Dear Valued Customers, Partners and Employees,
As the festive season and New Year approaches, I want to take a moment to document some thoughts on 2023 and look forward to 2024. This year has been a remarkable journey, and I’m proud to share some of the key highlights.
- We celebrated our 40th year in business. Much of this credit needs to go to Mike Coomber, the Coomber family and some of our long-standing employees. Mike has always applied sound business sense whilst continually investing in R&D and new technology. This is certainly the MO we will continue to use going forward.
- Solar Solve. 2023 was our first-year post-acquisition. Both the teams at Solar Solve and Rivertrace have been fantastic in terms of integration and open to ideas on how to improve and evolve. This culminated in a wonderful xmas party celebration on the Thames last week. Was great to see all our people enjoying themselves!
- EOT. We implemented the EOT (Employee Ownership Trust) this year. This gives all employees a chance to share in the continued success of the company. We continue to have Mike as the ‘ultimate consultant’ helping guide particularly our R&D strategy.
- Culture. We have done a lot of work in the background to help foster a positive working environment. We have also given our staff access to football matches (South Shields FC sponsor), golf club memberships and introduced a flexible working scheme. This enables staff to enjoy a better work / life balance. We also invested in developing the skill sets and core competencies of our team members. We conducted a lot of external and internal training.
- New products. Demonstrating our continued commitment to R&D, we launched new products and upgraded some of our existing range. The key element for product success is listening to customer issues and being aware of relevant regulation changes. Well done to the Engineering and Sales Teams for applying this market intelligence.
As we look forward to 2024, we have several new initiatives, particularly in the digital space that we are excited to share (more of this to follow).
This just leaves me to wish all of our customers, suppliers, partners and staff a fantastic Christmas and Prosperous New Year.
Yours faithfully,
Martin Saunders
Managing Director
