Engineer and entrepreneur explains how consulting buyers on the true cost of ownership, instead of competing on the construction quote, turns saved money into loyalty and referrals into a growth channel. 

New data released by the Global Wellness Institute in May 2026 put the wellness real estate market at $876 billion in 2025, with 23% growth over the past year against 3% for construction as a whole and a forecast of $1.8 trillion by 2030. Expansion of that scale keeps pulling fresh buyers into the market, and most of them still make the key decision the old way: by the construction price and a visual sample.

Tengiz Naskidashvili, founder and general director of the pool construction company Hydronym LLC, came to business ownership from engineering and built the company on a different exchange. Rather than selling square meters of water, he consults clients on what a pool will cost them over ten to twenty years, and at times talks them out of the very project they came for. Since 2017, his practice has delivered 13 to 17 projects a year, from private pools to 82-foot commercial basins, with many new orders arriving through repeat clients and personal referrals. From his experience, leaders in any service business can borrow a working sequence: help the buyer choose correctly, save them real money, and convert that saving into long-term revenue.

Consulting only carries weight when the adviser knows the client’s future costs better than the client does. An outdoor overflow pool of 33 by 16 feet, kept at 91 °F through a winter with average air temperatures around 34 °F, needs 80 to 100 kilowatts of continuous heating capacity. Across a five-month cold season, that adds up to 290,000 to 360,000 kilowatt-hours. Naskidashvili calculated these figures for southern Russia, where his company operates, and uses them to expose a contradiction most buyers bring to the first meeting.

“A client picks an open overflow pool with premium finishes and, in the same conversation, names energy efficiency as the key requirement for the project. Both wishes are legitimate. My job is to calculate what each configuration will cost per year while the decision can still be changed,” Naskidashvili says. Numbers on the table move the talk from taste to economics, and a seller who starts it earns the position of an adviser before any contract appears.

Saying no to a paying client kills the deal; agreeing to a flawed project kills the reputation. Naskidashvili’s answer to that classic dilemma is engineering a compromise. One of his sites in a central city district had a hard limit on heating capacity, while the owner insisted on overflow architecture. Instead of choosing between the two, he designed a hybrid pool with two hydraulic circuits: through the warm months it runs in overflow mode with the full mirror effect, and when cold weather arrives, automation switches it to an economical skimmer circuit, cutting winter energy consumption by 30% to 50%.

Side benefits reached the paperwork as well. Gas consumption of the reference pool falls in winter mode to roughly 335 to 346 cubic feet per hour, which fits within a standard household G6 meter rated up to 353.

“In summer the owner gets a prestigious, visually flawless overflow pool with the effect of an endless mirror. Winter turns it into a cozy, energy-saving skimmer bath. Automation and the laws of physics let us bypass the infrastructure limits for gas and nearly halve heating costs while keeping the status of the object,” the engineer notes.

Personal intuition does not scale, so Naskidashvili formalized his advisory work into a sequence any manager can repeat. Every dollar an owner spends on a pool falls into four lines: heat, electricity, water with chemicals, and service with repairs. Comparing three structural types against those lines gave him a ranking matrix: a concrete overflow pool leads on architectural freedom and loses on every operating line, a composite skimmer pool with a roller cover wins on running costs, and the hybrid sits between them. Selection then follows fixed steps: structure the client’s priorities, audit the site for available heating and electrical capacity, match both against the matrix, and lock the result into the contract together with the budget and schedule.

Sometimes the method means selling less. Clients of retirement age once asked him for a concrete overflow pool of 33 by 16 feet with year-round use; an audit found their house lacked spare heat and power for it. Hydronym’s founder proposed a smaller check instead: a composite skimmer pool with a cover, which now runs all year at 91 °F within the household’s original utility limits. That reduced invoice bought something more durable than margin, since the contractor who protects the client’s budget is the one invited back, and a service contract keeps him responsible for the object’s real performance for years after handover.

Deals lost on paper return as reputation. Many of Naskidashvili’s clients order again, new ones arrive through personal recommendations, and complex exclusive projects now come to his firm on trust. Among the commissions won on that reputation is the Utesov spa hotel, set on a cliff above the Black Sea. Under his direction, the company designed and delivered a single outdoor pool serving every guest group at once: an 82-foot lane for sport swimming, a shallow beach zone with sunbeds standing in the water, hydromassage stations for five, and a 13-foot cascade separating sport from rest. At the Aqua Prestige awards, his firm took a prize in the best sauna category.

Imitation followed recognition. Competitors reuse photographs of his projects in their advertising, and his format of the commercial proposal, where materials and work stages repeat the actual construction sequence, has been adopted by some regional competitors as a template. Limpid Pools, the company where he worked as an engineer before founding his own, now turns to him for professional consultations. “I built the proposal so that its order mirrors the course of work on site: materials and stages go in the same sequence the crew will follow on the ground,” he explains. Repeat orders and personal referrals bring in many of his new clients.

Forecasts give wellness construction four more years to double. Buyers entering the market will face the same choice between the image of water and the economics of owning it, and the gap between a cheap pool and an inexpensive one will keep widening with every rise in energy prices. Looking ahead, Naskidashvili plans to spend those years on complex engineering projects and further professional education, developing the wellness and spa segment where his method was born. Owners, meanwhile, can start with one question to any contractor: what will this pool cost me in year ten?

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