A Christmas round up

If 2024 was the year of the move, 2025 has been the year of the shake up and refresh. Reef has prided itself on maintaining unrivalled levels of staff retention over nearly twenty-seven years in business. Some retirements and departures have led us to take a good inward look at ourselves and evaluate what really makes us tick. It was no surprise to us that we discovered that staff and customers alike stay with us because we maintain the personal touch and never (hardly) say no approach. Most of our staff refer to us as the ‘Reef Family,’ which is extremely gratifying. At our Christmas parties this year I heard, particularly from newer members of staff, some who’ve been around the block a bit, how they are impressed by Reef’s friendly, inclusive approach and how they find it surprisingly refreshing. We have decided that 2026 will be the year of training. We have always strived to train all our operational staff in all aspects of the business, which again we are told is fairly unique in the industry which is a shame and perhaps a sad indictment of the direction of travel to a more corporate private equity ‘growth, squeeze and sell’ model, which all too often fails and in some instances, alarmingly leaves businesses legally exposed. In short, we want all Reef Engineers to be able to understand and interpret all systems they work on, it is not enough just to run taps, clean things, fill bottles, test this, test that, walk away, they must appreciate the nuances of systems, be able to evaluate, rectify and interpret to clients. Therefore we will be expanding our training offering both internally and externally and also hope to have our extremely popular ‘Legionella Awareness Training’ CPD approved in the coming months.

Our compliance software platform Orac continues to evolve and impress, the key development milestones this Autumn have been the release of our circular sampling and reporting module and more recently the Client Technician User option. We believe that Orac is the only water compliance system that allows users to input, view and rectify issues all on the same platform. The sampling module literally follows each sample from site to lab to logbook, filtering poor results and providing remedial quotes and automated rectification. Our Client Technician interface allows site personnel to record their results, from flushing, cleaning up to softener checks and weekly tower service on the same logbook system as us, meaning for the first time, and possibly uniquely, all facets of a water compliance system are viewable on one platform that allows all competent users to rectify defects all of which are fully tracked for audit purposes. We envisage that some features of Orac will be available commercially in 2026.

Wishing all a peaceful and restful festive period.

Mike Frith
Managing Director and Founder