"Great companies excel in tough times, and in tough times customers turn to great companies."

We finally managed to close the book on 2020, a year many want to forget as it came for many organizations and individuals with a myriad of challenges. However, the world didn’t magically change at the sound of the midnight bell when we toasted for a Happy New Year. We are not out of the woods yet and 2021 will continue to have its challenges but with the hope that various vaccines might be able to bring us slowly back to a more normal life and business environment, whatever “normal” is going to look like in the future.

As the economy worsened in 2020, as a company we had to think more and more about EPI's position and how we could assist our customers to ride through these challenging times. Managing a business when the world is on a roll is far more easier than when the world is in crisis. However, as the title of this post says; “Great companies excel in tough times, and in tough times customers turn to great companies”.   Great managers are able to always find ways to grow the business even under the toughest market conditions and customers want to work with companies they know and can trust to survive and assist and support them in darker days.   

At EPI we saw the world-changing in the early part of 2020 and we immediately went to work to understand the potential impact for our customers and what we needed to do to make sure we could to continue to support our customers whether it was with creative solutions or commercial arrangements to help them to ride through these tough times. So as the CEO, what keeps me awake at night, is the constant thinking about how we can help our customers now and in the future to make their business better.

Many years ago, we already started investing heavily to ensure that we would be aligned with current and future trends and the new generation of customers. We saw the trends and knew that the new generation of data centre professionals are going to have a different way of learning and making themselves relevant in their demanding jobs. We predicted the trend of different technologies as well as different styles of learning preferred by the millennials vs the generation before them. As such, we were actually very well prepared for the change from class room training and onsite audits to Virtual classroom, E-Learning and remote audits. This gave great peace of mind to our customers who could continue their business knowing that we were fully ready to support their ongoing education efforts and the requirement for audits to ensure compliance and risk management for their infrastructure which suddenly increased multi-fold in criticality.

As a CEO, my core commitment to our customers is to continue to review our strategy, operating model and hire the best people industry to make sure we continue to add value to our customers and prospective customers. We continue to invest, way above the industry average, in new technology and material development to stay the leader we are already for many years in the data centre education and audit field. We continue to work hard for our customers, current and new, so that they can be confident that no matter what the world looks like, EPI will be there for them to support their business and personal growth. We have made an unwavering commitment to back our slogan “Protecting Your Interests” in everything we do. We know that “in tough times customers turn to great companies” and we hope we can continue to fulfil that role. Many thanks to all our loyal customers and partners and wishing everybody a great and safe 2021.

Edward van Leent
Chairman & CEO
EPI Group of Companies