For Brian Sheehan, the hand of fate turned out to be his own right hand.
When Sheehan injured himself in a freak weight room accident during his freshman year at Appalachian State University, it ended a promising baseball pitching career.
But that derailment launched business success that exceeded Sheehan’s diamond dreams.
The 46-year-old Huntersville native used the time off from that the injury to enter the swimming pool business as a lifeguard.
Today, he’s CEO of The Amenity Collective, the largest North American manager and renovator of swimming pools, and the leading distributor and service of fitness equipment. The collective is a wholly owned subsidiary of Toronto-based FirstService, and has clients in 26 states and Canada with revenue topping $425 million last year.
Sheehan manages 1,400 full-time employees and more than 10,000 seasonal workers in offices across the continent.
“It’s been quite a journey,” says Sheehan, who lives in Davidson with his wife and four daughters.
Lifeguard to CEO
The weight room injury wiped out Sheehan’s freshman season and blocked his chances to play summer ball in a collegiate wood bat league, a vital experience builder that helps shape most successful college baseball careers.
“I still wanted to pitch, but you know, a right-handed pitcher with an injured right hand … there was not a lot of interest,” he says.
Instead, he spent the summer lifeguarding at a swimming pool near his hometown just north of Charlotte.
Baseball continued to fizzle as his hand was never quite the same, while the lifeguard gig eventually turned into pool management. After three seasons managing individual swim club pools in northern Mecklenburg County, Sheehan realized, “hey, I could do this.” He started a pool management business called, quite creatively, The Swim Club Management Group. It managed a few neighborhood swim clubs in the Charlotte area. His younger brother Benji helped out.
The business looked promising, but Sheehan had earned a bachelor’s degree in accounting from UNC Charlotte, where he transferred after his baseball career ended. He deemed a job offer from PricewaterhouseCoopers, now PWC, as too good to pass up, and joined the giant firm’s Baltimore office. A year or so later, he transferred to Charlotte.
Things were going well, but he missed the smell of sunscreen — or maybe his entrepreneurial spirit called. Either way, two years into his accounting career, he jumped into the deep end. He left PWC to focus on his company, which he operated on the side with help from his family
“It felt like the right thing,” says Sheehan. “I didn’t really love big accounting, and, if I’m honest, it probably didn’t love me either. Still, it was a big step, a risk. As I told the HR guy as I was leaving, ‘I may be back here in six months begging for my job back.’”
Sheehan set about the grinding work of managing a startup and building a company. He chased new clients and checked chlorine levels. He worked late nights and early mornings, especially in the summer when pools are open.
It turned out to be something he could do.
The Swim Club Management Group grew into a group of pool club management offices in cities from Raleigh to the mountains. Then, it moved into South Carolina and Virginia.
Sheehan and company dove into more than just pool management. They began building and renovating pools. They started managing operations for private clubs and fitness centers managed by a separate company, Club & Leisure Partners. They landed some municipal contracts. The company’s full-time head count eventually topped 100, with many more during “the season.” It had nearly 400 clients and was quite profitable.
And, it attracted attention from afar.
Sheehan remembers the day, after more than a decade in business, around 2015, when he received an out-of-the-blue call from Scott Patterson, the CEO of FirstService.
“I wasn’t really interested in a sale at that point,” says Sheehan, “but I also thought to myself, ‘you know, I don’t get that many calls from guys like that. I should probably take that.’” They agreed to meet. Sheehan warned Patterson “not to be disappointed.”
A CPA on the Deck
Sheehan and Patterson hit it off immediately. Both had started their careers at PWC. Both were of similar mindset. Sheehan wasn’t ready to sell, but they agreed to stay in touch.
A few years later, the COVID pandemic prompted Sheehan to reassess. “It caused me to think about the things in life that I’m really passionate about.”
Business was one thing, but so was his growing family. He sold his business to FirstService in 2001 and agreed to stay on for a two-year transition period. Swim Club Management remains one of Collective’s 11 brands.
During the transition, Patterson and FirstService leaders asked him to help turn around several lagging divisions. Sheehan excelled, and in early 2024, FirstServe asked him to lead The Amenity Collective. Long-time CEO Mitch Friedlander was stepping down after 35 years.
FirstService’s Patterson says he and other leaders at FirstService had their eye on Sheehan as a potential CEO successor at the Collective, even before the company acquired swim club operator.
“It is unusual to identify someone as a prospective future leader in your organization before working with them,” says Patterson, “but Brian had the unique combination of CPA accreditation plus credibility as a “pool” professional. [That is] rare in the aquatics industry where most leaders get promoted from the pool deck and lack the skills and vision to grow an organization.”
Sheehan implemented structure and processes at Swim Club Management that “you would not normally see in a pool business or any business that size, (which) reinforced our thinking that Brian was capable of leading a larger organization.
“After he started working for FirstService, following the merger, (we) were happy to discover that he is who we thought he was when we partnered,” says Patterson.
Humans and AI
Sheehan accepted the CEO post, even though that wasn’t his intended path. But he realized it was probably a unique opportunity, and the company agreed that he could use his Charlotte-area home as a base. He visits company headquarters in Owings Mill, Maryland, about once a month and spends many days on the road, visiting the Collective’s regional offices.
His greatest challenge in moving to the top rung of a corporate ladder has been re-focusing his time and attention on new priorities. Strategy is a higher priority than day-to-day operations.
“That’s the biggest difference and I’m still adjusting to that,” says Sheehan. “For most of my life, with The Swim Club, it was more of a start-up company, and in that situation you’re still the doer, or one degree away. So before, what I would have said was, ‘I need to go to shows, work network, make contact.’ But strategy is different. Your outlook needs to be longer and the reality, of course, is that we are part of a publicly traded company. There’s a need to deliver, to get thousands to do one thing, to move the needle at scale. There is a lot to learn.”
Sheehan is applying some knowledge gleaned from his Swim Club days to his new post. Both the business he started, and the one he now runs, revolve around human capital. Pool and recreation operations are labor-intensive.
“It’s a surprisingly intense work environment,” says Sheehan. “You’re asking people to operate a pool in some very difficult environments, and I mean that literally. We have, for instance, a lot of clients in the Houston area. Ask someone to get up every day in Texas, in July, and run a facility where everyone is expecting it all to be perfect every day. It’s not easy, so you need to hire well. If you do that, if you have people who catch the spirit of what you’re trying to do, you can kind of get out of the way.”
To that end, Sheehan added a talent acquisition department to the Collective’s
corporate office. The company is also using AI to provide guidance to managers and other employees.
“We’re not like some industries, where if tomorrow we need someone in finance or HR, there are dozens of staffing agencies to call,” says Sheehan. “Finding someone who knows how to build a swimming pool, or who can manage people taking care of the pool, that is fairly specific. So we added a department that does nothing but hunt for people like that.”
Once talent is located, training and nurturing becomes vital, says Sheehan. “AI can help us with that. We see a world very soon where a new employee simply asks (AI) ‘how should I handle this client’s situation?’ or “how do I complete X’? and our AI walks them down the desired path.”
A Growing Pool
Despite the Collective’s success, the swim club business remains primarily in the hands of small operators. In almost every area his company touches, industry knowledge and best practices are lacking, Sheehan says. They’re typically passed on from employee to employee over many years.
There are more than 10 million swimming pools in North America, according to the IBIS World research firm. More than 400,000 are public or club pools. The Amenity Collective manages about 8,000.
“It’s a hugely fragmented industry, and that’s where we come in,” says Sheehan. “We can come in and create value, succession planning. There’s some private equity in this space, but aquatics is not for the faint of heart. Every day that someone is at a pool, they’re expecting it to be a great experience, and your job is to provide that. You have to have really good ops. We know how to do it.”
Sheehan says the company’s strategic plan calls for 65% revenue growth, to $700 million, by 2030.
Which is a pretty good pitch, no matter which hand you’re using. ■
