How can nurturing emerging talents catalyze groundbreaking innovations?

In this enlightening episode of the Greenbook Podcast, Lenny Murphy sits down with Colson Steber, Co-CEO of Qlarity Access, to explore the remarkable evolution from Communications for Research to the rebranded powerhouse Qlarity Access. As proud sponsors of the 2024 Greenbook Future List, Colson delves into how nurturing emerging market research talent aligns with Qlarity's innovative approach to business. He shares the philosophies driving Qlarity's success—emphasizing values-aligned actions, the integration of technology to enhance human insights, and fostering a culture of intentional action and personal growth. This episode not only sheds light on the strategic direction of Qlarity Access but also embodies the spirit of the Future List, showcasing the importance of supporting young professionals, adopting advanced technologies, and encouraging a visionary leadership mindset critical for the future landscape of market research.

You can reach out to Colson on LinkedIn.

Many thanks to Colson for being our guest. Thanks also to our producer, Natalie Pusch; and our editor, Big Bad Audio.

Mentioned in this episode:

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Hello, everybody. It’s Lenny Murphy with another edition of the Greenbook Podcast. Thank you so much for taking time out of your busy day to spend it with myself and my guest. And it’s always cool when I’m meeting somebody for the first time on the podcast, and this is one of those days. So our guest is Colson Steber, the Co-CEO of Qlarity Access. Colson, welcome.

Thank you for having me.

It is our pleasure. Now, our audience can’t see, but I’m looking at you and thinking “All right. We have two long-haired gingers on the podcast, and this may be a first.” So I’m just putting that out there. We don’t know where this is going to go. When you get two long-haired gingers together, things can get weird. So [laugh]…

Absolutely. I’ve only been growing my hair out for two years. Before that, I had a buzzed head my whole life. So…

Same. Well, I started in 2020. Before that, it had been short. Some of my teens—it was long in my teens, but, yeah… So welcome to the club of the middle-aged long-haired guys. [crosstalk 00:01:15] But I think—my wife says I’m only better than I’ve ever looked, which really isn’t a high bar, but I will take it all day long. So…

Yeah.

Yep [laugh]. All right. Anyway… So tell us a little bit about yourself, talk about you and Qlarity Access. And let’s kind of set the foundation for our listeners who don’t know anything about you.

Absolutely. My personal mantra is “Relentless Intentional Action,” so TEDx to an abundance. I consistently put myself out there on LinkedIn as such, and my journey—actually, yesterday was my 12-year anniversary at my—what is now my company. And this is my eight year of being one of two owners of the business, and I sit in what would more often be thought of as that CEO seat, where we are—I am the one that works the—focus on where our culture is and the systems that we’re putting in place overall and how the—like, key relationships that we have is really what my job is now. And that is basically—not basically, right? That is literally my dream job, as I have, after the first three years of entrepreneurship, insanely focused on personal transformation and improvement to create what I want, you know, and living more of it than I have ever conceived I would actually make come true. So Qlarity Access is in its 27th year in business, and it became Qlarity Access just in September of 2023. So the company name was Communications for Research and always had been. I always wanted to change it, and one of the culminations of me getting to fulfill more of what I want was to make the investment to go through the creative process of—like, getting the outside to match the inside and rebrand to be Qlarity Access and have that represent, you know, my point of view on the world and our vision for the business.

Very, very cool. We could go all types of places with that introduction, so thank you. Now—so I remember Communications for Research, being an old geezer, and one of the things that struck me going into this—and I mentioned this to you—I think in categories, taxonomy, blah, blah, blah. Right? It’s the Greenbook in me. And I think of Qlarity Access as a field services company. One of the great unsung heroes of the entire market research industry, all right? They performed such a vital function. And, as you went through that rebranding process, knowing the functional role that you fill within the ecosystem, how did you get to that idea of Qlarity Access and this transformation of the business to your vision of what the company could be versus just what it does?

Right. I could go on too long of a monologue on this. So I often, in the early days, said that I needed to figure out what my business partner did naturally—because it obviously added value to clients—and figure out how to make a business that could scale out of it. We settled on that—like, we were this research logistics business that would work with that lead consultant or that lead researcher who really had a vision and methodology that they wanted to go down. And we would come along and say “We understand the outcome that you want, and this is”—what you call the ‘research logistics plan’ that will be how that gets delivered on. And, obviously, because the substantive service we provide is recruiting and data collection field service, that has to be—like, our knowing an audience and being able to access them for them has to be a key component of that. And so you look at what are our top clients buying, that unique value of this research logistics plan—like, where do you go outside of the ability to just fulfill it easy and actually, like, me to be a partner to a field services company for, like, where will we go find these people and what relationships will we establish. And, for us, what we were getting hired for over and over was within the agriculture sector, and so—and we started to build out what, like, market research world things of as a panel, but is, for us, like, a community of relationships that we have to actually engage correctly within the agriculture sector, and launched as Ag Access in 2020, which was a separate brand. And that’s really a lot of kind of how people—if a consultant gets a potential client that is going to—that they’re going to have to make a plan for, they’re going to say “Well, who knows this audience all ready?” And so they need to find us for our agriculture sector expertise, and so we created Ag Access. And then to come back, right, if someone finds Ag Access independently, while I look like I have expertise in the specific agriculture sector, I’m like, “Well, is this company legit? Like, are they going to provide quality and, you know, high service to, like, run formalized market research at a high level, right?” So, really, we need Ag Access to be the key product of Qlarity Access, and that’s where Qlarity Access, you know, was formed was specifically so that we can now—and then, you know, we’ve announced it, but then, next month, we launch as Vet Access for veterinary access. And so we have these completely dedicated, you know, relationship-based communities, our proven process of how add—we add value back to our clients. And we’re looking to continue to improve upon it.

Well, I love that, truly, thanks. And the specialization in those very difficult markets—I mean, in my day, I’ve tried to do agriculture research, and man, it was hard. So… [laugh] And I actually, about two years ago, moved to a very, very rural farming community myself and own a very small farm. And I have this—

I got to hear what you think.

[laugh] All right. It’s more of a homestead. It’s not a—but still, so I can appreciate—thank you for that description. I can appreciate the unique challenges that you rise and help folks with. So that’s very cool. Now, I guess, kind of on the other side of that, you’re innovating within your business and not just in your name but how you think about doing things and your approach. And this year, you are sponsoring our Future List, the Greenbook Future List. So what was your thinking in deciding “Yeah. You know what? This is something that we want to connect our brand to?” And what’s the—what does that look like for you on what that was important?

So our ‘why’ is community creating opportunities. I am extremely open about—like, the leader I want to be is one that really empowers and builds confidence in others and has them succeed within their own capacity but, like, for that to get opened up by their association back to our business. Like, that is the purpose of the business. Right? Like, we actually do the work that we sell. We subcontract a tiny fraction of our work. Like, that is my focus as a business is who to represent and looking what—at what opportunity exists. My marketing director, Katie Taddei, said, “I think this, like, seems really interesting and aligned to, like, how we look at the world to actually say ‘who are these people that are in their early career that we want to show our sport for?’” Right? I obviously thought it made sense.

Yeah. Very cool. So what I’m picking up here is that, from a business, you place values first, and everything that you do is aligned to those core values. Am I reading that right?

Absolutely. Like, through-and-through, day-to-day decisions as they’re made, that is definitely how we work to, like, align the action we take to what we believe.

God bless you man. I mean there is… [laugh] I wish more companies made that same prioritization. So that is fantastic. Now, how does that translate with business success? So have you been able to measure that—that “Hey… since we’ve kind of made this shift in focusing this way, that it’s demonstrably positively impactful for the business a whole”?

So having only substantively, like, started at this business, you know, a year after I finished my own MBA, I, of course, like, had this idealized view that that would be something that would be the case. And getting to the reality of that being the actual culture is surprisingly nebulous, right? And it takes many iterations of “how do we represent that back” within our behaviors of the leaders of the business to actually have it show up for the individuals that work here and then that to show out to our clients and the service that gets delivered, right? And you do have to start saying it before you’re necessarily owning it as part of that transformation. And yet, like, the realization of that coming true, I mean—from a business perspective, the business is triple the size it was when we bought it six years ago. We have immensely more value-added impacted to the customers that we serve. So we actually have hardly any, like, more customer companies that work with us, but we do a lot more work with them. And then I thought we were good because we were growing in ’21 and ’22, but everybody else was. And then, in 2023, we still grew, while everybody else wasn’t. And so, to me, that’s indicative of, like, we really did get to the real relationship where, like, the share of business with who we work with is coming our way. And, obviously, it reflects back on, you know, my own life as the entrepreneur and the freedom that I have, right? So I’m not part of my own sales team anymore. I spend my days obsessed with what is the most important thing for me to be doing and then—and getting in calls and, like, coaching people through their complex problems, since I have context they don’t have. And the opportunity to do that for even—though as small of a business as what we are, that, like that is what I spend all of my time on, is absurdly unique. Like, I’m a pretty insane personal development guy and, you know, entrepreneurial coaching groups and peer groups and consider many, many other research supplier company owners and CEOs my friends. Like, to be realizing that is a representation of the fact that, like, yeah, it works.

Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I mean, unfortunately, most CEOs of the majority of the companies in the industry are so absorbed in working ‘in’ the business, they can’t work ‘on’ the business. And what I hear is that you’ve successfully made that transition from being able to work ‘on’ the business, and therefore, you experience more growth. And so that’s a difficult path to walk for any entrepreneur, so congratulations in doing that. And the more that you talk, the more I can see how you’ve pulled that off—so very cool thing. And I see how it aligns to the Future List, so that does seem like a match made in Heaven. So let’s talk about that a little bit more. Because, obviously, we launched the Future List to recognize the rising stars, the future leaders in the industry. And how do you do that in your own business as well? What does that look like? You said you were really focused on development, et cetera, et cetera, so give us a sense of what that—how that impacts your own culture and business.

So we operate at an extremely open-book financial level. So there is a degree of access and reporting that is readily available to every single person, and then they’re provided a ton of training so that they can actually understand the outcomes that are within their sphere of control of their roles and responsibilities they have and the impact that it’s having on the larger aggregate number. And so, of the 70 employees here, 35 of them essentially can see the exact project performance of every single project. And I only start with that because, like, money is a means to an end, right? And if the company isn’t earning the profitability on the project, then they can’t do it. And that outcome is delegated back to the employee, and we’re ever trying to improve in aligning in how they’re paid to align back to that performance. But that’s a very baseline like—“I need you to be the ones to run the business.” And then the next thing is, is that I have to have you making the most important decisions, which is to delegate. Like, we focus a lot on, like, what is the substantive change that we’re going to make in the next 90 days. And that’s our—the rock that you have, and every individual gets a rock. And so they have something that they are working to improve. Again, that might have to require some behavior change across the rest of their team or the rest of multiple teams, right? And we have to align back very clearly that that fits within the annual plan, and that everybody that is getting a rock has an understanding of exactly why it's important, what makes it successful, and specific criteria of how it’s going to be measured whether it got done. And we expect approximately ten percent of their time to be invested in pursuing that. Right? So, like, we really work to have a culture of actually only working 40 hours a week. Nobody has 40 hours—like, how to make it so that we’re getting high-impact utilization, but that there is defined space that they’re going to spend advancing that initiative. The other thing is that just 15 months ago, we got to the point where every single person has an individual rock as well. And so, like, I only have three people that report to me now, but, like, for those people, right, like—I mean, we go into tools on time management, prioritization, how do we get—right? Which is literally just making them more confident in the skills and autonomy that they have to make the impact that I’m asking them to make. And we are filling out how—like, what is your unique ability, and what do we need to get rid of that doesn’t work for you inside of your role? And, I mean, I’m expecting us to be making progress every single 90 days against that. Like, my job is to have a new job every 90 days.

That is a cool way to think about it. So you are mentor-in-chief primarily. It sounds like that’s how you think about yourself.

Yeah.

That’s a great place to be. So let’s get a little more research nerdy for a minute. And it’s, you know, a related concept to—you’re always looking forward, moving ahead, helping the team move ahead in a business that is fundamentally about insuring the success of your clients. And now I would say that we are in the most rapidly transforming period that our industry has ever seen, and we’re just beginning to get a sense of it. And that’s the thing. It’s like, from my perspective, we’re racing to play catch-up to this transformation that has just—literally, every week, there’s something new that has huge implications for the foundations of our business. So what does that look like for you? Are you getting clients coming back saying “Hey… what about all this AI stuff? What are we doing? How is this going to change how we engage with respondents or in deliverables or any of those things?” So what—give me a sense of what’s life in the trenches for you during this period of kind of macro-change?

Right. And the rate of change is at the slowest point that it’ll every be.

Yeah [laugh].

Right? And I’m obviously very focused on the future. So a lot of what I just talked about is how to set up renewable cycles that will actually capitalize on this stuff, right? So meeting—like, we had an annual goal around outcome delivery and the need for us to focus more on what is the human intervention of quality assurance and the final presentation of, like, setting them up to succeed, and what are the opportunities to automate and eliminate human intervention within the functional process, which if we systemize these things, they’ll be a temporary marked gap where the market value will outweigh the—and we’ll actually, like, earn an increased margin, right? But that will disappear quickly because of the competitive in our environment dictating to do so. But, like, I go back to, like, what is true, like, how leadership has to work is—like, greatest book on this leadership principle, in my opinion, is Team of Teams, where you have to get out of the scientific method, which is to almost, like, treat what we do as an engineer, where, like, I have to go from this to this to this to this. And you have to have these outcome-focused decision making teams that actually get it and are willing to do what it takes to get to the outcome. Right? And they have to realize that it is theirs, and they do have to go do something with it. And then we have to constantly be training them on what opportunity exists. And the mere fact that, like, that is the focus is to have that, like, mastery of the baseline skills and delegate that autonomy and have that be with the people who actually do the work, like, makes us and our potential rate of change well beyond what the competitive set is going to achieve. And then, therefore, like, our ability to, like, meet and assimilate—like, I’m not a tech company. I’m not going to launch my own chat product. Right? But I am going to—as they come out, like, we are going to review, assess, assimilate, figure out how to service with them and deliver value back to the client with them faster than others, and that’s going to be of immense opportunity.

So just thinking back to my time [laugh], you know, when I would—I had field service partners. Right? And shout-out to Ian Kiernan at MR Ops, back in the old days, since we’re talking about that. And my experience is that most of those companies would primarily think about—they were consultative, but only within the limited scope of the specific solutions that they utilized, and they were always confined to what that solution set was. And what I’m hearing from you is “Yeah. We’re consultants first. We are problem solvers.” I love that idea of the logistical plan to get from point A to point B and address your business issues. The ‘how,’ specifically the technical ‘how,’ is you’ve divorced from the key driver of the business. Am I getting that right?

Everyone is a—has a limitation, right? Like, you absolutely have to use the systems you know to deliver value. But I think you’re correct in that I’m trying to systematize a custom outcome because there is no entirely, like, productized tech to deliver on interviewing people within the food supply chain on an insanely technical topic. Right? There is only relationships between people—and then how do we have a system that can repeatedly foster those relationships and deliver them back to the customer.

That’s very cool. That’s a great way to think about things. Again, for our audience, Colson and I have never spoken before. So, if I come across as a little fan-boy and gushy, it’s because, man, I’m, like, really enjoying about how you’re doing things. It makes an awful lot of sense [laugh]. And I see even more and more the alignment the sponsorship of the Future List, those type of values.

Absolutely.

Yeah. Very, very cool. Very cool. So let’s talk a little bit more about this period of transformation. So you’re in a unique, niche category, in terms of the—you know, the AG and the Vets and et cetera, et cetera, while also kind of a foundational business to the industry structure as a whole during this period of transformation. So what do you think the business looks like functionally—you know, let’s say two years out? What are you planning for and thinking “All right. These are the stuff that we’re—this is going to fundamentally change how we do this thing of building these relationships so that we can get information delivered to our clients to solve their business issues”? What does that look like for you?

So I’ve already looked at it and said, “Our person that’s working with the client has to be more of a partner than ever.” And so that is how that team has had to be built and rebuilt and built. Right? And then there’s immense opportunity in—as I was saying—like I think in terms of I want people doing things that are within their unique abilities that are, I mean, like, focused on the relationship, and I want as many tech solutions that we really, like, own it. It’s not just, like, some thing that’s on the side that we, like, have to go over here to work through. Right? It’s something that, like, our process goes through it, and the tech delivers the outcome that then we pick up as automated as possible. And I, I mean, there’s kind of no limitations of the number of things in the back office operation that are affected by the opportunity to use a software or AI replacement to do a substantive portion of what is being done.

Do you think the form factor of the engagement mechanism will change and that there’s a—we’ll need to adapt in how we think about that engagement process?

I’m challenged in answering that because, I mean, it’s the whole—like, it depends. And there won’t be…

[laugh] Right. I get—I get it.

It’s, like, yes and no. Right? Like, you see plenty of very—like, we tend to, like, attract either tech companies or consultants to tech companies that are looking to iterate, and so they’re doing innovative thing with the kind of human relationship that we’re introducing to them too. And so I see some of these methodologies that wouldn’t exist within, like, a typical market research ecosystem being used and being used to, you know, varying degrees of actually effectiveness by the people that are hiring us to be the people that have the relationship with the right person for them to talk to. So that changes things. I think the biggest thing that stands out to me is, like, there’s going to be almost this, like, comparing what we’re collecting against what the AI model is able to tell us. And, if you talk to people, right, that’s pretty much how everyone is definitively, like, using it right now is they’re comparing their thoughts back to AI.

Yep. Yeah.

And I think that that’s going to, like, just become so pervasive that how we relate to it is going to, like, start to really matter.

Yeah. I think increasingly what we think of as the insights world will fundamentally be—the term that I’ve been using is “last-mile data.”

Mm-hm

You know, kind of filling in the gaps. And that last-mile data will—they’ll be a period where we’re validating the AI. Right? We’re a check to make sure that it’s not BS. Increasingly, it will become—that will go away.

Mm-hm

And we will be just feeding the missing pieces, and especially the ‘why’ component for any decision making. And I think that’s intensely interesting. I’ll be different, radically different, especially from a financial standpoint of how the industry works today. But I don’t know if you saw the news this week—and, for our listeners, we’re recording this near the end of February—of Yahoo launching a traditional panel powered by surveys, which I thought, “Now, that is really interesting.” It was—and they purposely went to “this is real people. We’re talking to real people.” It was almost the anti-AI.

Yeah.

And I thought, “That is actually pretty damn smart to start positioning for the future.” You know, this is the role of insights is to get that information from real people that we cannot get through synthetic sample or the models or whatever the case may be. So, anyway, I just thought that was just—

That relationship is, like, my value spot. Right? Like, that’s to say—like, and if it is that last-mile, that person in—I mean, obviously, we’re going to go where our clients see value. Right? There’s not readily available access. It’s—I mean, if you think about, like, tech adoption curves and different concepts that have been laid out about how this works, like, it’s not—it’s similar to like—I mean, this—the original business that this company was in was telephone interviewing services because that was the primary mode of methodology. That was how business was done. Now that’s under 20 percent of revenue, and it’s used on about 3 percent of the projects that we do. And that’s probably roughly—it’s significantly less than that in the revenue stake of the industry, right? It’s just we’re still attached to it. And the reality is, is that, like, you saw—I have seen, like, over the last 12 years of my being here doing this that the client of—like, in the trapping study has no point in being done inside of that. Well, if I can aggregate the data and use this synthetic data to move to the intelligence, like, there is a lot of validation that will happen, and then there will be a lot of irrelevance to some of—and so just like the two-million dollar customer sat-tracker is now, like, an imbedded Qualtrics link. Right? Like, that’s going to—same thing that’s going to happen to a huge amount of research that is done today.

Yeah. I agree. And, you know, for other CEOs, researchers and for CEOs listening to this, I mean, it may seem like a constant, oh, you know, holy crap moment in this era that we’re in. But I think that you would be an example—and I would encourage everybody to do this—to lean in. “Okay. This is the reality. These are things that are going to change.” But there’s such immense opportunity to think differently in that reality.

Yeah. I put it—I put it, like, “We’ve done it before, and we’ll do it again.”

Yes. Yeah. We tested it faster [laugh] this time.

Right. But if you think, by principles of, you know, it takes 15 years to become an overnight success. Right? Like, typically, like, there’s a half-life. Right? Like, what, now we’ve been through it, and everybody that—like, again, it takes the right mindset. Right? If they’re a leader that’s at 55 has done that two full times in their career. Yes. They’re going to have to do it in half the time or less this time. And, unfortunately, people get stuck in like, “Well, I don’t have the energy. I don’t have—like, I don’t know that I can go through the learning curve all over again.” And it is like, “Yeah, you can because you’ll have to. And you will.”

Yeah. Well, that’s probably a good segue to our last question. And we’ll tie it back into the Future List. So you’ve just given some great advice to current leaders. What advice would you give to emerging leaders, for the young folk, if you will, that we have in the Future List?

Figuring out what you want and what your point of view is, is probably the most valuable thing. Because people are not going to lose their relevance. It’s that we’re going to be irrelevant if we don’t know why we are. And so I genuinely believe—like I say my mantra is “Relentless Intentional Action.” Like, I think you have to say, like, what are the habits that I have that are continually putting me in that learning zone and getting me—like, bringing me the insight that I need to know myself better and to understand what I am uniquely great at. Because most of the things that I don’t want hold onto are not where I add the most value, and I need to move towards what I am great at. I also feel like people very generalized advice. They kind of, like, got to do all the things, whereas I’m probably further along in my career than my age, but I’m only 35. And, like, I spend more of my time figuring out how to do less than do more. And that is entirely based upon how much time you figure out your own self. And so I’d like—I consistently point young people to content around designing your life and how do you apply, you know, processes and systems. Like, I’m talking about—we put in place in the business. For your own self as an individual to just create, like, where you can actually enjoy the journey. Because we’re so busy hustling that we’re always thinking we’re falling behind, when we’re not.

Sage advice. I was running my first company at 35, so you just brought me back. But I was not as wise as you. So [laugh] that’s the… Take that as a complement. All right. Anything that you wanted to bring up that I did not bring up?

I don’t think so. I love where this went. It was a lot of fun.

Cool. Good. Yeah. I did—that’s the joy of first-time conversations. Right? Like, I don’t know where the hell we’re going to wind up, and I think we got to a cool place. So I’m glad you feel the same way. And I hope our listeners feel the same way as well. All right. Were can people find you, Colson?

The easiest way to find me is—Colson Steber is an absurdly unique name, and if you look me up on LinkedIn, I post nearly every day. And I’m glad for people to connect with me, reach out, and I am a glutton for punishment in my willingness to, like, be a connector and jump on a call to get to know somebody and their story and relate to it. So…

Cool. All right. Well, and we’re—I’m glad that we connected as well, and thank you and the company for sponsoring the Future List. We certainly appreciate it. And that is it for this edition of the Greenbook Podcast. So I want to give a big shout out to our producer, Natalie, who makes all of this happen; our editor, Big Bad Audio; to our sponsor; and, of course, to you, our listeners, who help give a reason for me to connect with folks like Colson and get to know him. So we appreciate it. That’s it for this edition of the Greenbook Podcast. We’ll be back again for another one really soon. Everybody, be well. Bye-bye.