We turned 40 as a business last year, and thankfully, there is no sign of a midlife crisis yet. We are fortunate to remain firmly in growth mode, despite some of the economic headwinds the country has been facing lately. Described below are some of the new services we are now offering; some we have developed ourselves from scratch (e.g., eDNA testing of environmental waters, eDNA testing of earthworms in agricultural soils, and mould testing from indoor environments), and others we have acquired (e.g., our new water compliance services, and also our new auditing services, which are not described here). 

I often reflect that not all growth will necessarily be good, and so growth for growth’s sake is not the right way to think about things. What is true, however, is that when we are growing, new opportunities are developing for our people to grow their careers with us. We have recently had a series of internal promotions for a number of our staff into important roles in the company, and it’s great to see our A-players moving into bigger roles and developing new skills and experiences. 

Something else that is important to us when contemplating establishing new services is whether we believe we can be market leaders in that area in time. The things our customers do are important, and by extension, so too are the enabling services that we deliver to them. This is important work and needs to be done to high standards. We need to believe that our customers will get the best value from money from us, which motivates us to work hard towards creating those market leading services. 

And while we believe that the growth of our business is good for our staff and for the customers that we serve, we also want it to be good for the environment – we want to have the lowest carbon footprint (per unit of work completed) among all of our competitors, so it’s important to us that our environmental footprint does not grow at the same rate as our top line. Described below is a brief update on work we have been doing to reduce our plastic waste going to landfill, and in future newsletters we look forward to sharing details on a substantial amount of work we are doing to slash our carbon footprint. 

Staff, customers, environment – outcomes across these dimensions are sometimes in tension, but more often than not we can grow our business in a way that benefits all three, which is probably the highest aspiration of our company.