Scott Trafton
CEO & Co-Founder – Pool Shark H20 Bennington , Vermont
YOU
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What brought you to Vermont ?
I moved here from Wells , Maine when I was 13 years old . I went to Mount Anthony High School in Bennington . It was a nice place to grow up . There were a lot of fun things to do here . There were programs at the school where you could learn how to ski , and I also went cross-country skiing at the local country club . After I graduated from high school , I left Vermont to pursue a career in software development . I worked as a software developer for several startup companies , as well as banking and technology companies . I lived in a variety of places , including Wilmington , Massachusetts , which is just north of Boston . At one point , I worked down by Fenway Park , so my office was 12 miles from my house . I spent three-and-a-half hours in my car every day doing the 24-mile round trip commute . Eventually , it got incredibly frustrating .
I began to realize that due to the fact that I worked in the IT field , it was entirely possible for me to work remotely . I wanted to find a way to escape the hectic day-to-day grind of city life . It was then that I met my wife , who was a kindergarten teacher here in Bennington . Soon after , I figured out how to keep the job I had at the time while working remotely in Bennington . I sold my house in Massachusetts and moved back here , and my wife and I started having kids . In 2012 , my brother , Todd , and I started to develop an idea for a business that eventually became Pool Shark H20 . He is my business partner and co-founder .
The idea initially came about when I was visiting my family ’ s commercial resort in Maine . I realized that we needed an easier way to be able to keep track of the chemicals in the pool for health department compliance . At that point , there were around a dozen states that required extensive logging of chemicals that were present in commercial pools , so I knew that there was a potential market for the application . I started to develop a system that would make it easy to record pool chemical levels for health department compliance . The goal was to eliminate all of the complicated math calculations that could potentially cause errors by providing consistent on-demand water analysis . Today , we have accomplished that goal through our application .
At first , my work with Pool Shark H20 was just part time . I was experimenting with the concept to see if it worked . During the earliest stages , we had to examine every aspect of the chemical measurement
60 VERMONT MAGAZINE