The Son Rises Higher |
A hand-off from a hard-nosed tradesman to his snowboarding son has led to exponential growth for Watts Mechanical
by Scott Messenger
When Robert Watts started Watts Mechanical Services Ltd. with his wife, Susan, in Calgary in 1981, he never imagined a day would come when he’d no longer be allowed to yell at a guy on the job site. If someone botched an installation or repair job, reaming him out was just part of the fix, then you got the work done and everyone moved on. And as Robert, 63 now, remembers of those gritty days leading up to the recession of the 1980s, “Then I had to go out and find work on the street.”
That’s more or less how it went for the next two decades, bringing in enough jobs to keep a few guys around to shout at and operations afloat. Growing the company wasn’t really a goal. At least not until Andrew, one of three kids, finished university and approached mom and dad with ambitions – and a plan – to fast-track Watts towards what would become nearly exponential growth. That trajectory culminated in more than $21 million in sales and a staff of 100 in 2008-09, a year that should have reminded Robert of starting up back when, as he puts it, “You couldn’t beg, borrow or steal a job in Alberta.”
If you live in Calgary, you may recognize Andrew, Watts Mechanical’s 32-year-old CEO. While his father prefers the anonymity of the job site, the younger Watts possesses a very different style. He has allowed his personality to endow the company with a corporate vitality unusual for the trades. Since last summer, when the company ranked 47th on Profit magazine’s 100 fastest growers in Canada, Andrew has represented Watts Mechanical as it competed as a finalist in the Calgary Chamber of Commerce RBC Small Business Awards, and again as a member of Avenue (Calgary) magazine’s Top 40 Under 40. Hardly his dad’s life “on the street.”
But he’s not a tradesman to begin with. After completing a University of Calgary bachelor’s degree in communications and geology and a couple of internships in junior oil, Andrew spent the winter of 2001-02 on the North American competitive snowboard circuit with the Canadian national team. But before he did, he’d made his proposal: take a run at making the World Cup squad, compete internationally, then return to the company > where up until then he’d spent spare hours doing estimates and project management.
Despite having the best competitive snowboarding season of his life, “The spring came around in 2002 and I was not on the World Cup team,” says Andrew. “Which is probably good, because I got to build a company.”
The no-guts-no-glory attitude of the slopes has played a big part in building Watts Mechanical. At first, the plan was simple enough: double staff numbers annually (fairly easy when you’re starting with you, mom and dad, and a couple of plumbers, Andrew admits), get more vehicles into the field, move into a bigger building. Then it required thinking bigger. But going for gold by selling developers on Watts’ ability to tackle the multimillion-dollar projects seemed an over-ambitious strategy, at least to Robert.
“Yeah, OK, we’ll see what happens,” he recalls saying. Though he wasn’t entirely convinced at first, the elder Watts changed his attitude when Andrew secured work on a new Rona store roughly five years ago. “When that first million-dollar job came in, I thought, ‘Holy shit.’” But, thanks to his own experience on big projects in Fort McMurray and, when the Calgary Flames came to town in 1979, retrofitting the team’s original home at the Corral, “None of it seemed overwhelming.”
Also, Andrew had ensured the infrastructure was in place to support demanding projects. He’d rounded out the roster with journeyman plumbers from Europe and the United States through the federal government’s temporary foreign worker program. He’d also been steadily modernizing operations, making estimating and project management software standard job tools. Most importantly, as what Robert refers to as a “song-and-dance man – he can sell the product, he can talk,” Andrew had established a path of stepwise, incremental growth.
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