Looking back—Looking ahead

This year has been a demanding and unique challenge for the world. Overnight, Covid-19 plunged everyone into circumstances we never thought we would find ourselves in. Our response was to secure our staff in their homes first and then quickly reach out to customers and act in their best interests. We wanted to know how they were doing and what they needed. With our 30+ years of experience we helped them adapt their temporary export needs to keep their businesses moving forward. Throughout the pandemic we assisted the medical industry at the frontline of the fight against Covid-19 and news crews needing carnets to get to stories breaking around the world. We offered survival techniques to businesses via free webinars as well as complimentary consultations to help strategize a plan tailored to their businesses. We created community and helped get them back on track. That helped us too. We value our customers and always strive to make temporary exportation an opportunity to expand and grow internationally.

In David Foster Wallace’s This Is Water he references the joke where two young fish are swimming around hanging out when an older fish passing by says, “Good morning, how’s the water?” The two young fish continue to swim on a bit then one says to the other, “What the hell is water?” More than anything, this year has made us realize that we do not often see what is right in front of us. And like the proverbial fish out of water we have had to navigate uncharted territories. You never know what is going to happen, but we must adapt and live. We’ve proven we can.

Zoom calls are now the norm as are photobombing pets jumping on keyboards or shoulders at inopportune moments. Suddenly sounding like R2-D2 because of a technical audio glitch no longer incites panic. With kids in the house, it is often not unlike that great BBC-TV clip from 2018 where political analyst Robert Kelly is photobombed by his two very funny children while his wife scrambles to get them out of the room on her hands and knees then slams the door shut—all during a live broadcast! It reminds us we’re all human and it keeps us laughing.

We wish you all a very Happy New Year! Thank you to our employees and customers, partners and friends and we hope to build on what we learned in 2020. Together we can thrive in the coming year and into the future.