Gareth Watts is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Watts Marketing in Norwich. He started in 2003 as a door canvasser for one of the country’s biggest windows and doors companies, booking around ten appointments a week on his own and becoming known in the industry as one of the best canvassers working. He moved on to canvassing gas and electricity switching in 2008, registered Watts Marketing in 2010, began selling solar in 2013, and took the company full-time in 2015. Watts Marketing is now the UK’s largest exclusive lead-generation company, booking over 2,000 qualified home-improvement appointments a week.
Gareth Watts
In 2003 he was knocking doors for a windows and doors company, booking appointments one at a time. Watts Marketing books more than 2,000 a week now, and it is the same job at a size nobody can walk.
Gareth Watts learned this trade the hard way round, on the step. A canvasser’s job is simple to describe and difficult to do: find a household that wants the work, make sure the people who would sign are both going to be in, and put a time in a salesperson’s diary that is worth their drive.
Twenty-odd years later, that is still the product. Watts Marketing sells an appointment. One homeowner, one company, once. Everything else the business does sits under that: the advertising it funds, the consumer brands it owns, and the Call Centre Hub in Norwich that speaks to every homeowner before a booking reaches anybody’s diary.
It starts at somebody’s front door.
- 2003The doorstep10 a weekAppointments, on his own
He starts knocking doors.
A door canvasser for one of the biggest windows and doors companies in the country, creating appointments street by street. He was good at it in a way people in the trade noticed: around ten booked a week on his own, which in 2003 was a number that got a canvasser talked about, and he was known across the industry as one of the best doing it.
It is also a trade you learn by getting it wrong in front of people: which questions actually establish whether a household can buy, why an appointment booked with one decision maker wastes everyone’s evening, how quickly a sales team stops trusting a diary that has been padded to hit a number. Most of what Watts refuses to do now was learned at somebody’s front door.
- 2008Energy
Gas and electric, same front door.
He starts canvassing energy switching, getting households off one supplier and on to another. Different product, different objection, sold in the same ten minutes on the same step. Two trades in, and the pattern is already the one the company runs on: what is being sold changes, the qualifying does not.
- 2010His own name
Watts Marketing is registered.
For the next five years it runs alongside the doorstep work rather than instead of it, on one idea he has already tested by hand: an installer does not want leads, they want a confirmed appointment, and they want it to be theirs alone.
- 2013Solar
A third trade, and the biggest ticket yet.
He starts selling solar. Far more money on the table than a window or a tariff, and the same underlying difficulty: a household that has to want the work rather than just wonder about it, and a sales visit that costs real money to send out. Solar is where the business learns how much of the qualifying has to be finished before anybody drives anywhere.
- 2015Full-time
It becomes the whole job.
Watts Marketing takes off and he stops doing anything else. This is the year the company counts from. Every figure published on this site, from appointments booked to revenue generated to years in market, is measured from 2015, because that is when the business began delivering at the scale it delivers at now.
- TodayEvery sector2,000+ a weekAppointments, as a company
The UK’s largest exclusive lead-generation company.
2,000+ appointments a week across every trade Watts covers, booked out of the company’s own Call Centre Hub in Norwich and referred to one installer each. He still sets the qualification bar that room works to. It is the one he learned on the doorstep, written down.
Every appointment Watts books is the job he was doing on a doorstep in 2003. Find the household that means it, confirm the people who sign will be there, hand it to one company. The only thing that has changed is how many of them fit into a week.
The doorstep, indoors.
The conversation he used to have on a front step now happens on a phone, in the Call Centre Hub in Norwich, around two thousand times a week. Watts funds the advertising, owns the consumer brands the enquiry arrives through, and makes the qualifying call itself: homeownership verified, credit screened, every decision maker confirmed as attending, the property checked as one the work can actually be done on.
That is the part he will not hand to anybody else. It is the only place an appointment can be made worth the drive, and it is the job he did first.
- 2003
- On the doorstep since
- 545,000+
- Appointments booked since 2015
- £1.7B+
- Revenue generated for partners
- 2,000+
- Booked every week
Three rules that came off the doorstep.
None of them started as company policy. They started as things that went wrong in front of him.
- One homeowner, one company, once.
- Exclusivity here is how the business is built rather than a box you pay extra for. Watts creates the demand itself, speaks to the homeowner itself, and sells the appointment once. There is no second copy of the enquiry anywhere, because a second copy was never made. He has been on the wrong end of a lead that was sold four times, and he does not sell them.
- The qualifying call stays in-house.
- Every homeowner is spoken to by Watts’s own staff, in Watts’s own building, before an appointment reaches a diary. It is the most expensive way to run this and the only way he will run it. Qualification is a conversation, and he wants the people having it trained the way he was.
- The appointment is built to be sold.
- He has been the person walking up the path, so he knows what a wasted evening actually costs: a day out of a rep’s week, not a lead fee. So the bar is a household ready to buy, mostly on the visit itself, and an appointment that does not go ahead comes back for credit.
The rest of the leadership team.
- Damien PearlChief Marketing Officer
- Omar AdeyIT Director
- Chloe WaltonCompliance Director
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