2021: A year of multiple achievements and new faces
Many people would have expected the past year to be unusually tough, with many sectors challenged by the effects of both the pandemic and Brexit. But, while there have been challenges, demand for our services never ceased and our expanding teams dealt amazingly with everything thrown at them. Here’s a quick round-up to give us all that warm feeling to end the year on!
Time to take a breath and take stock
This has been an incredibly busy year for everyone across our production, sales, admin and accounts teams. So busy that most of us haven’t had time to take stock. But now we can, it’s obvious to see we’ve achieved a great deal between us.
Over the last twelve months, we’ve done a lot of groundwork to ensure we’ve still got the best foundations for our business going forward. We’ve expanded our team, our product lines and our premises, as well as giving ourselves a brand make-over that helps us stand tall alongside the biggest firms in the industry.
Now all the heavy lifting has been done, we’re ready to make the best use of all our resources going into 2022, to elevate both the brand and sales. And our best asset has always been our team, so let’s quickly remind ourselves who’s joined us this year.
New starters in 2021
The sustained demand for high-quality subsea navigation, positioning and survey products has happily entailed increasing the number of people on our team to help meet our clients’ needs. Early in the year we welcomed Design Engineer Con Healy and Assembly Technician Darren Heggie, who were joined in April by David Batson in Quality Control.
With greater production and the re-emergence of expo events came the need to bolster our sales team. We were delighted to bring Paul Griffiths on board in June, with his years of experience in acoustic positioning, who was joined by Sales Administrator Julie Jones in September.
Meanwhile, our technical teams were enhanced with Michael Calvert joining in July 2020 as Geophysical Product Manager – coming at an important time as interest in products in this field has soared. With Graduate Engineer Connor Jones, Junior Assembly Technician Elizabeth Matthews and Senior Support Engineer Steve Diven all bolstering our strength in production, we know we have a great spread of experience and enthusiasm across the workshop. And let’s not forget our newest recruit: Trainee Workshop Technician Jacob Sullivan, who just started this month!
On a personal note, it’s fantastic to see more women joining our production team. Gender barriers have no place in this, or any, industry and at aae we’re proud to have more women working in production roles.
New brand roll-out
You can’t help but have noticed that we have an improved look over what was in place a year ago. Earlier in the year, we went through the process of modernising our brand and the results have gone far beyond simply a better-looking logo and colour scheme.
The difference in the designs and layouts across our website, brochures and exhibition display stand has been night and day, helping to instil us with more confidence, motivation and pride – both in our work and our approach to customer service. On a practical level, the website used to be almost invisible – especially in the US – but we now have far greater visibility online.
Our new look has drawn admiring comments from clients (and competitors!) and really rejuvenated the whole team, including people who’ve been here for decades! It emphasises how we’re punching above our weight in terms of company size – or is our weight now greater than we think? The new brand helps us recognise how we are now a major player in our sector.
Expanding premises
As touched on earlier, sales in Geophysical products this year have shot up, with YTD sales for Sub-bottom Profiling at more than double last year. To ensure we can continue to satisfy customers and meet their needs, we’ve expanded our workshop space to accommodate the necessary increased production.
The majority of products we make in this field are going to clients in the renewable energy industry. With the world shifting their focus away from dirty old fossil fuels to cleaner sources of energy, this is a constantly growing sector that will only see increased demand over the coming years. It’s vital we keep ourselves seen as the preeminent suppliers in our field.
Thank you for your hard work!
It can be difficult to put a company and its people through change, and we want to recognise and thank everyone for their input and hard work over the last year. All the changes we put into motion in 2020 are now coming to fruition, and we’re now in a very strong position going into 2022 when it comes to our personnel, expertise and our brand.
We know everyone here has worked so hard under difficult circumstances – increased demands, challenging timelines – and all during a series of lockdowns and pandemic precautions that have been around in some form or another since early 2020.
Everyone is important at aae. Every role plays a part in our success, whichever part of our company you work in. If any one of us was missing, then we wouldn’t be able to do the job we do, satisfy clients and get paid.
So, thank you again. Have a Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year. Looking forward to it!
