SPRING INTO LOCAL 

How two Caddo Mills natives turned a moral stand into a pool company their community can count on.

Some businesses start with a business plan. Texas Tropic Pools started with a prayer.

Chris Taylor had been building and designing pools for years; he knew the work, loved the craft, and had earned a reputation for doing things right. But when the company he was working for started cutting corners in ways he couldn’t stomach, he came home and told his wife Lauren, that he was going to have to find something else. What he didn’t expect was her response: “Well, why don’t you start a pool company?”

He prayed about it. The next morning, word came through the grapevine that a man named Barry Stapleton might be looking to do the same thing.

That phone call changed everything.

Barry had spent 15 years in corporate management at L3 Technologies, stable work that served his family well while his daughter was growing up. But with her finishing college, he finally felt the window opening. He had been building a pool for himself at the time, watching the process up close, and he could see exactly how much room there was to do it better.

“I always wanted to be an entrepreneur,” Barry said. “I was just always too scared. But I decided, if I’m going to do it, I’m going to do it now.”

When the two men sat down together, the fit was immediate. Chris knew construction. Barry knew business. They think alike, grew up alike, and share the same moral baseline. Three years later, they still work out of the same office , and they still joke that their two brains together make one really good one.

From the Barn to the Showroom

The early days were equal parts exciting and humbling. They started in Chris’s home office until Lauren sent them packing to Barry’s barn. Six employees eventually worked out of that single room, not much bigger than the office they now sit in, fielding a constant stream of vehicles and customers.

“The barn was a blessing,” Chris said. “But we were growing so fast, we were taking up all of Barry’s space.”

The move to a real building came almost by accident while helping a friend scout commercial space. Now they are building out a showroom where homeowners can walk in, touch materials, and see everything on display rather than flipping through a catalog.

Their first real project set the tone for everything that followed. It wasn’t a simple pool, water features, fire features, a pergola, turf. The kind of build most companies would ease into. Texas Tropic dove straight in. They still use it in their marketing.

The Way Chris Designs a Pool

Chris Taylor does not design pools like someone chasing a commission. He designs them like someone who has built things his entire life and understands how people actually move through a space.

He thinks about where the steps should be because that is where people will gather. He thinks about how the pool sits relative to the back door because that is how families actually use their yard. He thinks about leaving room for kids to play, because a backyard is not only a pool. It is a life.

“I’m not a salesman,” he said. “I came from the construction world. So when I’m in a meeting with a customer, most of it is , you should probably build it like this, because this is what will give you the most lasting value and the longest-lasting pool.”

He starts every first meeting with the same question: what is your vision for your backyard? From there, he builds a CAD layout in the meeting and follows it with a 3D rendering that looks like a drone flying over the homeowner’s house , because a lot of people are not visual, and seeing it in their actual space changes everything. More than once, a homeowner has called after the meeting to cancel all their other appointments.

“I feel like an educator,” Chris said. “Not a salesman.”

They Answer the Phone

There is something Chris tells every customer before a project begins that sounds simple and is not.

They answer the phone. Good, bad, ugly, it does not matter.

Construction has issues. That is just the reality of building something in the ground. What Texas Tropic promises is not a perfect process. What they promise is that when something comes up, they will pause the project, sit down, come up with a plan, and fix it, without asking for another dollar beyond what was on the contract.

That commitment has been tested. When a project manager once floated cost-saving ideas to work around a construction problem, the answer from both Chris and Barry was the same: ” What is the right thing to do? Do that.”

“He told us he’d never worked for anybody that has the morals that we do,” Chris said.

Trust in Caddo Mills was also built through something harder to manufacture, roots. Chris spent over a decade as a volunteer firefighter and served five years as chief. His father raised him on a simple idea: the one thing you have is your word and your integrity. Barry has served on the Caddo Mills school board for nearly nine years.

That reputation showed up in a story that still means the most to Chris. Tracy Simpson had a six-month-old pool from another company; it had moved six inches, the plaster was cracking, and the plumbing had multiple breaks. When she sued, the company had no insurance. She won $40,000 in individual litigation. Texas Tropic rebuilt her entire pool at cost, lifting it, re-stabilizing the soil, laying new decking and plaster, and keeping the final number right at what she had recovered.

“That one makes me feel the best,” Chris said.

A Team Built to Last

Walk into the Texas Tropic Pools office, and the family feel is not a metaphor. Barry’s daughter Keely, finishing her master’s degree, is their longest-tenured employee, handling accounts and office operations. Chris’s son Harper started part-time as a senior in high school and is now learning construction from the ground up so that when he moves into sales, he will know exactly what he is selling. Barry calls him Chris 2.0.

Their project manager Adrian, came from a larger pool company, heard enough about Texas Tropic through the industry that he asked repeatedly, until they brought him on. He handles daily site oversight and keeps communication flowing through every stage of a build. Cheyenne, a high school senior on a work program, arrives every afternoon at two and manages all of their social media and video content with a consistency the owners could never maintain during a busy season on their own.

The team runs on trust and a simple philosophy: as long as the work gets done right, no one is watching the clock.

What They’re Building Toward

Texas Tropic Pools is not chasing size. What Chris and Barry talk about when they imagine the future is the people already around them growing into more , Keely and Harper stepping into leadership, Adrian expanding his role, the team becoming what Chris calls a tribe of like-minded people.

There are early conversations about other locations , not traditional franchises, but partnerships with people who are driven, morally aligned, and willing to do the work right. Harper is already building a roadmap toward his own Texas Tropic location in Fort Worth one day.

“We like to support people’s dreams,” Chris said. “We don’t want to be the squasher of dreams.”

For now, success looks like what is already happening. It looks like pools built to outlast the people who built them. It looks like a community that rallied behind two guys who grew up here, stayed here, and refused to cut corners when it would have been easy to.

“I want them to be relieved,” Chris said, thinking about what he wants every homeowner to feel when the work is done. “Thankful that they picked us.”

And around Caddo Mills, that feeling is becoming pretty common.

This article closes out our March Spring Into Local series, a four-part celebration of the people building something right here in Hunt County. We’re grateful to Steve’s Nursery, Joanna Arnwine of RE/MAX Four Corners, Wells Cattle Company, and Texas Tropic Pools for sharing their stories with us this month.  Next week, we’ll round out the month with a look at local spring events happening across Hunt County.

About the Business

Texas Tropic Pools is a custom pool builder serving North Texas homeowners who want a pool built with craftsmanship, care, and integrity. Founded by Chris Taylor and Barry Stapleton, the company specializes in new pool construction, remodels, and repairs, with a deep focus on proper soil preparation, durable materials, and thoughtful design that works for the way families actually live in their backyards.

Specialty:

Custom pool design, new construction, remodels, and repairs

Serving:

Caddo Mills, Hunt County, and surrounding North Texas communities

Website:

texastropicpools.com

Follow on Facebook

Phone:

903-741-8676

Location:

Caddo Mills, TX

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