2019 Year in Review
Contrary to popular belief, 2019 was the BEST! Ok maybe it wasn’t the best in many global-political ways, but it was a pretty darn great year here at Harvest.
I feel like 2019 was the year that we started coming into our own. One of the greatest challenges with starting a business is the sense of isolation before you can reasonably afford to bring others on board. I definitely experienced some of that in the first 4 years at Harvest. When I started, I was actually pleased to be freed from the burden of managing a staff (think of how much you can get done without all of those meetings), but then it became a bit lonely (who is going to listen to my not so funny jokes).
Ultimately, trying to conduct qualitative research while maintaining a quant practice was too much, and I had the good fortune of knowing exactly who to hire. So, I brought on Nicole who had been working freelance with me for a while to work on the quant. I also formalized our working relationship with Robin to handle the finances, proposals, and logistics. And bing bang boom…I wasn’t alone. Phew!
By mid-2019 the three of us had a good rhythm going, the work was coming in, and I was looking for new challenges. Actually…I wasn’t looking for a new challenge but rehashing a long-standing frustration with populating reports. If you haven’t heard my rant about the curse of copying and pasting from tabs to PowerPoint, then you are really missing out on some high-level intellectual outrage. Regardless, I set out on a course to try to find a better way and ran smack into the software known as Q with its alluring promises of direct connections from tabs to PPT. I was wooed.
Over the summer, we started to move from MarketSight to Q for all of our quant analysis. It was more difficult than I thought it would be as is well documented here. Still, we got through it. Well, Nicole actually got through it and I threw my hands in the air and said, “I’ll learn it when I’m not so busy.” Clock is still ticking on that one…although I can do the basics at this point.
Then, in the fall, it was time for a little more excitement – Sawtooth. I haven’t worked with Sawtooth in years, but a client had a particular need for Max-Diff, and I thought it would be like riding a bike. That was sort of right. The programming part was easy to pick up, but remembering the methodological details took a minute. Of course, Max-Diff is a gateway drug, and before I knew it, I was buying the whole conjoint package. In all honesty, I love choice exercises! I think they are far superior to measuring things by Likert scale. Don’t believe me? Next time you go to the grocery store to buy something, see if you find yourself rating your choices on a 10-point scale. Nope. Anyway, that’s a rant for another day.
All in all, we ended 2019 with some new capabilities, great partners, wonderful teammates, and new clients. What more could you want from a year??? Here’s to 2020 and all of the excitement it holds.
