Founder’s story: How Rep Data was established to solve common market research industry challenges
By Patrick Stokes, Founder & CEO
I’m extremely fortunate to have played an important role at two Research Technology (Restech) industry leaders, Lucid and Dynata, during their hyper-growth stages.
But I still had a dream about building a business of my own, one I’d been nurturing for many years. I wanted to impact data quality through a different approach to data collection. So, when a rare opportunity arose to team up with talent (individuals that would have never been on the open market), I took a leap of faith and founded Rep Data.
Systemic problems in market research
From the beginning, I knew we needed to address head-on the effects of frequent industry-wide panel mergers, layoffs and reorganizations which were causing instability in market research survey project execution. During my tenure in the industry, I’d seen survey researchers find themselves forced to work with different points of contact, many of whom were unfamiliar with their needs and research methodology. This made it difficult to build smooth and repeatable processes, especially in the data collection stage.
Data quality has also been a persistent, ugly problem in the market research industry. At Rep Data, we’ve prioritized quality with a multi-pronged approach to every market research project. We combine our unbiased approach to sample with rigorous field monitoring and expert end-to-end project management with technologically advanced fraud mitigation techniques. We call this approach “Quality2™” - both Service Quality and Data Quality. We explore this topic more in our white paper: “Data collection techniques for quality outcomes.”
Lastly, feasibility is becoming a major challenge, especially for lower incidence projects. Rep Data has unbiased access to a wide number of sampling resources and suppliers, which helps tremendously in reaching quotas for niche audiences. We couple this with upfront, honest communication about feasibility for every project, so our clients know what to expect.
Rep Data beginnings
What I saw was that survey data was becoming a commodity, but delivering it with a great, consistent experience was a rarity. When I founded Rep Data, I wanted to change this dynamic. We established Rep Data with a core mission: to be a reliable, repeatable data collection partner. For life.
To accomplish this lofty goal, I initially teamed up with two trusted colleagues who always over-deliver, Gary Elstein and Adam El-Khazindar. Since then, we’ve added several other amazing, talented people and grown our team across the country to include experts in project management and client services, veterans in the research industry, business development professionals and operations specialists. In fact, in just one year, we’ve grown from the three founders to more than 20 employees, on the ground, creating better data collection solutions from the ground up. I’m proud of the team we’ve built - you can “meet” them here.
Together, we are providing our survey research clients with long-term consistency, superior customer service and better data collection solutions. You can see what some of our clients are saying about our services in our library of case studies. After less than a year in business, we are thrilled to have been able to fulfill our vision and provide our clients with the consistent, streamlined and quality data collection processes they need to fulfill their goals.