Travis Wingate Has an Eye for the Whole Field

A swimming pool in software is never merely a blue rectangle. It is a route, a customer, a dosage, a technician, a payment and, on an inconvenient Tuesday, a phone call that arrives while both hands are busy. Travis Wingate has made a career marketing products built for work like this: ordinary nouns with complicated machinery hiding inside them. His current noun is pools. Before that came moving and maintenance. The titles rose, the industries shifted, but the interest remained strikingly consistent. He likes the whole operation.

There is another field in Wingate's life, and this one is literal. He has spent more than two decades in the pageantry arts, first as a performer, then as a designer and visual adjudicator. On a competition floor or football field, music, bodies, flags, timing and space are asked to become one idea. Wingate has judged for Winter Guard International, Drum Corps International and Bands of America. He has designed for Lowndes High School's winter-guard programs and for Fusion Independent World. His corporate biography and his weekends appear to occupy different planets. Look at them for a moment longer and they begin to rhyme.

The useful education of timing

Wingate is a native of Valdosta, Georgia. At Valdosta State University, he studied business administration and minored in music. He also performed with Northgate Independent Winter Guard in Atlanta. It is a combination that looks charmingly improbable only if one assumes business has no rhythm and design has no budget.

His first listed marketing role began in 2007 at Entruphema. By 2011, he was an email marketing analyst at Workopolis, the Canadian employment site. Email marketing in that era could be a blunt instrument: assemble a list, write a subject line, push send, hope. Wingate's team was already trying to make it behave more like a conversation. In 2012, he described Workopolis moving away from batch-and-blast campaigns toward lifecycle messages shaped by what customers had done and where they were in their journey.

One program followed employers after they bought a job posting. Four automated emails arrived over 45 days, while business data identified listings that needed human help. In the first eight weeks, the emails produced open and click rates 20 to 25 percent above the team's untargeted averages. Delivery reached 98 to 100 percent. There was one opt-out and a reported unsubscribe rate of zero. Those numbers are old enough to have survived several generations of marketing jargon. The principle underneath them has aged better still: relevance is a service before it is a tactic.

From retail scale to SaaS specificity

After Workopolis, Wingate spent nearly three years at Loblaw Digital, first in email marketing and then demand generation. In 2017, he left the national retailer for Fiix, a Toronto company making maintenance-management software. He later joked that Fiix executive Shane Skiffington had dragged him into “SaaS start-up land” by the heels. The resistance, if any, did not last. Over five years he climbed from senior manager of demand generation to vice president of marketing.

Fiix sold software to maintenance and operations teams, an audience more concerned with machines staying alive than with admiring a campaign. Wingate's growth group built guided content experiences around that reality. Someone reading an introduction to preventive maintenance could proceed to the next useful asset without wandering a maze of menus and posts. Fiix then measured what people actually consumed.

The reported result was not a vanity metric. Prospects who engaged with those content tracks helped lift overall win rate by 70 percent and deal velocity by 24 percent. Among small and midsize businesses, the win rate doubled. Average time to a closed deal fell by 20 percent. Wingate's explanation was admirably unromantic: tailoring the experience helped conversion, helped stickiness and helped deliver the content. The customer got a coherent next step. The company got evidence.

When Rockwell Automation agreed to acquire Fiix in 2020, Wingate called it a team accomplishment and recalled his leap from retail four years earlier. “Ready, set, grow (again),” he wrote. The parenthesis did useful work. Growth, in his telling, was not a single heroic ascent. It was another start.

The companies behind the clipboard

Wingate joined Supermove as vice president of marketing in 2022. The category changed from industrial maintenance to moving and storage, but the customer remained someone coordinating physical work under pressure. He hosted and appeared in webinars about finance, automated workflows and payments for moving companies. The conversations dealt in trucks, cash flow, staffing and the small repetitive tasks that accumulate until an operator has no day left.

In 2023, Wingate moved to Skimmer as vice president of marketing. He became chief marketing officer in September 2025. Skimmer serves pool professionals with routing, service records, billing, payments and customer communication. It is another business where software leaves the office and rides along with the work.

His marketing there has included a particularly sensible form of category building: give the category information about itself. The second State of Pool Service report combined survey responses from more than 2,000 pool professionals with aggregated data covering 30,000 professionals and 700,000 pools. A separate Pool Owner report explored what customers value in communication, service and pricing. These projects turn the company's access to a fragmented trade into a public map of the trade.

They also make good marketing because they are useful when the logo is ignored. A pool operator can compare pricing worries, labor shortages and customer expectations with peers. Skimmer can learn the language of the market it serves. Everyone gets a slightly better view of the field.

A judge who still designs

Pageantry supplies the counterweight to the spreadsheets. Wingate's time in the marching arts stretches back beyond his marketing career. His designs for Lowndes High School accompanied two WGI Scholastic A finalist appearances, a Scholastic Open finalist appearance and four Florida Federation of Colorguards Circuit medals. From 2018 through 2022, he designed for Fusion Independent World. His name remains on WGI's roster of color-guard judges and on current event panels.

Judging is a peculiar kind of authority. It requires confidence, but it also requires the discipline to look at what is present instead of what one hoped would be present. A judge watches individual achievement, composition, pacing and effect without letting any one shiny moment excuse the rest. A useful comment is specific enough to help and broad enough to improve the next performance.

That habit echoes through Wingate's work history. Colleagues describe someone able to examine a project from technical, sales and marketing angles. A member of his Skimmer team praised his candor, positivity and willingness to experiment, celebrate wins and learn from setbacks. Another former colleague remembered getting a great deal done while having a great deal of fun. There are worse reputations for an executive. There are also easier ones to fake, briefly.

A wider platform, the same question

Skimmer raised $74 million in growth capital from Mainsail Partners in 2024. Two years later, it acquired Pool Builder Geek and Poologics, extending from pool service and maintenance into construction and renovation. Wingate described the appeal as larger than entry into a new market. The acquisitions could form an end-to-end platform, following the life of a pool from the first build through years of service.

This is the sort of expansion that makes a marketing leader's job more interesting and less tidy. Builders and service technicians share an industry but not every problem. An umbrella broad enough to cover both can quickly become a fog. The old Wingate question returns: can each part keep its character while contributing to the complete picture?

His recent discussions about artificial intelligence suggest he is alert to a related tension. At a Mainsail marketing workshop, Wingate joined other executives to discuss staying human as systems accelerate and treating authenticity as a choice. It is a useful concern for someone whose career began with the migration away from indiscriminate email. Automation can improve timing. It cannot decide what deserves to be said.

On a pageantry floor, effect is immediate. The audience sees whether an idea has arrived. In SaaS, the signal takes longer: a prospect keeps reading, a deal moves, a technician finishes a route, a customer pays. Wingate has spent years studying both kinds of evidence. The settings could hardly look more different. The craft is much the same. Arrange the motion. Respect the people doing the work. Then step back and see whether it holds.