This episode is in partnership with MrWeb’s Insight in the Mobile Age segment. 

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My guest today is Chris Havemann, CEO of RealityMine.

Founded in 2012, RealityMine is a passive metering technology, enabling the tracking of consumers on multiple devices—across all major platforms—providing a holistic view of their daily lives. Headquartered in Manchester, England, with offices in London and Sydney.

Prior to joining RealityMine, Chris was the CEO of Rated People and the co-founder and CEO of Research Now.

Find Chris Online:

Website: https://www.realitymine.com/ 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chris-havemann-19a04b8/

Find Jamin Online:

Email: jamin@happymr.com 

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/jaminbrazil 

Twitter: www.twitter.com/jaminbrazil  

Find Us Online: 

Twitter: www.twitter.com/happymrxp  

LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/happymarketresearch  

Facebook: www.facebook.com/happymrxp  

Website: www.happymr.com  

Music:“Clap Along” by Auditionauti: https://audionautix.com

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[00:00:00]

Jamin: Hi, I’m Jamin Brazil. You’re listening to the Happy Market Research Podcast. My guest today is Chris Havemann, CEO of RealityMine. Founded in 2012, RealityMine is a passive metering technology enabling the tracking of consumers on multiple devices across all major platforms, providing a holistic view of their daily lives. RealityMine is headquartered in Manchester, England with offices in London and Sydney. Prior to joining RealityMine, Chris was the CEO of Rated People and the cofounder and CEO of Research Now. Chris, thank you so much for joining me on the Happy Market Research Podcast.

[00:00:37]

Chris: My pleasure, Jamin. Great to be here.

[00:00:40]

Jamin: So I’d like to start out with a little bit of context as usual. Maybe you could tell us a little bit about your parents and how they inform what you do today.

[00:00:47]

Chris: It’s a really interesting question. Without wishing to disrespect my parents, just to give you an idea, my mom was a housewife and my stepdad was a university professor. And in fact, I don’t think I do take much inspiration career-wise from what they did. If anything, I think my inspiration comes from my grandfather, who was a self-made entrepreneur. The only boss he ever had, he says – he used to say was the RAF during the second World War. And I think that seeded somewhere in me an entrepreneurial gene that led to me cofounding Research Now and other things in the world of market research.

[00:01:24]

Jamin: Did you spend a lot of time with your grandfather?

[00:01:27]

Chris: Yes, I did. I actually left my parents’ home on my 15th birthday. At the time we were living in Canada, and I moved across the Atlantic back to where I was born in England. And I lived with my grandparents, so my sort of formative teenage years or late teenage years were living with my grandparents.

[00:01:42]

Jamin: That’s super interesting because I have a similar story. It’s not about me, sorry, but just from a connection perspective, I did a similar thing where I moved out of my parents’ in my mid-teens and in with my grandparents. And my grandfather was instrumental in my life in a very similar way as an entrepreneur, and he had his hands in lots of different things from garden farming to farmers market-type things to dairies, importing and exporting and whatnot. And so is very – I think that the entrepreneurial gene for me really came from his mentorship, and yes. So was he part of or around when you started Research Now?

[00:02:33]

Chris: Yes, he was. He’s dead now because we started Research Now, myself and Andrew Cooper way back in 2000 actually, or 2003 when we rebranded as Research Now. And he was alive for about another seven or eight years after that, so he saw the early struggle, which I think all entrepreneurs go through. But also, I’m very pleased to be conscious that he also saw the early successes, and when we floated on the London Stock Exchange and so on, he was alive for all that and I think very proud that I’d managed to get a business off the ground with my cofounder.

[00:03:06]

Jamin: What a great opportunity for him to be able to see that, the initial birthing of the company, and then later on the success of the company. And of course, ultimately selling the business to Research – sorry, selling Research Now to e-Rewards, and then e-Rewards rebranding, which has actually surprised me, as Research Now. Which in many cases you’ll have the – that’s kind of like the tail wagging the dog from a size perspective. I’ve always wondered, why did they rebrand around Research Now?

[00:03:42]

Chris: It’s an interesting question because as you say, the transaction that happened in 2009 was that e-Rewards, a US private company and leader in the online panel space in the US, bought Research Now, which was a London-headquartered global business which I’d started with Andrew Cooper. And I think the Research Now name is actually – the US team at e-Rewards felt that it was just a better name. Our core client base was market research agencies, and they saw Research Now as a name just spoke very clearly to our core client constituency about what we were about. One of the things we were about of course was the speed of online data collection.

[00:04:18]

Jamin: And the interesting thing about that is from my vantage point, is e-Rewards came out of actually creating a reward system for airlines and other large companies. And a mechanism by chance that they could provide rewards to their members was through participating in surveys. e-Rewards also is very successful at building the premiere B2B platform. So if you wanted to do research among business professionals, Research Now – or sorry, e-Rewards had those relationships with like I said, large airlines or with business travelers and that sort of thing. And they opened up that space. The relevancy of the name “Research Now,” I think it’s probably still the best name in consumer insights for the reason that you just said, is that there’s always pressure around time and there’s always pressure around efficiency.

[00:05:24]

Chris: Yes, absolutely. I remember coming up with the name. I was sitting with Andrew and we were thinking what – because we’d started a business called the Mobile Channel, which interestingly was a permission-based mobile advertising proposition. So both e-Rewards and Research Now started about the same time as permission-based, reward-based advertising businesses. And then when those models struggled, both companies pivoted as we now fashionably say, what you do when you nearly bust, into saying, “Well, rather than having an advertising audience that we incentivize to watch advertising or receive mobile advertising, we’ll incentivize these people to do market research surveys as the world transitioned to online.” And we were sitting down talking about what we could rebrand this company from the Mobile Channel, and we came up with Research Now because there were three of us at that time. We thought, “Well, sounds like it could be a big company.” By the time I left we were 1,200 people. But we were three at that point, and we said, “Research online, it’s going to be cheaper. It’s going to be better arguably. But it’s certainly going to be faster, so Research Now. Why wouldn’t you want your research now rather than in three weeks?”

[00:06:33]

Jamin: It’s perfect. I feel like it’s such a perfect name. Of course, I’m always about the simple connections. So if you can embed that innately inside of a name, from my vantage point it certainly is a nice hack to create immediate connection with the value prop. After leaving I guess e-Rewards/Research Now, you then started Rated People. And then of course, now you’ve got RealityMine, as in gold mine. What do you think your grandfather would say in looking at your current path?

[00:07:12]

Chris: That’s interesting. I think his main interest would be in probably around me personally, whether I was enjoying it, what my motivations were, which I think is key. When you’ve done something, I moved to Ready People to do something completely different. I left the world of market research for several years, and I was involved in Ready People which is an online platform to effectively find tradespeople. In the US you have Angie’s List, HomeAdvisor. It’s a similar business in the UK. I think you would’ve been just like him, actually. Sort of you do one thing. It’s interesting for a while. Maybe have some success. Maybe you have less success. But your brain sort of spurs you on, your curiosity to do something different. And that’s what I did when I joined – I didn’t actually found Ready People, but I became the sort of professional CEO as it were. And similarly, that’s exactly what’s happened with RealityMine. I found myself back in the research industry. So my grandfather was just the same. He went from one thing to another and very, very different. He opened a hotel and he ran a cafe. He did all sorts of things like that. Nothing to do with data on market research, but a similar journey of different things.

[00:08:20]

Jamin: What is your motivation? I have to believe having gone through acquisitions and also on both sides, you probably – and I don’t mean to assert this. But you probably did OK financially, meaning that achieving a certain number and then allowing you to live fairly comfortably off of that. And CEO jobs, they’re remarkably stressful. I think everyone would agree in different seasons, of course. Also fun and rewarding and all that kind of thing. But what do you see – what have you identified as that motivator to continue?

[00:09:00]

Chris: It’s funny, the CEO job. I think as you just said, at times it feels like the worst job in the building. But I think most of the time it’s actually the best job in the building, because you have a I think surprising – as much as anyone has control. And I think that’s a very strange thing to say in this COVID-19 world we’re now in. But relative to a lot of people in a company or in a workplace, you have a lot of control. You have a lot of understanding over the context. I think that for me has always made me feel that as a CEO, it feels less stressful than jobs I had earlier in my career where I was a small cog in a corporate machine.

[00:09:37]

Jamin: That’s good, and I appreciate the sort of self-awareness of – excuse me – what fits and what doesn’t. The interesting thing to me though around this is that it feels like there must be some high level of joy that warrants the ongoing effort, because it is still a – it’s different than an eight-to-five. It’s almost like a 24-hour, especially – right, yes. In driving that, have you figured out where that joy actually comes from?

[00:10:15]

Chris: I think it’s the same thing that made me highly competitive, sometimes overly competitive player of games when I was a kid. Whether that’s a family game of Scrabble or a computer game, I like to compete. I like to win. And that sounds quite brutal, but I think some of this is purely I get a lot of pleasure from seeking success, and also the journey being challenging. And so yes, we were very successful at Research Now and we had a fantastic team, and that was a great journey. I took a little bit of time off, but then I wanted to reenter that challenge. And actually the fact that my last job was completely unrelated sector is neither here or there. It’s just like playing a different game, but you play to win. And that certainly motivates me.

[00:11:01]

Jamin: So RealityMine – give us a little bit of understanding. What is RealityMine’s value prop and who is it delivering it to?

[00:11:10]

Chris: So RealityMine is a software provider, and we’re firmly, fairly, and squarely in the market research industry. I should come back to sort of why that is. I wasn’t a founder of the business. There were two cofounders and I came along later as a CEO to take the business on to the next growth phase. And what we do is we deploy our software onto typically mobile, but also tablet and laptop devices of market research panelists, and we capture very rich behavioral data. So this is a world of – still a world, like Research Now, of incentivized panels. RealityMine’s software can capture information about the content people are watching. So they might be streaming Netflix on a tablet and we can see that. They might be going on a purchase journey in Amazon or Walmart.com. We can see that. We can see the in-app behavior. So we’re capturing very, very granular behavioral data, which is I would say a massive complement to a lot of the other things going on in the world of market research. As we know, there’s a rich world which has existed for decades of market research measuring stuff – put simply, what media people are consuming, what people are buying mostly. There’s a very rich world of understanding what people are thinking based largely on survey research and so on. And this passive behavioral data is highly complementary to that. But of course, the emergence of the smartphone roughly a decade ago and the huge impact that’s had on our lives as consumers is key and pivotal to why this is so important.

[00:12:48]

Jamin: The marriage of primary and secondary research is a theme that I have identified in 2019. And it was one of two of the most material – whenever I’d have a guest from a brand on, which is about 50% of the time, the guest would across the board say that one of their biggest challenges is being able to connect consumer behavior data, or transactional data or what have you, third-party data, to their primary research in a way that provides richer context of the insight. Then that richer context obviously leverages – told with a compelling story, then can be leveraged in the organization for action. So it really is seen as this piece that used to be a nice-to-have, but is now a requirement for researchers to present – one, understand it, and ultimately present the right sort of recommendations from their research. I’m really curious on who your buyer is inside of this new world at the brand level. Or is it actually at the agency level?

[00:13:58]

Chris: No, it’s at the agency level. A lot of the clever stuff, that integration of – and I think that’s a theme of today’s insight world, is a fragmentation of techniques and a need to integrate different techniques, different types of data to get to the fast insight. That clever stuff is done by our clients. So we’re providing software which sits on panels, and we don’t own the panels. What the software does is it captures this rich behavioral data, but our client is the market researcher. Typically in a large market research agency, so a lot of our clients are the big global MR players, the household names like Ipsos and so on. But also we work for lots of innovative smaller agencies. And the big use cases are around measurement, particularly of video. I think there’s – I’m not sure what the latest statistic is. But if you think about people watching video in Asia for example, the majority of that viewing is happening on mobile phones. It’s not happening on TV. So the world of measurement, if you think through the lens of TV ratings, you’re missing the picture in terms of what’s happening with video. And even here in Western markets, particularly if you look at younger demographics – if I think about my 18-year-old son, he doesn’t watch a lot of television. He watches a lot of YouTube. He watches a lot of Netflix, and that’s mostly on his phone or his laptop. And I think that explosion of change in behavior is causing a need for measurement, so researchers who are into the world of measuring media and need tools like RealityMine. Similarly you have researchers who are thinking about journeys towards purchasing, and of course we now live in this omnichannel world. I think – well, we used to live in this omnichannel world until the COVID-19 outbreak. Now we live in a surprisingly digital world. But let’s assume they go back to some semblance of normality. Consumers clearly have this massive array of choices and influences in terms of how they end up buying Product X-Y-Z in a certain category in a certain location or digital space. And our technology helps complement the offline world knowledge with the digital journeys that people are making on their devices, and of course a cross-device.

[00:16:09]

Jamin: If I’m like a boutique research agency, how accessible is your tool? Because it sounds like it’s doing a lot, which for me intuits it’s super expensive. And it might be, and that’s OK. Is it something that smaller agencies are able to leverage?

[00:16:28]

Chris: Absolutely. We have some very small agencies doing qualitative projects. So they might – you typically think of that in the old days as focus groups and so on. But we have agencies like Flamingo who are using our tool and they may be deploying an app which we provide to a small group of people, maybe 50 people within a category. I don’t know. Sports shoe buyers or whatever it might be. And they’re using that rich data to draw a picture of the lives of these sport shoe users. Maybe these are running enthusiasts or whatever. I think what is different is the kind of data the technology provides. So yes, there’s a question of how do you get the data? How do you engage a panel? What about all the privacy issues? We could talk about that. But I think back to your question, a really interesting question is can that agency handle the type of data that metering technology outputs? Researchers are used to dealing with typically survey data. That’s a well-known and loved and understood thing after decades and decades and decades of survey research, long before online. The kind of data our technology provides is millions of rows at individual events. So from this timestamp to that timestamp, this person or this idea using this device did X-Y-Z. They viewed Netflix for 14 minutes or whatever it might be. And you’ve got to have a certain capability to manipulate huge amounts of data and integrate it with other types of data to bring it to life. So very much depends upon the skills of the agency currently we’re working with, and their ability to handle that type of data is really what drives the answer to your question.

[00:18:06]

Jamin: So you give them the actual data. Are you also providing the analytics tools? Are they leveraging some combination of R or Python or something like that?

[00:18:17]

Chris: That mostly happens client-side. So we deploy – our technology could be deploying onto a panel either as an app or as an SDK. So in a perfect world for example, a client has – they have their own panel. They have a native mobile app within the panel. It might be a native survey app. If you think of panels like MFour in the US, huge US panel. But it’s all native mobile, so it’s all Android and iOS. In the MFour world, our technology is deployed as an SDK. And that data arrives at MFour, millions and millions of rows. But the analytics, we have done some work with some clients around for example dashboarding. We have developed some tools that allow the data sets to be queried and actually to return in the format of survey data, as if you’d surveyed someone to capture their behaviors if they were self-reporting on their behavior. But for the most part, it’s agencies that do the heavy lifting in terms of analytics.

[00:19:13]

Jamin: That makes perfect sense. Thank you. So – excuse me. So you touched on COVID-19, obviously probably the single biggest event that will ever – you and I will encounter in our lifetime at a global level. How do you think coming out of this – do you have any predictions on how we will be different?

[00:19:41]

Chris: Yes. It’s an interesting question. I think there’s been a lot of comment in the media about “things will never be the same again,” and assertions that for example markets like business travel might never really go back, that people will get used to these endless Zoom meetings and decide they like it and so on. I think some of that’s overblown. I think a lot of things that people like doing for all sorts of reasons, they’ll return to doing what they like doing, whether that relates to their work patterns or their personal patterns. But I think a lot depends on the lockdown and how long the world remains in a lockdown or semi-lockdown state. We have to learn new habits. Clearly there are some things which will have ratcheted. So for example, I think there are some people who are still maybe reticent to do online shopping in certain categories. Maybe if you’re doing – we call it – I don’t know if you call it DIY in the US, but a DIY project around the home. Maybe you’ve used your time in the garden to, I don’t know, buy some materials. And you used to go to your local DIY store or your hardware store and buy stuff. You can’t do that right now. Turns out you can do it very easily online. It gets delivered. And “hey, why didn’t I do that before?” And I think there will be some categories, maybe food or similar, grocery retail where we will see a systematic step change and a move towards online and digital. But I think – I don’t know. Maybe I’m a luddite, but I think a lot of us will return to old, familiar patterns if we’re able to.

[00:21:15]

Jamin: It’ll be interesting to see how it materializes. I’m very split aspirationally on what I want and what I think is going to wind up happening. But I tend to agree with you that the activity levels and the things that we used to do, travel, et cetera, that’s certainly not long-term. It should go back to normal.

[00:21:39]

Chris: One thing you said, Jamin, that was interesting was this is the biggest event, this COVID-19, in our lifetime. And I think that’s almost certainly true. We don’t know, but almost certainly true from a sort of short, almost tactical perspective. Arguably there’s a bigger thing happening, but it’s the frog being slowly boiled in the pot, which is climate change. And I think there’s an interesting question. Will we see intersections between those things? So if you think about airline travel for example, it could be because of the financial impact of COVID-19 and the impact on capacity in the industry, and the impact on things like distancing within planes that we may see – and people’s reticence to travel. I think we may see systematic change in the airline industry related to less flying, less people on aircraft, higher-priced flying. I think that actually could be here to stay, and it will actually – the environmental pressures that were there will only be released to accelerate, I think.

[00:22:41]

Jamin: Yes, that’s on point. You and I have gone through for the last – as a community have gone through this crazy “everybody flies” period so that airlines have just been leveraging the heck out of that with seat space getting smaller and smaller, ridiculously small. And I’m not even a tall guy. It’s small. And now the opposite. Plenty of leg room, I have to believe.

[00:23:12]

Chris: Reaching on both sides and can’t touch anyone.

[00:23:15]

Jamin: It’s kind of crazy. So in this coming out of it, I think there should be more appreciation of the customer from the airline perspective. But then as you’re articulating the pollution and greenhouse gases emissions, they’ve fallen. It’s well-documented. You have these emotional things with dolphins back in. So all of this is creating this beautiful or natural – I can see – so just in my life, the skies are clearer right now where I live than they have been in decades. And it’s amazing. It’s a marvelous thing. I can see the Sierras, which normally I can’t see from my house, and it’s just like they’re part of my backyard landscape. Exactly. It’s such a unique time. And so yes, I think that’s an interesting assessment that you’re making. And obviously our hopes are aligned that that’s something that gets a lot of attention, more attention going forward. So thinking about actually the market research space in a post-COVID environment, because at some point this has to blow over. How will the market research space be different over the next few years?

[00:24:35]

Chris: I think it’s interesting. It’s always tempting to think that everything’s changing. It’s happening so fast. And I think you’ve got to step back. What are the fundamentals that probably remain the same and remain the same over many decades? And I think some of those things, needing to follow the consumer to deliver insight – if we think of that as the part of the purpose of the market research industry, I guess that doesn’t change. But the question is “but how do you do that?” I think we see trends. And so for example, the existence of RealityMine as a player in the industry is simply because a decade ago, the smartphone came along. And suddenly there was this tool which was radically changing consumer behavior. If I can just go off on a tangent, and I think everyone knows this, but a couple of years ago I went to my first Tinder wedding where the couple met on Tinder. They met through their mobile phones. People are managing their lives through their mobile phones in terms of their social lives, social media. They’re learning, educating themselves on these devices. They’re reinforcing political opinions through the social media platforms and so on. They’re watching stuff on these devices. They’re buying stuff on these devices. So huge consumer change, and so RealityMine has emerged to help – one of many companies of course capturing that, helping capture and understand the opportunity. And I guess a key thing will be to see, “Well, what else is the consumer doing? What is changing, whether that’s in terms of how it communicates or whatever we’re doing?” That will drive some of the change. I also think one of the things going on is that competition on the industry has become more and more intense. If I think back over my career, I can really think of it as the pre-2000, pre-digital, pre-Internet career and the post-2000, post-Internet career. And I think the digitization of the world has created this sort of massive – you could think of it as a test-and-learn capability for companies. Because of digital, everything’s measurable. So one form of getting insight is just do something and see what happens. So I think if you think about your average corporate employee, they’re thinking “where do I get my insight from?” Their immediate thought is not necessarily, “I’ll call up a big market research agency and ask for a report in six weeks on topic X-Y-Z.” They’ll learn by doing. And I think that’s a trend, and I think that’s driving greater complexity, prep time pressure on researchers. And that’s only going to accelerate. So coming back to your question, “How will the space look in five years’ time? What’s going to change?” I think some of those inexorable pressures around greater and greater scope of issues to cover, fragmentation of data collection possibility, the need to weave in different methodologies and techniques to drive insight, that’s only going to accelerate. And unfortunately I think it’s going to accelerate at the same time as clients want inevitably more for less, because many times they’ll see other ways of getting to the insight that they want. So a broad, sweeping generalization, but that’s how I see it.

[00:27:47]

Jamin: So you are interacting on a regular basis with leaders in the insight space, agencies specifically. What are the biggest issues or the biggest issue that they are facing today?

[00:28:03]

Chris: I think it’s a really good question. I think if you think about the largest agencies, there are honorable exceptions that are in growth mode. Well, if we think of the pre-COVID-19 period at least. So Ipsos for example is still growing organically. But if you look at the other research majors in general, they’re contracting. And I think you’ve got to step back and ask yourself, “Why is that? What is happening with those agencies?” And I think we’re just living in this period of unprecedented change. The age-old media silos that needed to be measured, whether that’s TV or print or radio, those silos have broken down. If you think about your readership of news, clearly it’s not about measuring newspaper readership. You might be finding yourself reading something because, I don’t know, Twitter sent you an email. You click through a link and suddenly you’re reading an article on Fortune. You didn’t really think about that until you got the email and clicked through. How can that be measured accurately? That’s a difficult problem. So I think the world of measurement is facing a lot of challenges. And similarly, the world of trying to understand the consumer is facing challenges for all sorts of reasons, and the pace of change of the consumer and the different ways of reaching that consumer, like often on survey research. So I think the traditional methods of capturing and analyzing data are under tremendous pressure. So I think the short answer to your question is clients are finding themselves needing to innovate and innovate faster. Yet as ever, when industries face structural change, they sort of cling to things that they know, techniques that they know. Or revenue streams that they’ve had for many, many years they’re trying to defend, and defending those revenue streams while innovating aggressively is very challenging. So I think a lot of clients in the larger universe of MR agencies see those issues, and I think that’s well-understood. I think that also of course throws out lots of opportunity for smaller, innovative, nimble guys with nothing to lose. So I think a lot of the innovation you’re seeing is coming from smaller businesses. RealityMine would be an example of that, but there are many, many, many as we know within the sector who are really coming at it with a different angle, a different technique. But it’s still going to leave a massive scope for great market researchers to integrate the best capabilities and the best methodologies and keep their clients happy, which is ultimately the goal of all of us.

[00:30:31]

Jamin: I have been actually very impressed with Ipsos as an organization, both before and right now. They’ve done a remarkable job of differentiating themselves. I don’t know exactly what’s part of their secret sauce, but it has been exciting to watch that large agency. Because most people would say that right now is not the time of the large agency, but they continue to become a remarkable player in the space.

[00:31:01]

Chris: I think I have a view on that, which is I think we know about Ipsos that a lot of the growth, historically the way that company’s been built has been by acquisition. But I think in managing those acquisitions, there’s been quite a lot of focus on the financial entrepreneurs and accountability locally, whether that’s geographically locally or locally within a business unit. And I think at times that may have looked from afar as not necessarily the best strategy compared to maybe a global common product approach, whatever it might be. But actually when times are being disrupted, if you’ve got a local person that cares about their business, so the line of business that’s accountable to the top of the organization, that’s potentially very powerful. I think that is one of the things going on at Ipsos.

[00:31:46]

Jamin: It’s super interesting. That’s a whole ‘nother topic on the podcast, which would be actually fun, tactics and strategies around successful M&A.

[00:31:56]

Chris: Absolutely.

[00:31:57]

Jamin: But having said that, you’re absolutely right. It’s just an amazing story. Also – anyway, oh my gosh. It’s hard for me not to go down that rabbit hole. But –

[00:32:08]

Chris: I agree.

[00:32:09]

Jamin: – we’re also capped on time. So I want to get to my next question. Part of my audience are aspiring insight professionals. So they’re either in a master’s program like at Michigan State or Georgia or wherever and they’re getting ready to get a job relatively soon, or they’re looking at pivoting in their careers. What do you see as three characteristics of an all-star employee?

[00:32:38]

Chris: That’s a great question. I think all businesses are people businesses, and so at the end of the day, our businesses are all about our teams. One thing I would say, and I think the word is overused, but I would use the word “passion.” I think some of us have been very fortunate that going to work as a joy for the most part. Not always, but it’s a joy. And why is it a joy? Because we love what we do. We’re doing what we choose to do. We care about what we’re doing. And I think I’d encourage particularly young people to try and find – it’s obvious, but try and find work and try and find careers that inspire you and have a passion for what you’re doing. I think that really resonates with founder entrepreneurs. When you start a business as you know yourself, you really, really, really care about everything about that business. And so you’re very much warm to people that also show a care, almost a love for the business that they’re helping you create and develop. So I think that passion about the business and the team and what you’re doing is incredibly important. You don’t want people who are sort of disinterested half the time in what they’re doing, which is pretty obvious. The second trait I’d raise is curiosity, actually, a kind of intellectual curiosity. So clearly you want smart people, but I think you want smart people that are sort of restless about trying to understand why and get to the bottom of, not just assume. We live in this very I guess – I’m a believer in a world of shades of gray and complexity and fragmentation. And I think trying to get to a deep understanding about things is a very powerful trait. And then the final thing I’d add to your all-star list is to be a team player, which again is – a lot of people talk about being a team player. But at the end of the day, we go to work – no one wants to go to work and have a lousy time. And part of what makes work fun is the people that you work with, that they’re in general – everyone has a bad day, but they’re supportive. They’re fun people. They care about the team. They look after each other. It’s not about them. It’s not about their ego. It’s about what they achieve. And so I think if you can inculcate that within your culture, it’s a very powerful thing as we all know. So my three were passionate, curious, and team player.

[00:34:48]

Jamin: Last question. What is your personal motto?

[00:34:52]

Chris: It’s an interesting question, Jamin. I don’t really think I have one. I think one thing that my grandfather used to say that I think I’ve picked up on was if a job is worth doing, it’s worth doing right. And I think that’s something I certainly think about, even now in lockdown when I’m outside cleaning the patio. I’m either not going to do the job at all, or I’m going to do it really, really thoroughly. And I think when I reflect back, that’s one of the things I believe in. So I either don’t do things because I don’t want to do them, or I guess more importantly in the business context, they don’t feel that important. Or they do feel important, which case you should really go to town on doing them well. So if a job’s worth doing, it’s worth doing right.

[00:35:33]

Jamin: My guest today has been Chris Havemann, CEO of RealityMine. Thank you, Chris, for joining me on the Happy Market Research Podcast today.

[00:35:41]

Chris: My pleasure. Thank you so much. I enjoyed it.

[00:35:44]

Jamin: Everyone else, if you found value in this episode like I did, I hope you’ll take time, screen-capture, share it on social media. If you tag us in the post on Twitter or LinkedIn, I will send you a T-shirt. Make sure you tell me your size. Have a great rest of your day.