As we set our strategy for this year it’s been useful to reflect on what we achieved in 2020…

What a year! It’s fair to say that 2020 wasn’t quite the year that anyone expected to live through when they set their New Year’s resolutions this time last year. 

Having said that, it was a great year for us business-wise, with huge growth and a lot of lessons. 

Here are seven reflections on 2020 – an unprecedented year.

As a business, we love strategy. In our client work and our overall business plan, strategy is the thing that keeps us on the right track. But we don’t think anyone plans for the disruption of a global pandemic!

It’s important to allow for flexibility in plans, and to be agile enough to pivot when necessary. Last year, we learned to adapt quickly, which helped us to work even more effectively for our clients, delivering work ahead of schedule and going above and beyond what’s expected.

In addition to our work on nicotine products, last year we expanded our services to offer regulatory and testing services within the pharmaceutical, medical device and CBD industries.

We took the huge step of building our own laboratory, allowing us to offer comprehensive testing services and provide a single-point solution for our clients who require both regulatory and testing work to be conducted for them. 

With one of our co-founders being a European Qualified Person, we can offer high quality, standardised testing methods and are currently working towards ISO 17025 to continuously improve our laboratory services.

When COVID-19 was declared a pandemic and the world went into lockdown. In the US, the FDA announced that it would move the PMTA (PreMarketing Tobacco Application) deadline from May to September. 

This gave us an extra five months to onboard more clients and use the extra time to build more detailed PMTAs. This helped immensely, and all of our clients’ applications have now progressed through to substantial review.

In 2020, our team grew from 3 to 12. Welcoming new members to our team and ensuring they settle in well can be hard work during the best of times, but doing it remotely is quite another story!

Communication has been so important in staying in contact with our team, being able to support them in their new roles and delivering training so they can develop their skills.

And of course, we’ve been in constant contact with our clients, making sure they stay informed and updated on the work we’re doing for them.

With clients in the USA, the Middle-East, Asia and Europe, we’ve always made use of digital tools like Zoom, Google Drive and of course, email. But in 2020, technology has allowed us to stay safe at home and continue to deliver work for our clients without impacting quality or our ability to hit deadlines.

We discovered lots of great software last year that has had an incredible impact on the work we do, and we plan to use them into 2021 and beyond.

If you’ve read about our values , you’ll know that we place a lot of importance on quality and sustainability, and one of the ways we do this is by operating a Quality Management System which is verified by ISO 9001 Quality Management Systems and ISO 14001 Environmental Management.

We were successfully audited by British Standards Institute for both of these standards last year, and continue to measure, monitor and analyse our internal performances against our client needs to ensure that we maintain the highest professional and scientific standards.

This gives us a great foundation to gain more accreditations in 2021.

One of our most important reflections on 2020 is that we’ll always face obstacles (although maybe not a global pandemic!) but there is always a way to overcome them, whether that’s by changing strategy, communication and collaboration or simply working through them.

So, those are our reflections on 2020. What lessons did you learn from this unprecedented year?

We’d love to support you in getting your pharmaceutical products, medical devices, nicotine or CBD products on to the market safely and legally in 2021. Contact us today to learn how we can help you grow your business.

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