Phil Gatenby on a career in water efficiency
People behind the work
Water bills go up every year. The UK has not completed a major new reservoir in more than thirty years. Phil Gatenby spends his working days on the other side of that problem, in people’s homes, finding the water that is being wasted and getting it stopped.
Phil joined Aqualogic in January 2020 as a water efficiency technician. He is now a senior project manager in our client services team, running contracts, managing field teams and still keeping a set of plumbing tools in the back of his truck.
We spoke to him about swapping self-employment for a van and a tablet, what he learned during a very strange first year, and what he looks for in the people joining us.
A Christmas Eve interview
Before Aqualogic, Phil ran his own plumbing business. The work suited him. The hours did not.
“I don’t have a very good off switch. When I was self-employed I could easily do 12, 14, 16 hour days without realising, and I could do that six or seven days a week. It got to a point where I needed to put more of a work-life balance in place.”
Going back into employment was how he planned to reset that. A water efficiency technician role came up, and although the job did not call for a qualified plumber, Phil applied.
He met Jonathan Adler, our client services director, on Christmas Eve 2019. He started in January.
What sold it to him was not the job description. It was what the work took away.
“We’re literally just trying to stop leaks, we’re trying to fix things, and it’s all totally free. I can go in, do the work, and I don’t have to say right, you owe me this at the end of it.”
Phil had never been comfortable pricing his own jobs. As a self-employed plumber he lost whole afternoons to work he never billed for, because the customer reminded him of his grandmother, or because he happened to be passing anyway.
Small repairs are the ones that get left. A dripping tap or a leaking toilet is rarely worth a call-out charge to the customer, and rarely worth the trip for the plumber. So they run, sometimes for years, wasting water and adding to a bill nobody has connected to the cause. Take the charge away and the job gets done.
“There was a customer with a wobbly tap. She said she’d had it for years and no plumber would come and fix it. It took two seconds. She was over the moon. I loved that element.”
That reaction is what has kept him in the work. It gets reported in litres saved and appointments completed, and those are the numbers a water company needs. On the doorstep it is smaller and more immediate. Someone has put up with something for years, and then it is fixed, and it cost them nothing.
Learning the job, then learning it again
Phil’s first week will look familiar to anyone who has joined our field teams. An induction at head office, a session with our technical manager on the products and where they go, then two days shadowing the technician he was taking over from.
“By the end of the week I’d effectively taken over. On the last day I dropped him back at his house, kept his van, kept his phone and his equipment, and went off on my way.”
The plumbing side gave him no trouble at all. “The way we fit the products, where we fit them, that’s all plumbing logic. It clicked.”
That left one thing to learn. The tablet, the audit app, knowing what data was needed at which point and making sure no question got missed. Because everything else was already familiar, Phil could put his whole training week into it.
“Once I’d got the hang of those, fitting the products and talking to the customers, that side was dead easy. I only had the one element to learn.”
Then COVID arrived, and in March 2020 home visits stopped.
Water efficiency work depends on getting into people’s houses, and lockdown made that impossible overnight. There was no precedent for it and no obvious way to carry on. Rather than pause the programmes, the business worked out how to run audits remotely, talking customers through their own properties so the savings still got made. It needed people willing to try something untested. Aqualogic asked who would trial it. Phil said yes.
He was one of the first onto it and stayed on it longest. Before long he was training everyone else.
“I wasn’t managing it, I wasn’t a supervisor. But because I’d been on it the longest I became the senior person within it. So I started to train more people, and there was a team around me, and they all came to me with issues.”
From there he moved to the planning team, making outbound calls to customers, then went south to support a contract there, driving down on a Monday and back on a Friday. When that contract took on its own project manager, Phil became its supervisor. Another contract came in soon after and Jonathan asked him to run it, his first project manager role.
Not long after that, the manager running the contract in the south moved on, and Jonathan asked Phil to take that one on as well. Each step had come the same way. Something needed covering, and Phil was the one asked.
As the business kept winning work, a third contract came in and a further project manager was brought in to run it. Phil moved up to senior project manager, the role he holds now.
What the job looks like now
Phil line manages plumbers, water efficiency technicians and a contract supervisor, and works alongside our planning and data teams. He runs the client meetings, the reporting, the mobilisation of new work, and any customer issue that needs resolving.
He also still takes the technical calls.
“I’m a qualified plumber, so if the team have a plumbing problem I can understand where they’re coming from. And it isn’t only my team. If someone on another contract has a question they’re not sure on, it gets passed to me and I’ll talk them through it or give them another way of looking at it.”
That has proved useful with clients too. One client did not want to offer free toilet repairs as part of their programme. Phil used his plumbing background to show them what it would be worth if they did. They changed their approach.
The hardest part of the job is the one nobody outside sees.
“The workload is a wave. You have peaks and troughs. My team might complete a hundred appointments in a day, so it only takes one or two to go wrong and suddenly there’s a lot to pick up. Managing that wave is the challenge.”
He still speaks to every customer whose issue reaches him, and he still goes out to site, though less than he once did.
“I’ve got no issues going out on site. I do less of it now my team’s got bigger, because I’ve got more people in place I can send out.”
Moving from doing the work to making sure it gets done is the part of stepping into management that takes longest, and Phil has kept the parts worth keeping. When a site needs an extra pair of hands, he will still turn up and be one. His tools are in the truck.
The step up came with support behind it. He took his Prince2 when he first moved into project management, and a further management qualification has recently been offered to him.
“It’s as easy as picking up the phone”
Phil came to Aqualogic for the hours. He has stayed for the work, and for the people doing it alongside him.
“I enjoy the team I work with.”
What has not changed, he says, is how easy people are to reach, even as the business has grown.
“It’s as easy as picking up the phone. It always has been. There’s always been an open door policy, there isn’t anybody you can’t speak to if there’s an issue. And I push that with my team. If you’ve got a problem, don’t think, he’s a director, I shouldn’t really be ringing him. If he can fix it for you, he’ll help.”
Phil’s own progression is not unusual here. One of his colleagues started as a water efficiency technician, became a supervisor on a contract Phil was running, and now manages projects of his own. He kept the van and the tools.
“He’s still got that mindset. If he needs to, he can go out and show the team what needs doing, or pick up any issues himself.”
Why the work matters
Customers ask Phil the same question a lot. Why is my water company giving me this for free?
“The last major reservoir in the UK was completed in 1992. In that time the population has grown by more than eleven million. The same fresh water we had then has to go a lot further now. You never want the day to come where you’re gasping for a drink, you turn the tap on and nothing comes out.”
That is starting to change. Construction began at Havant Thicket in Hampshire in 2023, the first major new reservoir in the UK in more than thirty years, with completion due by 2029. It will not close the gap on its own. Reducing demand and cutting waste in the existing network still has to do most of the work.
There is a second reason, and it is the one he has come to feel more strongly since he had a house and children of his own.
“Bills go up every year. If you can go into a house and say, your water bill is that high because you’ve got two leaking toilets consuming the same as another four people living in your house, and the company will fix them for free, why would you not get that done? It isn’t halving anyone’s electricity bill, but it takes something off a burden that’s growing all the time.”
Phil is not exaggerating. Waterwise puts a single leaking toilet at between 215 and 400 litres a day, against average use of around 143 litres per person. Between five and eight per cent of toilets in the UK are leaking, and most of the people living with one have no idea.
“You’ll be amazed how transferable things are”
Phil’s advice to anyone who thinks they do not have the right background is to stop looking for a direct match and look at the principle underneath it.
“Don’t look for directly comparable experience. Look for the overriding principle, the general rule, and then apply what you’ve got to that. You’ll be amazed how much more transferable things are.”
He puts it in plainer terms.
“People say, I’ve not done this particular thing. But the key points within that experience are X, Y and Z, and you’ve done X here, you’ve done Y there and you’ve done Z there. You’ve done them all. What you need to do is work out how to link them together.”
That matters here more than in most industries. Water efficiency is a small field, and someone who has done exactly this job before is rare.
“If you look for exact examples of water efficiency, you’re looking at a very small basket. Look at the bigger picture.”
The training is there for the rest. Everyone gets their National Water Hygiene when they start. Technicians who want to move into plumbing have been put through plumbing courses.
Ask him what kind of person does well here and the answer comes straight back.
“Somebody who’s flexible, willing to take it as it is and roll with it. People who aren’t too narrow focused, not blinkered to the bigger picture. You’ve got to see where your piece fits into it.”
The other thing he brought with him came from a decorator he worked alongside years ago, on a job that had gone badly wrong.
“He said there is absolutely nothing in this house that is so broken that we cannot fix it. There is always a way to fix everything, you’ve just got to take a minute and find it. That stuck. When issues crop up now I don’t lose my head, because there’s going to be a way to fix it. We’ve just got to figure out what it is.”
Ask Phil to describe what Aqualogic does in a sentence and he does not reach for anything elaborate.
“Saves water and helps customers.”
He arrived as a technician who had never heard of the company, and he is further on now than he expected to be.
“I’m probably in a position higher than I ever thought I would be.”
There is a lot of work still to do. Every leak found and every repair made takes pressure off a network under strain, and takes something off a customer’s bill.
We are growing, and we are hiring across our field, technical and client services teams. See our current vacancies.
Aqualogic, a Sustec company
