"I was quite proud of myself": Ampthill dad The Pool Guy bags top TikTok award with viral videos

Miles Laflin, 35, has been in the pool cleaning and maintenance businesses for 15 years and began documenting his work on TikTok, as The Pool Guy, when the world was plunged into lockdown during the pandemic in 2020.

He had been working for a company where he would create time-lapsed videos showing the before and after results of dingy pools being given a new lease of life.

Miles explained: “I got some brand deals and then I was getting people direct message me and email me to see if I can come and do a job for them. I was trying to do that in my own time, after the hours I needed to work for this other job.

“It all got a bit too much. So I decided I'd just go on my own. Social media definitely helped with that, because it was like free marketing. It's just been growing and growing since literally the first video I posted.”

After deciding to start up his business, Miles gained over 15,000,000 followers on TikTok and around 22,000,000 followers across all his channels.

He explained that he had never expected his videos to do so well. He said: “Literally, the first video I posted went quite viral. And then every video after that, because I was posting daily, then every video was getting really high numbers of views and the following kept going and going and going.”

His fans were asking for more, and Miles gave them more – by setting up a YouTube channel to document even more grimy pools and hot tubs.

When asked to estimate how many pools he has cleaned, Miles said: “It's got to be in the thousands, easily. In the summer, I'll go from job to job, so I can have eight jobs in a day sometimes.”

Miles and his team now tend to stick around Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire and north London, but said he could be tempted to travel further afield for particularly interesting jobs.

Despite winning the first award at the first TikTok Awards in the UK and Ireland, Miles didn’t know it was a thing.

He said: “I didn't really know about it until about three weeks before because my agent said that I had been nominated for an award.

“I didn't realise how big it was going to be. I got a nice suit and when I got there, it was like quite a massive do. I was quite surprised by it. It was quite overwhelming, I wasn't expecting to win.”

Miles won the title of High Quality Content Creator of the Year for 2024.

He explained: “I was quite proud of myself for winning it. I always get messages from people who say ‘You've inspired me to go out on my own and start a business.’

“There are so many jobs, maybe not similar to mine, but people could create content, and there'd be an audience out there for that specific thing that they do. They probably don't think that, but there definitely is, because I would never have thought it.”