Steve Rennau is hanging up his tools after more than four decades in the swimming pool and hot tub business in The Valley. And when he hangs up his tools, so does his business, Mountain Pools. Rennau, Fayston, looked for someone to take over the business from him and came up empty.
Rennau got his start in the pool and hot tub business shortly after graduating from Saint Michael’s College with a degree in business administration when he started working for Allen Clark of A.W. Clark Builders in 1978. Clark had started the business in 1975 and Rennau worked with him building pools and later hot tubs until purchasing the business in 1984.
Rennau, who had worked in the pool business during high school and during summers in college stumbled across Clark the same way he did Mad River Glen – by happenstance. Rennau, an avid skier since he was 10 years old found Mad River Glen during his first year at St. Mike’s while driving over the App Gap. He stopped and went in and purchased a college weekday pass for $70. Later that year, in the summer, and a little further down Route 17 he saw Clark’s sign for Mountain Pools.
“So, I'm working at Mad River teaching skiing, and someone says Tommy Clark's dad's got a pool business. And I've been driving by a sign that said Mountain Pools and AW Clark building. I thought he was selling spring water. I really didn't think there was a swimming pool business. I drove up and introduced myself. And he was actually sitting there writing a classified ad for The Valley Reporter. He needed a service manager. I said, ‘I can do that.’ And the rest is history,” Rennau recalled.
While working for Clark and before buying the business, Rennau met his wife Tisa, who didn’t ski at the time but did shortly thereafter. Skiing and Mad River Glen have been a significant part of their lives with both of them teaching skiing to Fayston Elementary School students and Rennau volunteering for years on the Mad River Glen ski patrol.
As residential and commercial development boomed in The Valley, business grew and, at one point, Rennau had six employees and a fleet of service vehicles and equipment. The business weathered boom and bust cycles. He and Tisa bought some land on North Fayston Road, had two kids, Jesse, now 47 and Chris, now 42. Both have their own families and careers and were not interested when the time came to sell business, Rennau said.
Rennau said he’d been in talks with a couple of different property managers who had expressed in interest a couple of years ago, and one last year. Neither opportunity panned out, due in part to the labor shortages that plague so many local businesses.
So, he’s retiring and celebrating that fact with a party at Mad River Glen featuring The Grift. They love spending time in the Outer Banks as well as The Cape and they look forward to doing more of that when retirement is official.
Rennau said the transition from being flat-out in the spring and summer getting all his clients’ pools and hot tubs ready, to not doing that was a little odd but he’s managing. He just bought an e-bike and is excited to get to use it this summer.
“I’ll probably end up volunteering, maybe driving for Free Wheelin’ or even serving on a local board,” he said. He previously served on the Fayston Planning Commission and the Mad River Valley Planning District.
