This episode of the Happy Market Research Podcast was recorded in July 2020.

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My guest today is Daniel Stradtman VP of Consumer & Market Insights at The Lubrizol Corporation, a Berkshire Hathaway Company

The Lubrizol Corporation is a provider of specialty chemicals for the transportation, industrial, and consumer markets. These products include many different types of additives from transportation-related fluids like engine oils to personal care products, pharmaceuticals and medical devices

Since 2011, Lubrizol has been a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway. It generated $7 billion in revenue and has an employee headcount of approximately 8,300 people globally.

Prior to joining Lubrizol, Dan started his career as a research project manager for a non-profit. Since then he has served as Director of Consumer Insights & Strategy at Walmart, Director of Brand and Comms at Kantar TNS, and the VP of Market Insights, Analytics, and Strategy of GE.

Find Daniel Online:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danstradtman 

Twitter: https://twitter.com/insightdan

Website: https://www.lubrizol.com 

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 

Epidemic Sound: https://www.epidemicsound.com/ 

This Episode is Sponsored by:

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[00:00:00]

Jamin Brazil: Hi, I’m Jamin. You’re listening to the Happy Market research podcast. My guest today is Dan Stradtman, VP of consumer and market insights at the Lubrizol Corporation, a Berkshire Hathaway company. Lubrizol Corporation is a provider of specialty chemicals for the transportation, industrial and consumer markets. Their products include many different types of additives from transportation related fluids like engine oils to personal care products, pharmaceuticals and medical devices. Since 2011, Lubrizol has been a subsidiary of the Berkshire Hathaway company, and it has generated over $7 billion in annual revenue. It has an employee headcount of approximately 8,300 people globally. Prior to joining Lubrizol, Daniel started his career as a research project manager for a nonprofit. Since then, he has served as director of consumer insights and strategy at Walmart, Director of brand and comms at Kantar TNS, and the VP of market insights, analytics and strategy at GE. Daniel, thanks so much for joining me on the Happy Market Research podcast today.

[00:01:08]

Daniel Stradtman: Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks for having me today.

[00:01:11]

Jamin Brazil: I like to start out with a little bit of context. It helps all of us sort of level set. Tell us a little bit about your parents, and what they did and how that informed your current career?

[00:01:23]

Daniel Stradtman: Yeah, thanks, Jamin. I grew up in somewhat rural Ohio. Halfway between Cleveland and Toledo. My mom was a schoolteacher, and when she had me and then my sister, she ended up not working until we got to the age we were both going to school. And then she worked part time. My dad worked, actually for my grandpa who owned an electric contracting company there. And so he spent 40 odd years doing electrical work around town, he’s probably been in two thirds of the buildings in Sandusky, Ohio over the course of his career, and so growing up there for the most part it is fairly rural although a lot of tourism runs through there because it’s right on Lake Erie and there’s an amusement park there that draws from the Midwest. But I think one of the biggest impacts they probably had on my development was it never was a question of whether I was going to go to college, it was an expectation that that was going to happen. And so really when I entered college, they were very supportive of it, but I had no idea what I wanted to do. I thought I did and then about four majors later, I settled on psychology and then that kind of took me down a path that eventually and somewhat haphazardly led me into market research. As I move through psychology, I think it’s interesting because you get when you’re in an academic setting, you get feedback from advisors, you get feedback from professors and they kind of hold that up as the epitome of that degree. So it was expected, you kind of go on and get an advanced degree. I was a good student, not good enough to probably go in and get a straight PhD. So I moved from Ohio, at the University of Dayton out to the University of Colorado to get a master’s degree in clinical psychology. And it was along that path I started to kind of change my focus in terms of hey, is being a clinical psychologist really the career that I want or is there something else that might be more suited to some of the things I was recognizing I was pretty good at? So thankfully, in grad school working for that nonprofit through grad school, I started to learn what’s essentially called program evaluation where you’re doing the research side of clinical psychology, but it’s a very applied research. So you’re going into different entities and working through the process on how they collect data, the impact that they’re having on a community, and then how to improve those things to get a greater impact. And I had a really forward thinking professor there who started to push me in those ways around statistical analysis around what was the beginnings of analytics. And so when I finished my graduate degree, I took a year sales job with Wells Fargo and then ended up being able to get back into kind of more the analytics side working as a business analyst for the university for a few years. And from there, that really was the launching point of recognizing like hey, if I stay inactive academia the path probably doesn’t have a lot of financial benefit. Because I wasn’t going to go on and get a PhD. I knew that that wasn’t something I wanted to do. And so I started to try to make the transition into market research and ended up moving to Atlanta for a short time, and working for Earthlink and then moving back to Ohio to Toledo with TNS for a few years in both the CPG and the automotive sectors and then eventually Walmart and GE and that’s led me to where I’m at today. But I kind of like to say I was a failed psychologists before it was cool to be one. But it’s been a background in a training that has blessed me across the years to have some pretty amazing colleagues and pretty amazing roles.

[00:05:56]

Jamin Brazil: There’s not a lot of guests that have been on the show that have both the supplier and the brand, the internal researcher perspective. I imagine having that dual background that aids you a lot in your current role?

[00:06:13]

Daniel Stradtman: Yeah, it’s funny because moving from TNS to Walmart when you’re on a supplier side, you’re doing the work and you’re really trying to figure out and you’re going out and talking to the consumers and surveys or in focus groups or whatever the methodology is. And then you deliver and it falls into a black hole a lot of the times. And so recognizing that one, I think it prepared me to be a better partner when I got on the corporate side in understanding some of the demands on suppliers and the demand on vendors and kind of what helps them improve and what helps them grow as partners. But I also walked into Walmart with a bit of a skill set to figure stuff out. In fact I remember it was within the first couple of weeks I was there, my boss at the time had said, “Hey, we’ve got this data from human resources and they’ve done some surveys, and they were asking for some help on this. It’s kind of all convoluted, I don’t know if you can make any sense of it, but they needed by tomorrow, if you can, but if not, don’t worry about it, I don’t really expect anything.” And it’s one of those cases where when you’re in a supplier side, you use Vlookups in Excel and you’re able to really manipulate poor data because you end up in situations where you’ve got to be creative, and so I was able to pull something together that was fairly cohesive, fairly quickly. And I remember my boss said, it was kind of like, wow, this guy’s got a little bit of a future here. Even today I think having that background on the supplier side, whether it was at GE or Lubrizol I think it allows us to be more effective when we think about how to direct suppliers to get the best outcomes because you don’t want these things to be transactional. And certainly, there’s been a push across most companies to push to a procurement model. To push to this centralized buying function that treats buying market research the same as treating buying a raw material, but I think I fully recognize that you’ve got to have the right mix between value but also quality of partnership.

[00:08:40]

Jamin Brazil: I couldn’t agree with that point more. I’ve not been on your side of the fence. But over 20 year veteran in the space, the companies that get the most out of me are the ones that understand that it is in fact a partnership. So our space has gone through a lot of evolution. There’s a report done by a consultancy called Watermark Consulting. They analyze the S&P 500 for commonalities among over performers and underperformers, and what they found was that last year, companies that employed consumer insights to make business decisions outperform the index by 45 points. What was really interesting in the report though for me is that companies that didn’t employ they actually underperform the index by 76 points. And so in that context, how have you seen over the last five years the role of consumer insights change inside of top companies?

[00:09:44]

Daniel Stradtman: That’s a great question. And in fact, I haven’t seen that particular consultant report. So I may need to hit you up later to get it to make sure I forward it to my CFO and my CEO, by the way. So I think you’re right. I think that is one of the key changes is you really have to be focused in as an insights leader on return on investment. And what does that dollar buy me? And that can be very difficult to do, especially when you’re talking about foundational research or early and early stage research type concept testing. And when you don’t have a clear visibility to sales like we do at Lubrizol, because in many cases, we’re providing components to things that end up becoming other things. And so having that clear vision for how to establish a return on investment metric or set of them for your organization, I think is a critical capability than any insights leader needs to develop. I think the other thing is, we’ve obviously seen a rise of data. And that data is extraordinarily diverse in terms of where it’s coming from, who’s generating and who’s analyzing it. I’m not necessarily sure that has always been translated into more insight. So we’re a little bit data rich and insight pour. And part of that is just do we have the right tools? Do we have the right talent? And are we given the time to really allow for that translation to occur? The third element to that change over the last five years is just speed and sense of urgency. I remember being somewhat of a methodologist at Walmart, probably to my own detriment. When in reality, as I was striving to get 90 to 100% variance explained, the organization was just saying, look, if you can give me 65% a way there that’s already smarter than we are and then we can kind of move faster. And so you have to come off of that methodological mountain and be pragmatic. That’s one thing I’ve stressed to the teams that I’ve led over the past decade is just the pragmatism. Yes, you want to have methodological rigor, but you also need to have a pragmatism when it comes to being able to turn those insights into action at the speed of business.

[00:12:32]

Jamin Brazil: Which is ever increasing and I think the current state of the world in this global pandemic, we’re now resurging again in the US as we’re having this conversation in July 8th, 2020. How has the global pandemic impacted market research?

[00:12:53]

Daniel Stradtman: Well, it’s certainly impacted the ability to do some methodologies at all. Calling together people to sit around a table in a dark area in a strip mall in Columbus, Ohio isn’t going to happen anytime soon. And so the tool box needs to expand. For us, it’s meant using more data collection tools that are self-provided. So the ability to capture video on a mobile device or something like that, and then use analytics or analysis to make sense of that, text to text surveys. There’s a couple of firms out there that do that I think fairly effectively. And thankfully, we had done some of the legwork even before we knew there was obviously going to be a pandemic. We had kind of pressure tested though, so we had some relationships developing. So we shifted away from some of those more traditional ethnography and focus group type qualitative work into that more distributed model. The other element is now that you don’t have shared spaces at work because we’re not in the office, we’re a distributed team now, we’re all working from home and I honestly that light at the end of the tunnel feels fairly distant. Thankfully earlier this year, we had launched our insights engine, which is really a digital hub around all the insights that make a company tick. And there’s plenty of companies that have done that, especially in the consumer packaged goods and services spaces. So we’re not unique in that area. I think we are fairly unique when it comes to maybe our competitive set, but that’s really allowed us to carry on some momentum because it’s now essentially the insights megaphone and the great thing is the organizations respond. And we’ve seen we launched honestly two weeks before these work from home orders and we’ve seen great membership, we’ve seen great engagement in the tool. And it’s really helped to push some different strategic actions as well. So I think it’s been fairly effective. So if I think about in some how is the pandemic impacting market research? You end up having to focus in on what’s going to drive the organization forward in the short term while not losing sight in the long term. So if there’s things that you can do as an insights professional that maybe even aren’t part of your job description normally, and maybe they’re not what you thought. I’m a custom researcher and I run these things. You may need to become a strategy moderator where you’re helping them develop different scenarios, and thinking through the business implications. You need to be water and you need to flow where the cracks take you to make sure that the organization is still using insight to move forward as much as possible. So I think the team here has done that, I’m really pleased with that, but I think that’s good counsel to any insights team right now is to just help where you can because the world’s never seen anything like this.

[00:16:35]

Jamin Brazil: I really like your water analogy. I wish I could quote the Bruce Lee or the Bruce Lee quote, but anyway, I can’t.

[00:16:43]

Daniel Stradtman: I just watched his biography too, and I’m failing on bringing that quote back as well. Anyway.

[00:16:53]

Jamin Brazil: Maybe because it’s a podcast. I, can sound really smart in the post production.

[00:16:56]

Daniel Stradtman: Yeah, you can push that right in and just blow everybody’s mind.

[00:17:02]

Jamin Brazil: Which I would never do. But that is pretty funny. So instrumentising, instrumentation, instrumentising the consumer insights role is something that I felt is one of the biggest opportunities in consumer insights. What kind of things do you put in that dashboard or system that you have?

[00:17:22]

Daniel Stradtman: It’s definitely not a dashboard. It’s truly a system. So it steals from social media practices. So you have posts and you have the ability to drill down on different markets or categories or contributors, you’ve got search capabilities. You’re able to upload multimedia, so it’s not flat and file based. And that multimedia then becomes searchable. So this is really it’s an insight engine. And that came from some early conversations we had after I joined in 2017, where the organization latched on to what was I think it was a Harvard Business Review article that took a deep dive into Unilever and the work they did in this insights engine world. And so we started in earnest on that journey probably in late 2018, and we were able to launch it by the beginning of 2020. So the instrumentation of it is that now instead of general manager or marketer calling somebody and going, “Hey, can you search for this for me on all the many resources we have?” The syndicated resources of which we have probably 50 plus, or the custom work that we’ve done to this point. Which spans almost probably 100 studies over the past couple of years. It’s self-service to start. So it’s always on, we’re a global company, the teams in Shanghai and Mumbai and the UK and Spain can all search on their own time. And then the next question, so the first question isn’t, can you search this? They can do that themselves. And then the subsequent questions are more value add. So it’s like, “Hey, I found this what do you think about this? Or can we build off of this now that I understand this topic?” And so that’s at a very base level what we’ve tried to do here is to do more with the great work the team’s already doing and force multiply it across the org. I’m always very careful because I think I’ve heard it her said inside, we need to get to this point where there’s artificial intelligence to kind of push and self-analyze some of this stuff. And I think at some point we probably get there. I don’t know if we get there in a way that’s really actionable in my career, maybe. But I have been very careful to make sure when I hear AI in that we talk about augmented intelligence and not necessarily artificial. It’s how do you enable the team’s – it’s more of an exoskeleton than a robot. And because the insights team and the marketers and the business managers like it’s more about how do we empower them to do more with what they have than necessarily replace what they are doing with kind of artificial means.

[00:20:51]

Jamin Brazil: So then – you think about this post pandemic world in a lot of ways we’ve now completely digitized or digitized the market research process, the actual research ops elements of it. Before we would do things like in person focus groups and while that obviously is still going to happen it’s fundamentally different going forward. What sort of tools or techniques or methodologies do you think a post pandemic researcher that is all of us should be cultivating in order to maintain an edge in consumer insights?

[00:21:32]

Daniel Stradtman: I mean depending on the market you serve. Certainly, in the consumer space you’ve got to be able to reach out and get a wide variety of opinions both quan and qual. So I don’t think survey research is necessarily going away because that can be done at home and there is plenty of people smarter than me who can argue whether survey research has the same validity that it once did. And I don’t begin to say that it does or it doesn’t. But I think it’s more of some of those articles that used to be done face-to-face, intercepts and focus groups and in person ethnography that just going out and making sure that you have a tool set where you can reach people in ways that avoid you having to actually physically be there. And there is plenty of companies out there that are playing in that space right now and so just find the ones that make the best partner to yours. That’s a tough one with one of the transitions you do see a lot of market research departments or insights departments moving to more that we are going to program our own surveys and we are going to hire an ethnographer. And I think those work. I wonder if those structures might be a little bit under fire though in a post pandemic world. Because you are going to need to rely on vendors probably because the technology is moving so rapidly. So certainly, having that right tool set and continuing to go out and investigate cutting edge tools – I think actually this is probably, the pandemic is probably going to create new opportunities. Create new companies out of this that can reach consumers or end users or up and down the value chain players in different ways. I’d love to see it happen more on the B2B side. Obviously, that’s self-serving because we – my team does actually go all the way to the consumer in some cases. But we are also talking to different value chain players whether its farad as it may be truck drivers or for some of our industrial sectors it might be plumbers or folks like that that just aren’t typically all that reachable in kind of a standard consumer panel. So, I think those types of things are going to be important. I think the text to analytics stuff could probably be additionally invested in. we are playing in that now and some of it is good some of it I think lacking a data dictionary, it really struggles to kind of tie those things together into true insights. Again a lot of data, not sure quite what to make of some of it. But if I was somebody who was early in my career it used to be you’d have your research folks, your custom folks almost, and then you’d have your analytics folks. And I think those are blending a bit. You’re still going to have people with great expertise in both but you can’t be a market researcher, an insights person without some understanding of analytics and some understanding of how data and the bigger data pieces fit in. And in the same band, I don’t think from an analytics perspective you are doing yourself the best service to not have that visibility into some of the things that get uncovered in insights works because you end up without the why in a lot of cases. So thankfully I have a little bit of flavor in both but if I fall on either side it’s probably more the insights side. But I know enough analytics to be Danielgerous. And then lastly just having data visualization, how to use that data to tell a story. We actually had this conversation with the team today about getting Power BI training more effectively rolled out across the team because how you can tell stories with data and be able to capture that and put that into our tool, our megaphone right, which does actually account for Power BI. It’s just a skill set that I think you look 10 years down the road and it might become somewhat table stakes like Excel or PowerPoint is now.

[00:26:09]

Jamin Brazil: Do you think in a right now world who is doing that really well? And is that the agency level or is it happening inside of the brands?

[00:26:21]

Daniel Stradtman: I think agency vendor level they tend to do really well in niches, right. So one of the trends of the last decade, decade and a half is you’ve really lost the middle-sized vendors, because they’ve been swallowed up into the bigger conglomerates and then they get rebranded in that. And so you end up with the big ones and then you end up with the boutique ones. And so the boutiques tend to do one or two things. They like to think they can do a lot of things and in some cases, they can but they do tend to do one or two things really well and so that’s fine. You can make a great living out of that. And the big ones I think have that greater continuity to be able to provide full service but in a procurement led world a lot of times they cost themselves out of it because they are adding price to everything. So I think there is definitely – in the vendor side that’s probably, what you are seeing is that these tools get developed and then they eventually work to get bought out or work to get kind of become part of these other things. So if you can catch them on the way up a lot of times you can get some really cool thinking at a pretty reasonable cost. I do think there is a ton of creativity going on on the corporate side. And just knowing a lot of folks I have worked with over the years and as that tree has gotten more full some of the former colleagues have had whether it’s’ TNS or Walmart or that. I mean I think you’ve got some in leadership positions in both the corporate side and the vendor side and there is just really cool stuff coming out of it. So I don’t mean to shut that question it’s just I think if you see a company that’s succeeding in the market most likely there is some cool stuff going on behind the scenes to help define their customers and define their value prop. Which is coming from market strategy and coming from insight.

[00:28:53]

Jamin Brazil: So when you add a new whether it’s a tool or agency or supplier what have you it could even be supporting the team from operational perspective, what do you look for?

[00:29:10]

Daniel Stradtman: We did these vendor days at Walmart when I was there and our VP there started them. And it was really this chance for kind of – it was like a speed dating thing over the course of a day or two. And they’d come in and they get their 40 minutes to pitch and 20 minutes of question and then it’s on to backdoor number two. And you do that all day for a couple days. And so from that came some great vendors and I like that. And I have used that process actually coming into Lubrizol now where we didn’t really have a big vendor set. What I realized at GE was I was doing some good stuff and I had a team that was doing some good stuff but I think I lost that kind of cutting-edge, that tap into cutting-edge. And so I viewed to not do that here at Lubrizol. So we’ve done two of those now, we will probably do a virtual one this year. So we do have that kind of speed dating thing set up where we ask folks purposefully to come in in a very small amount of time or to pitch in a very small amount of time, 30 to 40 minutes with some questions. And the reason is is that I want to see how well they get their point across. How well they get their value prop across. And it’s not like we can’t continue the conversation offline but I think having firms that can kind of produce that in that short amount of time if they can really come out of it and be impressed that bods well to their ability to write reports and to kind of be able to deliver what my expectations are. So hopefully I didn’t away the firm on that one but I do think that there is a benefit. I mean we tell them upfront like hey you’ve got a small amount of time so get to the point. I don’t need the full origin story. So that’s an element of it. We also try to do pilots. I think for a newer function at a company, which we certainly are, Lubrizol, and you want to have some success points to draw from. And then we want them to have a little bit of skin in the game. So look normally this might be a $40,000 project, so for this first one given there is an unknown quantity is there some skin in the game you can put into it to try to earn new business? And that’s worked out pretty well for both sides I think. I don’t think anyone has necessarily walked away going well that wasn’t worth the 10% price reduction or 20% price reduction or whatever. Because it gives them a chance to stand out. But it comes down to just saying look what’s the one thing you do better than anybody else in the world? And then what’s that project that if it came across your desk you guys will be like yup this is our fastball, right down the center and this is the one we hit out of the park 99 times out of 100. Because that allows us to set them up for success. When trying out a new vendor I don’t want to put them in a situation where they have to stretch necessarily to do something that isn’t in their wheelhouse. I’d rather if this is the one thing they do better than anybody give them a chance to prove that. And so I push that on my directors, I want them to work with who they feel comfortable with, who they think they can deliver against their accountabilities. And so thankfully the directors I have a lot of experience and I think do a good job of ultimately picking the partners they work with on custom work. And for that matter integrated work. With this new tool in the toolbox, we want to integrate all this integrated work into the tool because that’s going to make the search more powerful. And for some vendors that’s a really tough thing to hear because they work on sea licenses or they work on access by location. I mean how is that going to work in a post pandemic world? If you are charging based on how many sites accessed I mean that’s a struggling business model I think. So we want vendors who can kind of understand like if you can get into these systems you are going to get a lot more folks using the insights that you are generating therefore you are going to have value which means that you are less likely to lose business with us. So yeah, I mean, I think that’s a bit of a snapshot on how we make that evaluation.

[00:33:55]

Jamin Brazil: I love that and actually that’s like right in the middle of my ethos which is you need to add value in a freeway and if you do that then you build relationships with humans and those relationships wind up netting more projects, right. So like if we are really concerned with the terms of trade like they used to be even like two years ago, very transactional in nature then you can start – I think in the post pandemic you are going to start losing out to companies that have, I don’t want to say philanthropic point of view, but maybe more of a liberal point of view on how they are actually getting compensated for the insights.

[00:34:36]

Daniel Stradtman: Yeah I agree with you 100%. I think that’s easier said than done, right. And hopefully you are right. And don’t get me wrong, I mean, we are a for profit company as are any of these, right, in that. And so the goal is never to get something for nothing. I think the goal is to say how do we set up the relationship so that it is mutually beneficial and has a future. I really don’t like – I try to avoid transactional relationships as much as possible because market research from a career standpoint if you are five years into it right now you’ve got to understand it’s an extraordinarily small world. Extraordinarily. I connected today with a guy who I worked with at TNS who is in a new venture and I hadn’t talked to him in 12 years. But those relationships last. And so if you are good to vendors, if you are a good vendor like that’s going to resonate. And this is tough industry if you are known for being anything but genuine. So be genuine and be real and be fair as much as you can and I think it will work out.

[00:36:04]

Jamin Brazil: Words to live by. So as you think about building successful insights teams, strategy teams, is there again any principle that you’ve used to follow somehow to optimize the talent?

[00:36:18]

Daniel Stradtman: Yeah. So it’s evolved as I’ve gotten bigger teams and different accountability you definitely have to evolve it. But I mean I stole a couple points from VP at Walmart because he always said, “Look, you hire smart nice people.” And so I was like OK that makes sense, right, because smart – you need people to really be able to think through problems and figure stuff out. You need to have that kind of ability to do that. And even if the intelligence or the experience is a little bit off from what you are asking them to do, if they are smart enough and have that right mindset they’ll figure it out. Nice, I mean you want to have folks on your team who you enjoy working with. You want to have people who assume positive intent and interactions. I have evolved that over the years and include it in kind of a driven if you would and I actually don’t mind people who have a little bit of a chip on their shoulder to prove themselves because that shows that internal drive. There is a lot of reasons why people get up every day and go to work. For some it’s the outcome, for some its look they are trying to put food on the table for their family, for some it’s they love feeling that sense of accomplishment or being congratulated or getting that award. And any of those are fine as long as there is some drive internally that fuels you and I can work with that. Above all, you need ethical folks. You have to have an ethical orientation. If you don’t you shouldn’t – whether it’s an insights team or any other team I would struggle with that. And as I have been here at Lubrizol what I’ve really tried to focus in on is development and so we’ve created some roles on the team that are really meant for high potential talent maybe a little early in their career they doesn’t necessarily have to be insights people. So we kind of bring them and the goal is for them to spend a couple of years to increase their commercial acumen, increase their storytelling abilities, increase their analytical abilities and to really have more of a think external market driven mindset. Because those are cultural beliefs that we are moving the organization to be more focused on the market drivers. And so that’s been I think a real success. We’ve already had – even in the short time I’ve been here we’ve had one person come in from human resources function and then she has rolled off actually into a product management role in the additives business. And so by focusing in on that talent and really developing it we hope to be able to create evangelists in the organization that really have the ethos. Yes, along the way they might learn how to run a focus group or they might learn how to analyze a conjoint and that but it’s more about – it’s less about OK I know how to run a focus group and more about how do I create the insights out of that data. And then how do I turn that insight into something that’s actionable, into a strategy, into a new commercial opportunity, into the innovation point. And so that’s been a lot of fun here. But overall I’m blessed to have extraordinarily good people and teams and my hope is that can continue based on some of those ethos of how we try to bring people into the group and invest in them. Mentorship is critical so if you’re wherever you are at in your career you should always have folks who are your sounding board, you should always have folks who you can truly look to and are going to give you critical feedback. Another boss of mine always – I remember as an early manager I would – there was somebody who was working for me and I wasn’t happy with the results and so I tried to kind of do it. I tried to kind of go in there and fix things. And his point was like look you can do that or you can actually let that person have a performance to measure. Because if you just go in and fix everything then the performance is yours, it’s not that person’s. And so you’ve got to be willing to put in the work to give critical feedback that’s going to grow someone. So for that – that answers that question.

[00:41:14]

Jamin Brazil: I learned something from it so thank you for that. My guest today has been Dan Stradtman, VP of consumer and market insights at Lubrizol Corporation. Dan thanks for joining me on the Happy Market Research podcast today.

[00:41:24]

Daniel Stradtman: Yeah my pleasure, anytime. Take care and be well.

[00:41:27]

Jamin Brazil: Everyone else, if you found value in this episode like I know you did, please take time screen capture, share it on social media, tag me on LinkedIn or Twitter and I will send you a special gift. Have a great rest of your day.