Splash Digest

Dealer Spotlight: How Prairie State Water Solutions Boosted Business with a New Website

You’ll find family-run small businesses all over America, and residential water treatment dealerships are among the best. Fathers often pass on their knowledge to children, and then one day, pass on the business as well.

For Nick Koz, of the WaterCare dealership Prairie State Water Solutions in St. Charles, Illinois, it was a little bit different. He became part of a water treatment family and then made the business his own.

Back in the late ’90s, Koz was employed in what he calls a dead-end retail job when water industry veteran Steve Liberg, a friend of the family, asked him to come work at Prairie State Water.

“I started helping him install water softeners, change well pumps, change well tanks,” Koz says. “That was a little over 14 years ago.”

Things have changed quite a bit since then. For one thing, Koz started a relationship and eventually got married to Liberg’s daughter, Dori.

“We kind of dated on and off around the time I got the job,” Koz explains. Apparently, he caught Liberg’s eye as well as Dori’s. “He liked me for whatever reason, and I’m glad he did.”

The couple purchased the water conditioning side of the Liberg’s business in 2013 and officially turned it into an independent WaterCare dealership. Even though he’s split off from his father-in-law’s business, Koz and his wife operate Prairie State Water Solutions in collaboration with Liberg’s Prairie State Water Systems. The former acts like a sister company, which focuses on well drilling along with well and pump services.

When Koz first got the job at Prairie State Water, he was basically the only full-time employee, but there wasn’t always a lot of work for Liberg’s future son-in-law to do.

“Back then, he couldn’t quite keep me busy 40 hours a week,” Koz remembers. “I was doing yard work and doing stuff around his house too. A 40-hour week would be nice now. I wish I could have one of those.”

In addition to the hectic schedule that comes with being a small business owner, new customers are calling Prairie State Water Solutions all the time. Koz attributes part of that to a new WaterCare branded website (CleanerBetterWater.com), which is helping more people find his dealership online.

Koz chose to use one of the Clear Choice Water Group’s dealer website templates, which are specifically designed for both the WaterCare and Evolve brands.

With Prairie State Water Solutions’ old website, Koz says he would get a call here and there from people saying they saw the website and had questions.

“Now I probably get at least one or two calls a day that I believe are generated from the website,” he says. “And I thought I had a good website before!”

Nick Koz is a water treatment expert, not an online marketing expert. He readily admits that he doesn’t know a lot about technical topics like search engine optimization (SEO), but the results of his new website are all the proof he needs that it’s working.

“However they’re putting it together, it’s the right way to help customers find us,” he says.

Besides understanding search engines, it’s also valuable to have someone working on your website who understands the water treatment industry. Koz realizes with the WaterCare website template he got the best of both worlds.

“The fact that this was built in conjunction with Water-Right, WaterCare, and Evolve as a whole, the brain power is incredible in how it was set up and made to work right,” he says.

Koz also notes the fact he can trust Water-Right to give him a website that’s going to work, because the people behind the CCWG don’t want to sell him web design services, they want him to succeed.

“They built this platform, with all the R&D and everything behind it for us to prosper,” Koz explains. “They want us to sell more equipment. They want to grow the business and they want us to grow too.”

More About CCWG Dealer Websites

If your dealership’s website could use a facelift, choosing to use the Evolve or WaterCare templates is an easy and economical way to quickly build a site that is well-designed, optimized for search engines, and customizable.

• View an Evolve dealership template
• View a WaterCare dealership template

The Evolve and WaterCare websites are offered to CCWG dealerships as a service. Water-Right does not make a profit. It will cost $862 to put the site together, plus a $59.95 annual fee to host your new website. There is also the option to purchase software for $200 to make future changes to the site your self.

For Koz, it’s been worth it, especially when he sees how his search engine rankings have improved.

“You could spend thousands and thousands of dollars and get nowhere,” he says. “Just from my little investment in this new website, we’ve jumped tremendously.”

Prairie State Water surveys its customers to find out how they heard about the business, which is how the company knows for sure the website is having an impact.

Koz also has plans to keep building the dealership’s website, adding new content. For instance, he has a “Projects” section on the site where he’ll eventually feature photos from actual jobs.

“I pride myself in clean plumbing work,” Koz says. So nice copper work, nice PVC work, I just want to highlight what we do and show customers we’re not the traditional water conditioning dealer that just sells water softeners and filters. We design a lot of different things specific for certain homes. It’s nice to able to showcase what we’ve done in the past.”

By continuing to add material like that to his website, Koz is not only setting himself apart from the competition, he’s also keeping search engines satisfied with fresh content to deliver to people looking online for the products and services his dealership provides.

Want to get your new dealership website started? Please contact Melanie Jayjack (melanie.jayjack@water-right.com). She will put you in touch with the company we’ve hired to host and setup our CCWG websites.