrote down once at /industries/pool-construction/social-media.