Blog
Peter Lyons - Q & A

Peter sat down and reflected on the successes of 2020 for NECIT Services, despite the challenges the COVID-19 pandemic brought, and his plans for the continued growth of NECIT in 2021.

Can you talk us through how the year 2020 looked for NECIT?

“2020 was a successful year for NECIT in many ways. In terms of growth, we opened up a new regional office in Houston, Texas, USA to help support the need for our services across the Americas and developed a team focused on supporting our clients in the region. We also signed 2 Master Service agreements with global EPC companies as well as growing our client base by 20%.

As a result of the growth of the business in 2020, we made several new additions to both the US and UK based teams, bringing in new Business Development Managers in the UK, USA and ASIAPAC to help manage and develop our Sales Pipelines, a dedicated person to oversee our marketing efforts and several new coordinators to supervise our clients project needs.

It was nice to see our growth in 2020 be recognised as we won ‘Family Business Entrepreneur of the Year for the North East’, something myself and the team were really proud of. Winning this award was a testament to the hard work the team has given, not just throughout 2020 but since the beginning.

Despite the difficulties 2020 brought many people and businesses, NECIT were able to grow our client base by 20% over the year, which helped us achieve an annual turnover of £2.3 million. Something we are hoping to improve on this year.

What has made the year a real success has been the overwhelming feedback we have received from our customers given the growth we have had this year. It makes us all extremely proud that we are scaling the business while maintaining a high quality service.”

Many businesses were impacted by the start of the COVID-19 pandemic last year, how did NECIT manage with the difficulties the pandemic brought?

“Much of the NECIT team actually work remotely in different countries all over the world, including Malaysia, Italy and France, so the pandemic didn’t really impact us in that sense. Thankfully, NECIT as a company has the ability to run remotely and with many of our inspectors coming under the bracket of key workers by supporting the construction and manufacturing industry, NECIT remained open throughout the entire year.

As NECIT have a large network of multi-skilled inspectors around the globe, we were still able to support our clients and source local expert personnel meaning there was no need for travel, complying with the travel restrictions the COVID-19 pandemic brought. Our inspectors, if required, also have the capabilities of completing quality inspections remotely, so if COVID restrictions meant our inspectors could not travel, our inspectors could still provide our expert services.”

What are NECIT’ main goals for 2021?

“After the successes of 2020, NECIT are aiming to grow and improve on our turnover in 2021 and continue our expansion to all corners of the world. Additionally, we are hoping to continue re-investing in talented people to join our ever-growing team and help them grow personally and professionally.

We are also planning on expanding into different market sectors and extend our product offering for our clients in terms of the services we offer them.

An important goal for NECIT this year is to become UKAS ISO17020 accredited , which will be a massive objective for the company to achieve.”

(To find out more information about ISO17020 and its importance, stay tuned for our next blog where we will discuss in more detail).