Why Anderson Brothers Owns All Our Own Gunite Equipment (And What That Means for You)

The honest 2026 answer: Anderson Brothers Pools owns every piece of equipment that touches your pool — the excavator, the steel bender, the gunite rig, the compressors, the plumbing trucks, the decking forms. We do not rent the equipment. We do not subcontract the gunite shoot. The crew running each piece is on our payroll, working only on Anderson Brothers projects. After 65+ years of building gunite pools in Southeast Michigan, this is the single biggest reason our pools last and our schedules hold.

If you are evaluating pool builders in Oakland, Livingston, Wayne, or Macomb counties — and you are about to spend somewhere between $80,000 and $250,000 on something that lives in your backyard for 30 years — this is the question to ask every builder you talk to: “Who is actually building my pool?”

The way most pools get built in Michigan

The dominant model in our market is the general-contractor pool builder. The company you sign with does the design, the sales, and the project management. They then subcontract:

• The excavation to an excavation company.
• The steel rebar work to a steel crew.
• The gunite shoot to a gunite subcontractor (often the same one used by every other pool builder in town).
• The plumbing to a pool plumber.
• The electrical to an electrician.
• The decking to a concrete or masonry contractor.
• The plastering to a plaster crew.
• The landscape restore to a landscaper.

That’s eight or nine different companies, each with their own scheduling, their own quality standards, and their own incentive to finish their portion and move to the next job. The pool builder you signed with manages the schedule. They do not, on most days, build the pool.

This is not a slander — it’s just the dominant model. Many subcontractor-built pools are perfectly fine. But the failure modes are real and they’re predictable.

What subcontractor-built pools cost you long-term

Schedule slippage compounds

Every handoff between subs is a potential delay. The excavation crew runs late on a previous job, which pushes the steel crew, which pushes the gunite sub, who only shoots on certain days of the week. A two-week summer schedule turns into eight weeks. Multiply that across the dozen-plus handoffs in a typical pool build and you understand why most subcontractor-built Michigan pools that “started in April” are getting plastered in September.

Quality is only as good as the cheapest sub

The builder’s margin depends on subcontractor pricing. Cheaper subs do cheaper work. The visible work (plaster, tile, coping) usually gets a quality sub because the homeowner inspects it. The invisible work — the steel grid spacing, the gunite shoot density, the plumbing pressure-test, the bonding wire continuity — gets the bid winner. Those are exactly the elements that determine whether your pool is leak-free in year 15.

Warranty becomes a finger-pointing exercise

Three years in, a plumbing leak develops at a return fitting. The pool builder says, “that’s a plumbing issue, call the plumber.” The plumber’s company has changed hands or stopped doing pool work. The builder says, “we can fix it, here’s the invoice.” Your warranty was never with the people who actually did the plumbing work.

The gunite shoot is the highest-stakes hour of your build

The gunite shoot is the single most consequential step in a gunite pool build. Steel goes in, the gunite rig sprays a one-piece concrete shell over it, and that shell will live as long as your house. A bad shoot — thin spots, voids, cold joints — will show up as cracks 5–15 years out. There is no fixing a structurally weak gunite shell after the fact, only living with it or rebuilding.

Most pool builders use the same handful of gunite subcontractors that serve every pool builder in the region. Those subcontractors are good or they are bad. They do not adjust their work for who hired them. If you hire a builder who hires that same sub, the quality of your shell is determined by which day of the week the sub is having.

What changes when the same company owns the equipment and employs the crew

Schedule consolidation

Our crews work only on Anderson Brothers projects. The excavator does not need to leave to a different builder’s job site. The steel crew bends and ties for the next Anderson Brothers pool, not someone else’s. Phase transitions happen on the day they are scheduled to happen, weather permitting, because no one is waiting for a sub to be released from another job.

One quality standard, set by us

The gunite shoot is done by our gunite team, on our rig, with our standards for nozzle distance, density, and curing. When we discover a way to improve a step — better steel spacing for a complex shape, a different shoot pattern for cold-weather days — that improvement applies immediately to every pool we build, because we don’t have to renegotiate it with a sub.

One warranty, one phone number

Three years in, if something goes wrong, you call us. We sent the people who built it, and we are the people who fix it. No subcontractor relationship to navigate, no “that’s not our part of the build” conversation.

Equipment maintained for our use, not minimized for rental

Rental equipment is maintained to rental-company standards, which are about preventing total failure, not about delivering precision. The shotcrete pump that has been on 200 rental jobs this year is not the same machine as ours, which is on our jobs only and serviced on our schedule.

What this looks like on your build

If you build with us, here is who shows up to your site, on which days, in which trucks:

The only outside party on a typical build is the licensed pool electrician — required to be licensed and bonded by the state for pool electrical work. That electrician has been on our projects for years and is effectively part of the team.

The trade-off — and why we choose it

Owning the full equipment fleet and keeping crews on payroll costs more than running a brokerage. It means equipment payments in winter, when no pools are getting built. It means crew payroll during cold-weather months when we are doing remodels and service work instead of new builds. It means we cannot grow at the pace a sub-broker can. We have built one pool at a time for 65+ years for this reason.

What we get for the trade-off is what our oldest customers come back for: their kids’ pools and now their grandkids’ pools, built by the same company, warrantied by the same company, serviced by the same company. That is the long game.

Questions to ask any pool builder you are evaluating

1. “Do you own your gunite equipment, or do you subcontract the shoot?”
2. “Who actually performs the gunite shoot on my pool?”
3. “Are the excavation, steel, plumbing, decking, and plaster crews your employees or subcontractors?”
4. “If a problem develops in year 5, who do I call — and is that person still in business in this market?”
5. “How many pools did you build last year, and how many of them did you actually swing a hammer on?”

The answers will tell you most of what you need to know.

What to do next

Talk to us. Talk to a few other builders. Walk pools we built 15 and 20 years ago — we’ll give you addresses (with the owners’ consent) so you can see what our work looks like a decade-plus in. Then make the call.

We build gunite pools across Birmingham, Bloomfield Hills, Troy, Rochester, Northville, Novi, West Bloomfield, Plymouth, Livonia, Canton, Commerce Township, Milford, Farmington Hills, and the rest of Southeast Michigan. Schedule your free in-home consultation here or call 248-380-7665.