Business View Magazine | Volume 8, Issue 6

104 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE VOLUME 8, ISSUE 6 equipment after decommissioning, although this is rare. According to Tasha, “Many air pollution control systems have a service life of 20 to 30- plus years. If the installation has exceeded this period, we recommend scrapping and recycling the current installation and setting up a new one.” As an essential business, Epcon remained open during the COVID-19 pandemic. In fact, 2020 proved to be a strong sales year for the company. “I think we’ve proven our business is pandemic-proof because we nearly doubled our sales in 2020,” asserts Tasha. “Part of it was because we had a healthy pipeline from 2019 but also because we did not have to stop when the pandemic hit.” The company did experience some supplier delays, including from the Suez Canal incident, but this had a marginal effect on operations because most of the equipment is built from raw materials like steel and insulation. On the HR front, some internal changes were necessary to comply with pandemic rules such as social distancing, which were not easy for the close-knit company. Tasha explains, “Although the nature of our work means people do not work close to each other on the manufacturing floor, the difficult part was transitioning from face-to-face meetings to online collaboration. With a family-like culture where people have known and worked with each other for many years, this was a challenge.” As the company targets growth in the coming years, Tasha sees regulatory change playing a more significant role in their growth than technological change. She notes, “At the core of our products are basic physics principles like thermodynamics that do not change much. There’s nothing in our wheelhouse affected dramatically by new kinds of technology being developed. If anything, we’re just taking on new tools to become more efficient.” On the other hand, any time there is an increase