This week EBS celebrates its first 20 years in business. We’re extremely proud of the journey that we’ve been on and when I think back over the 20 years, there are four main things I believe are critical for the longevity and success of the business.
People
The most important of the four, you need to surround yourself with good people. One person can never ever achieve as much as a focused collective group of like-minded individuals…no matter how good one person thinks they are. I believe EBS has done this pretty well over the years. We’ve got some fantastic people on our team now and that makes EBS who we are.
Luck
There can be both good luck and bad luck, but you definitely need to have luck on your side to succeed and thrive. There’s been a lot of ‘at the right place at the right time’ in many successful businesses & EBS has been no exception. EBS has been lucky to be able to navigate our luck to help translate this into our success.
Change is the only constant
Change can happen gradually over time or it can happen instantly. The only thing you can be assured of is that the ‘today’ never lasts forever so you cannot remain static if you want the chance to survive and thrive.
As Charles Darwin said, and I ad-lib here: The species or things most likely to survive are those that adapt most efficiently to change. It is never the strongest or the smartest that survive. It is always the ones that evolve best to change. That is something that EBS has done well in over the 20 years I think – adapting to change and pivot where needed.
Have fun
Or at least try to with whatever you do… It’s not going to happen every day and there’ll be days you wonder why you’re doing what you do. In general, if you enjoy what it is your doing, then you’ll have a much higher chance of being successful. At the end of the day, you want to enjoy what you do.
Looking back over the timeline of EBS, I realised that some of the most significant changes along our path happened in five-year increments. The most significant change for EBS as a business came in 2006. We were the best Arrow partner and we’d just landed one of the largest sites to implement and we had bitten off more than we could chew. It reached a point where one of two things was going to happen:
- either I was going to try and sell the business to another Arrow partner and get out of the day-to-day grind or,
- find someone who could handle the technical and delivery side of the business and let me focus on what I was good at.
We asked Arrow for help with their largest site to help us meet the clients objectives. At this time, Jonathan was Head of Arrow Global Support and Dan Argus was a fresh-faced graduate!
I had a chat with Jonathan, and I didn’t think there was any chance of him moving companies, and I also had my eye on Dan – a consultant with great customer service skills. To my surprise, Jonathan called me back and we started talking about how it might work and the rest is history… Dan joined the team shortly afterward and the core of the ‘new’ EBS was formed.
The next milestone for EBS came in 2011 when we celebrated 10 years in business. By that time with the new team well established, we had 83 clients and had doubled our revenue in 5 years.
In 2016 after selling the Arrow side of the business to focus exclusively on Microsoft NAV we made the decision to set up the Cloud Easy division. This decision five years ago to move towards the cloud proved to be the right one and has set us on a strong trajectory since.
The team has grown substantially in the last five years and our focus on our culture and values has been instrumental in making sure we have the right people in our team to help us support our clients as their needs grow and change.
I’m very proud to be here, having survived 20 years as a business & I know that if we keep doing what we’ve done for the last 20 years, then we’ve got a very good chance of going on and on for a long time into the future…
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Paul Woods is CEO and founder of EBS. He has extensive experience in systems specification and selection through to implementation, training and support across different industries.