Factors to Consider When Hiring a Lake Management Company
If you own a private lake and you like to fish, you probably bought the lake, or had it built, hoping to have exceptional fishing, fishing on a level that can’t be found at most public waters. A good lake manager can help you create that kind of fishery; the wrong lake manager will just waste your time and money and make you wonder how he or she ever earned a degree in biology. The southeast has become a hotly-contested region for lake management; new companies seem to be entering this space almost on a monthly basis these days; it can be difficult to sort the contenders from the pretenders if you don’t know what to look for. Here are a few things that can help you make the right decision.
1) What is your priority for the lake?
Some lake owners just want aquatic weed control; fishing is not a priority. You just want the lake to look like a postcard. Any competent lake management company should be able to properly treat undesirable aquatic vegetation, but more than a few times over the years, we have come behind other companies that had caused fish kills from careless application of aquatic herbicides or pond dyes. Even if the fishery is not a priority, most lake owners don’t want to wake up one morning to thousands of dead fish floating on their lake. A commercial applicator’s license is required to apply aquatic herbicides as a service, so make sure whatever company you hire is licensed. Beyond that, ask them if they have had any customers experience fish kills in the last three years within a short time span of a treatment they had performed; if they hem and haw, call someone else.
Other lake owners are all about the fish: they want to grow the biggest monster bass they or any of their buddies has ever seen, or bluegill big enough to scare small dogs. For this goal, it’s easy to weed out some of the large companies competing in this space: just ask to see their trophy-fish photos. If they don’t have any, why would you even consider hiring them?
If they have photos of big fish on their website or IG, ask some questions about the photos. If all but one or two of the fish came from one or two water bodies they manage, and they manage hundreds, what happened to all those other hundreds of lakes and the hundreds of thousands of dollars they were given to manage said waters? If you find a company that can readily produce photos of big fish from dozens of different water bodies, that demonstrates that they get consistent results, which in turn tells you that they might know one or two things those other companies don’t about fish biology.
Trophy Pond has grown Florida bass to thirteen pounds, and bluegill to two pounds fourteen ounces; more importantly, we have grown very big fish in dozens of different private ponds and lakes, from ten-pound bass in one-acre ponds to an 11.5-pounder from a lake on the Cumberland plateau at 2,000-foot elevation to that 13-pounder that came from northernmost Georgia, from a bluegill that probably was three pounds or more but wasn’t weighed (we’ll post a photo of it below) from a seven-acre pond to bluegill from twenty-four to thirty ounces from nine different ponds, and 1.5-pound bluegill from dozens of ponds and lakes.
Here’s another hint: we’re a much smaller company than several of our competitors, but we have more big fish photos than said competitors, though they have a lot more accounts, at the moment, than we do.
2) Do they grow their own fish?
Many fish hatcheries don’t even offer management services; some do. Some lake management companies also grow their own fish; more than a couple of the largest companies in this space don’t raise any of the fish they would stock for you.
There have certainly been top-level fisheries created by companies that don’t raise any fish. Our question to you would be this: who is more likely to know the most about bass and bluegill, biologists who have spent thousands of hours on a day-in, day-out basis culturing them, from spawning to feeding, disease treatment to habitat, water control to predator control, growth rates to lifespan, or someone who merely picks the fish up at a wholesaler and trucks them to the customer, and then sees them once a year, if that, in an electrofishing survey? If you were a Formula One driver and you were looking to have a custom car built to take your career to the next level, would you hire a salesman who had never built or designed a car but had sold lots of them, or the guy who had built the car that had just won the Indy 500?
We travel to Florida multiple times every year to catch more pure Florida bass and coppernose and handpainted bluegill from the wild to improve the genetics of our fish. Even among fish hatcheries, whether one is talking about farms in the southeast or anywhere in the U.S., no one works as hard at having the best fish as we do.
3) What’s their company structure?
All of the biggest lake management companies that work in this region are corporately-owned. Corporate-owned is not always a bad thing; if you need to find something for your home quickly and cheaply, and you can stomach the crowds, Wal-Mart is a viable option. If you need open-heart surgery, on the other hand, you’re probably not going to be swayed by the practice that has the most doctors; you’re probably going to look for the surgeon who has killed the fewest people on the operating table. Or let’s say you’re hiring a lawyer, and the quality of work he does for you could make you or lose you a large sum of money; you’re probably going to care a lot less about the number of attorneys at the firm, and a lot more about his track record in court.
A corporation functions very differently from a small business. A small business owner, such as for example the owner of Trophy Pond i.e. the guy writing this blog post, answers only to himself when it comes to making decisions about what’s best for a customer’s lake; an employee of a corporation answers directly to the CEO of said corporation, which is 0% of the time said biologist, for every decision he makes regarding any customer’s lake. You may have heard one or two stories of this or that corporation prioritizing profit over the good of their customers; lake management corporations are not a special species created from a higher plane of CEOs who are singularly selfless and Christlike. Profit is the alpha and the omega, end of conversation.
If you don’t believe me, simply glance at any one of the three biggest corporations presently advertising lake management services in my home state of Tennessee. All three are based at least one state away, two of them multiple states away; all three are based in different climates. All three of them heavily emphasize aquatic herbicide treatments in the work they do while at the same time telling prospective customers that they will give them the fishery they have always wanted, conveniently omitting the fact that you can’t have both. Trophy Pond electrofished a four-acre pond in fall 2025 that had been so severely over-treated for algae, for years on a monthly basis, that we only shocked up one largemouth over 10”, and no bluegill that even measured 6”. But the northern-state-based corporation that had been managing the pond had made thousands in treatment fees.
Prior to the advent of electrofishing, one of the ways fisheries biologists measured the potential of a given lake for having a quality fishery was the amount of coverage of aquatic vegetation: lakes that had significant coverage of plants carried four to sixteen times as many pounds of fish per acre as ones that had minimal plants. And that’s just on the macro level, plants big enough to see; on the micro level, fisheries biologists to this day measure phytoplankton density on every lake or pond they electrofish, because phytoplankton are the foundation of the entire food web in any lake or pond, and the more phytoplankon, the more zooplankton there will be, the more benthic invertebrates there will be, the more and the bigger fish there will be. There’s even a saying in the fisheries community: “Clear water is sterile water.” And yet the biggest lake management company working in this region brags on how they will give you beautiful water, while at the same time telling you they’re the best option for growing big fish.
Would you hire a personal trainer who told you he wanted you to start eating whatever you wanted, pizza and cheeseburgers and ice cream, because doing so would allow you to gain muscle and lose fat at the same time? That’s the equivalent of what that lake management company is telling you.
There’s nothing whatsoever wrong with wanting a lake completely devoid of aquatic vegetation; for some lake owners, that’s all they care about; we can provide that service for you, and are happy to do so. Beware of companies that tell you you can have your cake and eat it too, or more accurately, just don’t tell you what will happen to your fish population if you sterilize your lake with chemicals.
