Never mind the soft economy, for Brandon Brown and Skip Mayhew, business is bubbling, and as rising travel costs drive consumers to look to their back yards as recreational destinations, the prospects for jetted revenues grow.


Brown and Mayhew own Spokane Spas Inc., a five-year-old Spokane Valley venture that specializes in repairing the circuit boards that control hot-tub spas. The business, which currently employs four people, also refurbishes spas and sells both new and used hot tubs, as well as some accessories and supplies.


Revenues at Spokane Spas have been growing steadily, and Brown says he expects an additional surge this year and next, as people opt to travel less and recreate more at home.


I personally love hot tubbing, he says. I go out there in the evening with my daughters, and its our relaxing time.


Brown and Mayhew met when they both worked for Apollo Spas here, at the same time Brown was attending school at Spokane Community College. When the struggling Apollo Spas changed hands in 2003, Brown and Mayhew struck out on their own, launching Spokane Spas as a repair and maintenance business, he says.


Armed with toolboxes and operating out of Browns garage, they pounded the pavement, going door-to-door marketing their services. Since then, the venture has grown, adding other revenue streams and eventually needing its own shop, Brown says.


Using his knowledge of the hot tub industry, where he has worked since high school, and his electronics engineering technician degree from SCC, Brown immersed himself in the technology that he calls the brain of the spa, a printed circuit board that controls all of a spas electronic functions, including the heaters, pumps, and air blowers, and developed a method for repairing the expensive controllers.


There are many different boards used in hot tubs, and they ordinarily must be replaced when they break down, Brown says. He says repairing the printed circuit boards saves customers up to half the cost of replacing them, which he says can cost $1,000 or more. The business offers the service to customers both here and nationwide through its Web site, at www.spokanespas.com. For work outside the Spokane area, customers typically remove the boards themselves and ship them to Spokane Spas, which repairs them and sends them back.


That service has been a big driver of Spokane Spas growth, Brown says. About two years ago, the company moved from its makeshift shop in Browns garage into a 3,000-square-foot shop it leases at 16428 E. Sprague. Since then, the business has added two additional full-time employees, giving it four counting the two owners, and with the extra shop space has increased the number of spas its able to refurbish for customers or refurbish and sell.


Brown says Spokane Spas has built up a customer base of 3,000 people, and that its annual revenues have risen steadily, to about $382,000 in 2007, from $254,000 in 2006. He expects similar growth this year, and if revenues continue to climb at their current pace, the business might decide to open a second location here later.


Brown says that reaching the five-year mark makes him feel the business is stable, and he believes that the business has built a good reputation for its service. In addition to repairs and maintenance, the company has sought to diversify in recent years, adding sales of supplies, including custom hot-tub covers, and a line of new spas made by Mountain Springs Spas, of Stevensville, Mont.


He says some of Spokane Spas customers have received free spas from friends or have found them on Internet sites such as craigslist.com. Invariably, such spas need repairs, he says, adding, My adage is, Theres no such thing as a free spa.Innovative repairs


The circuit boards Spokane Spas repairs have a multitude of components, including diodes, relays, capacitors, and resistors that can short out, and though those individual parts can be purchased through electronics catalogs, the manufacturers of the circuit boards dont make available schematic drawings for repairing them.


To figure out what needs to be replaced in such cases, Brown often does what he calls reverse engineering, which involves taking a board apart component by component to figure out how the components relate to one another and which part needs to be replaced when the board stops functioning.


Sometimes, he says, figuring out what needs to be replaced is easy, such as when the terminals of a component are burned and the damage can be seen with the naked eye and the type of part is easily determined. Other times, the component might be so badly melted that the part number cant be read. In such cases, Brown turns to his collection of circuit boards to compare the damaged parts to those on an identical board in his inventory.


Brown still does most of the hands-on diagnostics of the damaged circuit boards himself, though other staff members are trained to complete the repairs based on what he finds, he says.


Mayhew also is a longtime spa repairman who operated his own repair business in California before moving to Spokane and going to work for Apollo Spas, Brown says.


Brown says the company plans to continue to focus primarily on maintaining, repairing, and refurbishing spas for its customers and on selling spas it refurbishes. Spokane Spas also works as a contractor to other spa vendors by doing warranty work for their customers.


To refurbish a spa, Spokane Spas replaces cracked pipes and analog thermostats and controls with modern digital versions, and can drill additional holes in the fiberglass body to add additional jets. Brown says as long as the fiberglass shell is in good shape, most hot tubs can be refurbished. He says the working parts of most hot tubs have life spans of between 10 and 20 years, and many of the hot tubs the company gets in for refurbishing were built in the early 1990s.


He says the earlier tubs are well-made and that some of the extras found in newer spas, such as built-in stereos, result in a lot more repair issues. Aside from repairs to circuit boards, most of the repairs spas typically need are a result of the owner leaving the tub dry or unused for an extended period of time.


Like a wooden boat, its better off wet than dry, Brown says. He says the seals in hot tubs dry and crack if left unused, and pipes freeze and crack if spas are left unused in the winter without being winterized. He says if people run their spas all year, using cooler temperatures in the summer, the spas have fewer maintenance issues.


Contact Jeanne Gustafson at (509) 344-1264 or via e-mail at jeanneg@spokanejournal.com.