Honesty, fairness, integrity, the golden rule: a customer-first culture. Customers want it - even demand it. And it’s so easy to promise. This is ‘distance race’ thinking, and building a business on it is harder than you might think. It requires you to sacrifice many short-term opportunities for gain. It means spending whatever time it takes to help a customer solve a problem on deadline. It means resisting the urge to cut corners on materials that, once in place, no one will ever see. It means innovation: going beyond what your customers want or expect, and working relentlessly to create new products and ideas to fill unmet needs. It means keeping your word, even when it’s inconvenient, and honouring relationships over transactions, even when it costs. And it means building a team with people who believe it, live it, and stand by it. At IPEX we’ve long-since made a decision to embrace this long-term thinking, not just when it’s easy, but every day, in everything we do, for every customer and every employee. We don’t do it because we’re nice people, though we like to think we are. We do it because it’s good business, and that the reputation we’ve built over time, job by job, one customer at a time, pays the best dividends.