Changing the Way Data is Collected

Editor’s Note: Guest contributor Scott McClymonds, founder of Fayetteville-based strategic consulting firm CEO Velocity, recently interviewed Rick West, CEO and co-founder of Fayetteville firm Field Agent, to discuss the company, its value proposition, culture and West’s approach to leadership.

 

In a nutshell, Field Agent has disrupted the retail industry by changing the way data is collected. Decision-making data that used to take expensive days and weeks to collect now can be gathered cost effectively in a fraction of the previous time using Field Agent’s technology and process.

Founded in April 2010, Field Agent specializes in mobile research and retail data collection. The company mainly serves consumer packaged goods companies and retailers with its mobile app that collects data like product pricing and availability from shoppers.

Field Agent is not just about data collection, though. Its differentiated value is the team members’ experience in the CPG industry. That makes it a valued partner to retailers, bringing game-changing wisdom and insights to their data gathering.

Besides technology and CPG experience, an additional piece of Field Agent’s value proposition is its ability to attract and retain talented people in Northwest Arkansas.

 

Scott McClymonds: “Rick, tell me what Field Agent is. How did it get started? How is it different from anything else? What is the point of it and why is it a passion of yours?”

Rick West: “Let me begin by giving you a little bit about our journey and how we got here. I am one of these former CPG people; I used to work at Procter & Gamble. I was there about 17 years then moved to Northwest Arkansas from Asia in 2001. The premise for the move was to start a company to bring the skills and expertise that we had acquired at P&G to the Walmart vendor community already here in Northwest Arkansas.”

SM: “What startup was that?”

RW: “It was called the NorthStar Partnering Group. NorthStar was primarily a shopper marketing agency. We worked on in-store marketing executions focused on bringing the store to life in ways that engaged shoppers along the path to purchase. This led to us running in-store health screenings and promotional events. We even launched RediClinic, Walmart’s first in-store medical clinic. Our overall focus was to provide solutions to the problems that vendors seemed to have as they were servicing Walmart.

“At NorthStar we were doing a tremendous amount of shopper research and this led us to launch a second company called CORE4 Research. CORE4 focused on shopper insights and NorthStar focused on marketing execution. Our real competitive advantage was the focus on the shopper versus the consumer.”

SM: “So, with tech companies, they don’t really have the experience to deal with the retailers or CPG companies. They say that they have a nice product, but it is really just a shiny object and they ask the client how they would make it work.”

RW: “Exactly. But more importantly, how do you make it work so that it fits into what they are doing as opposed to saying, ‘Yeah, you have to follow these steps and make these changes.’ The client would tell them, ‘I’m never going to do that. That is not how I work, so I’m not going to incorporate it.’ In essence, many of our competitors say, ‘It’s nice and shiny; it’s really pretty. Do you want to buy one?’ But if you understand why someone does something and how they do it, you will sign up all day long. And people get our ‘why.’ They get why we are doing what we do today.”

SM: “And why does that turn you on?”

RW: “There is nothing more satisfying than to see a problem that needs to be resolved and you actually fix the problem. So often in the corporate world you apply a bandage or you try to over-manpower something. Once the manpower leaves, the problem comes back up again and you must fix it a few more times. That is one aspect of Field Agent that really invigorates me.

“The second piece that really gets me excited is being able to deliver the solution here in Northwest Arkansas. We have 50 full-time employees, 25 part-time folks, and we are operating in six countries around the world. We’re providing not only meaningful work here but really meaningful engagements around the globe. It is not that often in your lifetime that you can solve a problem for an industry and create meaningful work using technology.”

SM: “I want to talk about your leadership philosophy for team and cultural building, how you got there and why you.”

RW: “Scott, I started out with the basic premise that to motivate employees or to put your team in position to be successful, you have to give them something bigger than themselves to believe in. From a business standpoint, I just laid that out for you. If you want to come alongside us, we’re going to change the way the world collects information. We use mobile technology and crowdsourcing to do that.

“We are also seen as a tech company in the flyover states, which is an interesting anomaly happening here. So that is really, really cool. We do really fun things here, but let’s go back to that giving someone something bigger than themselves to focus on. We believe that giving back to the community around you, the country you live in and the world you are a part of, can be a game-changer in who you are to your neighbors, who you are to your country, and who you are as a global citizen. We do that by providing opportunities for our employees to follow their passion. For each one of our employees, we have allowed them to follow that and there are some simple things we do. We allow our team members to have an extra week of vacation to follow their passion either in the community, the United States or the world; as long as that passion is something that they invest in from a faith-based standpoint.”

SM: “By faith-based, you mean what?”

RW: “In other words, if you want to go help out Hurricane Katrina and you want to go wash clothes on your own, that’s not what we’re really looking for. We want something that’s going to help people, not only from the physical but also the spiritual aspect. As long as there is some aspect of your faith that you are following, so it’s helping both the person’s soul and the physical, then we’re going to let you follow that passion. If you want to go work in an orphanage in Guatemala, we’re going to give you a week to go do that. The second thing we do is to give them a $500 stipend that they can use toward travel, hotel stay — whatever it takes to get them there, because we expect people to have skin in the game.

“And the third thing we do is to offer a $1,500 matching funds program each year that is a $1-to-$1 match for anything they have a passion for.”

SM: “What is the direction of the retail industry? How are the trends forcing you to adapt, and what are the trends?”

RW: “For the first 10 years, the primary conversation focused on the first and second moments of truth, which were coined by Procter & Gamble and Saatchi & Saatchi X. We know in the omnichannel aspects of things, you now have to limit that second moment of truth as well. For us and all the supplier communities in this area as well, you now have to win holistically, with the shopper and consumer at all facets, as opposed to picking and choosing. Studies will show that there will always be a reason or a need for someone to hold a piece of technology, sit down in a car and drive, or look at a certain washing machine or consumer electronic. There is always going to be a need to go and do that, right? But the question becomes, ‘While I’m standing in your location and I have done the touching and feeling, when I open up my phone I could buy it from an omnichannel provider such as Amazon and have it delivered to my house tomorrow at a better price.’ Amazon can provide a great zero-moment-of-truth experience, but they can’t provide the touching and the feeling, so the question for all of us is, how do I gain the loyalty and the experience of ‘I can win’ as opposed to become a transaction? Because if you are just a transaction, then price is going to win.”

SM: “Now we’re moving into entrepreneur advice. What is your advice for starting companies?”

RW: “The best advice I‘ve been given, bar none, was from Dr. Steven Graves. We were getting ready to do our startup in 2001, and we’re talking about our vision, our company and how we’re going to make things work. He said, ‘All right. Let me boil it down to this. As an entrepreneur, as a new startup, the best piece of advice I can give you is that you are only as good as you invoice and collect.’ It’s simple. You have to monetize. So, the simplest way to look at it is, if you’re not good at invoicing and collecting, you’re just going to die.

“Now, [this is] the second phase of that. I often tell people, if it’s not your passion, then find a partner and soulmate, someone to do this business with, that is not another big idea guy or an ideation kind of a guy. Find someone that is operationally focused or sales focused that can go help you create invoices and go collect. In my case, having great partners is important. I’ve got a partner here, Henry Ho. He loves the big ideas, the strategy and working with clients. We have another partner here, Marc Yount, an amazing operations guy that can run the day-to-day things and is a great leader of people.

“For me, I’m the creative guy that’s going to come alongside the team and set direction on where we are going and to champion our ‘why.’ When you put the three of us together, we can create, set strategy and get things invoiced and paid. It’s a really good mix. So oftentimes, it is just finding that right partner to help complete what you are looking for.”

SM: “Do you have any idea of where you want to be in three to five years with this company?”

RW: “When we talk to investment firms, and we talk to companies that use us, the common theme we hear is that [we] are probably the only one building a company as opposed to creating technology itself. My focus as CEO has been [to] continue to focus on quality and building a great product and a great engagement, great experience. Stay within the rails of what we do and let’s build a great company. That’s opposed to building a shiny object. So three to five years from now, we will be in a half-dozen more countries. Our growth here will continue to some degree as we become more efficient. I would say that we would probably have one or two or more products that are similar in nature to what we are doing today. But it will be a company that’s still viable, that’s producing a great product.”

SM: “So, staying within the rails has more to do with changing the way data is collected and outsourcing it, than it does within any particular industry?”

RW: “That’s right. We want to be creative within the rails to provide solutions to industries as long as we are collecting information.”

SM: “Rick, what about doing business in Northwest Arkansas? How do you view it?”

RW: “The world we live in here in Northwest Arkansas is a really interesting ecosystem. And so part of [the reason we stayed here is] we felt that we could find the talent here, and we thought we had tremendous influence in companies all around the world because of the influence of Walmart, Tyson Foods and J.B. Hunt. If you look at the labor pool we have here, the work ethic and the creativity, all the folks that are around us, we thought we had the best of all worlds in this circle. I think that [with the] mixture of consumer product companies and retail and all the stuff that has to do with the University of Arkansas, it’s a really, really interesting ecosystem.

“From a CEO’s standpoint, we need to work harder keeping our talent. I think it is going to be tough to continue to figure out how to do that. That’s part of the biggest challenge we have right now: finding and keeping talent in this area.”