Im Ross Walters, CEO here at Ecotekk. I began working in the home improvements industry 30 years ago now, whilst studying for my A´levels, doing part time work on the phones for a large national window company within the bowater Group. Staybrite Windows – as they were called then- were, in the main, a very professional and efficiently run organisation, fitting in the region of £100,000,000 per year, even back then in the mid 1990´s, operating about 50 branches through Wales and England.
Over the subsequent few years I worked my way through the ranks from part time telephony to team-leader, marketing manager, and sales & branch manager, before realising that working for a large commercial entity was not really what I wanted to be doing with my life, and so in 2006 I took a break from the rat-race and left the corporate world altogether, in order to return to full time education, so I enrolled at Swansea university to do a degree in Politics.
As well as always being an avid follower of politics (I stress Ive never been a politician though- and I probably dislike politicians generally as least as much as anyone reading this!). I´d always been a nature lover as a kid.
I spent the best part of my childhood fly fishing down the river; I went to the children’s Wildlife Club every Saturday at Penscynor, and had been keenly aware of the environmental problems the world was facing, even from a very young age. It’s fair to say that I was always deeply moved by, and concerned about, the natural world. Whilst studying for a batchelor´s degree in Politics though, and spending a substantial part of that time dealing specifically with environmental issues, reading books such as Silent Spring and the Limits to growth, it became more apparent than ever to me that the Earth was in a terrible and rapid state of decline, and that man-made climate change was the number one threat to both human security and nature more generally. It become obvious to me then that I needed to play my part in the inevitable transition to a low-carbon economy, and to get out there showing people that there was better way of living -one that would improve their lives as well as their finances , all whilst helping to preserve the habitability of the planet for future generations as well as doing a good thing.
By the time I graduated in I realised that the best way for me to use my key insights from politics and economics was to combine them with my by then extensive experience in the sales and marketing of energy efficient home improvements. Instead though of returning to the world of large corporations where id be totally unable to shape their business ethics, and sincerely believing that there was a better way of doing things -one that retained the polished professionalism of a large commercial operation, but which treated people better, and kept the personal touch and availability of a local family firm, adding to this the level of technical proficiency and competence that you can only get from a real specialist.
In order to provide the kind of first class customer service and straight-talking, expert advice that was so desperately needed in the industry and that customers were absolutely crying out for, I established Green Energy Solutions (GES Wales) limited -which was the very first true renewable energy specialist to operate in the Swansea area- in July 2009, straight after graduation, and subsequently spent the next few months travelling all over the country to attend week long residential training events in, amongst other things, Renewables and Energy Efficiency, Solar PV, Solar Water Heating, and air and ground source heatpumps, attending conference on clean energy and trade expositions such as Ecobuild (now Futurebuld), in order to have a complete understanding the technologies that we would be offering with a view to being able to give customers the most helpful advice and best sales experience possible.
After nearly 10 years of running an extremely successful renewable energy company, I took a hiatus in order to return to university and study for a Masters Degree in International Relations, graduating in 2018. The following year I went travelling in Central America, spending some time Costa Rica where I did volunteer work at a wild animal sanctuary in the rainforest. When I finished my travels and returned home I decided that the most good I could do with my life was to go back to my true calling, and be an evangelist for the clean, green, renewable energy technologies that the world so badly needed to transition towards, and which would benefit so many people in the future.
Whilst running GES, I would constantly receive calls from customers asking if I could recommend someone for this or that job (often times for window and door replacements as I might have mentioned to solar customers that I´d also worked in window sales for the longest time before moving into renewable energy), from customers that needed a different kind of home improvement and wanted someone they could trust. So the idea of starting Ecotekk was to be able to offer those people, who loved our approach and loved our brand, a complete range of energy saving and power generating technologies, all from company they knew they would look after them and treat them well, without them needing to take the risk of buying elsewhere.
Over my 30 years experience in the industry i´ve learned that what people want most of all from a company is for them to be honest and truthful, technically proficient, reliable, and to charge fair prices. Sadly, the number of companies that tick all these boxes is vanishingly small. I established Ecotekk four years ago because honesty, expertise, and fair prices should be a given. We represent the change in the industry the public wants to see. I am extremely proud that Ecotekk is an ethical company, that always treats the public, its staff and its customers well, and always fairly, and that all of our customers love our approach, and the high quality work that we do for them.
The Micro Generation & Energy-Saving Home Improvement Experts.