The world has gone through a rough time and there is no doubt the company has experienced something unique this past year. The unprecedented pandemic we faced during 2020 was not something we anticipated in our financial books. COVID-19 as we remember started hitting our economy in March of 2020 and by that time, we have put our budgets together for the upcoming fiscal year. We start the budget process early in the year, usually during January or February. We were anticipating another great financial year with record revenues. As it turns out, California issued a shelter-in-place order on March 16th, 2020. There was a lot of uncertainty in the air, which turned to a slowdown of operations during this time.
Not knowing what the future was for businesses, management decided to revise the current budgets to a more conservative approach to reflect this uncertainty. Fortunately, the construction industry was considered essential in California and we kept operating on most of the current jobs we had active. In addition, another great help is that there was a lot of back logged jobs that we brought into the new fiscal year. In fact, we also picked up a few large projects along the way thanks to the construction industry that kept on going. The Hazmat division saw a tremendous increase in activity due to the pandemic. A lot of current customers were required by state guidelines to be more stringent about cleanliness. Because we were already providing a service for them, they turned to us to provide a more extensive service. This boost in operations meant an unexpected source of profits we did not anticipated at the beginning of the year. The Hazardous Waste Division also was able to expand its revenues and profits by providing COVID-19 cleaning services to many of our clients on existing projects. This was also a key reason to invest in this service area and created the opportunity to start Bayview Industrial division.
Lastly, the government helped us by providing businesses like us with an economic incentive. The company received a PPP (Paycheck Protection Program) loan in April 2020, which allowed the Company to exceed its Revenues and Profits from its conservative budget as the year progressed.
Even though there was a lot of uncertainty and a difficult time for everyone, we kept going thanks to the great work of our employee-owners. As we have seen, even in difficult times, we are a strong ESOP company that had a great financial year.
Nancy Calderon