Priscilla McKinney: That is recording. I forgot to mention to you also at the beginning it has a whole intro about digital transformation and that this is why you’re here. So it’s gonna seem like we jump in, but it has a good entry.
Edgar Baum: Sounds good.
Priscilla McKinney: Well, I met Edgar Baum once again at a CEO dinner. And we have just constantly connected with each other at so many different events in this industry, but we got a good chance to really talk. And I mean, there was just no reason to not bring you on this podcast because so many people are confused about some of the technology that’s out there, and so anyway, dispense with everything else. You are gonna love this episode because I’m gonna drop a few bombs in this one.
Probably not F bombs.
Edgar Baum: Whoa whoa, are you playing with my last name here? That’s not allowed since nine eleven.
Priscilla McKinney: I love that. I love that. Okay, well, as you hear, we have Edgar Baum with us here. He is the CEO of Avasta. And he is a strategic consultant and he operates on that dividing line between the intersection of market research and then growth intelligence, the strategy that really has to happen, the due diligence that’s needed and understanding.
How we evaluate businesses, what their worth really is, what they’re doing that is so indispensable. And so as you can imagine, Edgar has a very keen focus on it on industries. Specifically, we’re gonna talk about the market research industry today. So he’s been involved in all kinds of mergers and acquisitions. He has IP property. IP property property. That’s like saying an ATM machine. Hold on.
Let me change that sentence here. His work really spans strategic valuation, growth intelligence. He’s been involved in so many. I’m gonna do that whole thing again. Hold on. You know what? Let’s just take it from the top. We were getting somewhere until I dropped a bomb. And then that wasn’t good. So okay, here we go. We’re gonna take it from the top.
Edgar Baum: Hit me.
Priscilla McKinney: I have a wonderful guest today, someone who I love to have dinner with. In fact, just recently had dinner with him again in New York. And we ended up in an amazing conversation. And I just needed to make sure that my audience got to hear from him. I have Edgar Baum on the show today. Welcome to the show.
Edgar Baum: Hey, pleasure. Absolutely. I look forward to this. The best conversations are just when you try and leave a restaurant and you spend thirty minutes leaving. So that was a pleasure with you, Priscilla. So look forward to extending that now.
Priscilla McKinney: Exactly, exactly. I love it. I love it. Well, we’re gonna get pretty controversial in this episode, and I really expect nothing less from a conversation between me and Edgar. But he is the CEO of Avasta, and he is a strategic consultant, and he sits at the intersection of market research and growth intelligence. But listen, his work is all over strategic valuation, growth intelligence.
He’s been involved in so many mergers and acquisitions. His IP is across Fortune 500 companies. And, you know, the different private equity firms that he works with is actually on four continents. That’s, I’d have to say, I think you might win a prize on my show for that one, Edgar. But we’re gonna talk about what is really going on in market research. And this is such a unique perspective that he has because when you really are valuing businesses.
You get down to the nitty-gritty. Are they indispensable? Are they not? So, Edgar, let’s start with this about what you and I really consider to be a lot of the bullshit going on in market research today. So tell me what your primer is. How do you suss this out? Tell me what it is you’re seeing on that side.
Edgar Baum: So I want to dive into what I think is a general business governance challenge that is there. And I’ve had a number of market research industry clients as well. So helping market research industry companies understand how to propagate themselves. So this is not just somebody who has used market research, but somebody’s gone and evaluated and then worked with those companies to bring it to life. And the common thing that I’m kind of seeing is that there’s
A lot of smart people in business. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have gotten to where you are. But the risk that we all run, myself included, and I’ve done this in my own career, is to think that we have the best idea in the moment when what we actually need to be doing is facilitating for our customers to think that they’re spending money on their best idea. And the role of market research is to actually help you understand how many people in your target audience understand.
That your best idea matches their best idea, or there’s enough of them that have a best idea that you’re willing to go and deliver a product or service around. And it might just seem extremely simplistic, but that is the whole point of it. And I think we add a whole bunch of complexity and layer to this. And the part that really frustrates me, and this is more than a quarter century, gosh, I think I’m celebrating my 30 years as a market-facing professional here, which is.
People are not looking at the so what of the intelligence that they’re using to go and make a decision. And my probably biggest beef is that we look at averages and we think that it’s a uniform representation of the population. Or we aspire to the maximum and we think that just because we’ve identified the maximum, that we can achieve something that is feasible.
And to me, a big one is around total addressable market. You know, I just saw the latest news of Anthropic estimating that they have a $30 trillion TAM. And I’m like, great, you know what? Can you hit 1% of it? Because if you can, holy crap. Right? And that’s the piece that I think is kind of going on. It’s like you come up with big numbers or plausible averages, and then you never figure out how you can get to that aspect of it.
And to me, that’s a problem in finance. It’s a problem in market research. I just reviewed a market research report, comprehensive, 100-plus page documentation. And I just have these moments when I wince. I have a horrible poker face when I do this, but I went and took a look at it, and there’s a small percentage of the study that represents 70% of the revenue for our client. And I’m like, we all missed it.
Like I myself included, because I was just like, I’m gonna go with the given that the third party research is going to go and bias the study towards where the money is coming from. And that wasn’t done. And we thankfully have enough respondents and we’re able to go and do that work. But now what’s gonna happen is that from us looking at this from a market intelligence perspective, where’s the revenue gonna come from? We are gonna be severely downplaying a percentage of the respondents because the money’s not there.
And we’re significantly going up on the percentage where the money is there. And then now you’re gonna have a client who’s gonna go and take a look at this and say, hold on a second. I have a research report that says X and a financial validation report that says Y, and they’re in conflict. And they’re actually not in conflict. One is the dollar value, the other is the representation of the people who buy the category. And this is how we get in trouble.
Priscilla McKinney: Yeah. And so this is what’s interesting to me is that everybody has fought tooth and nail to digitally transform their teams, bring in the right technology, build platforms, do all, even upskill their people and try and think about it as change management. But how does this translate over to actual business valuation? And this is where I think there are very few people who sit at that intersection in this industry and say, how do we translate all that work into real value?
But I want to switch gears just a tiny bit, really a very tiny bit, because what is so interesting about this work you do, valuation around market research companies, is that market research, the product itself, is so tied to business success. So the irony is just rich here, right?
Edgar Baum: Look, I teach a graduate course on how to financially measure the role that brand plays for corporate value and being able to predict those ebbs and flows. I love market research. I remember going and doing an audit of a multi-million annual spend on market research and what else can we do this with, when I was at P&G a million years ago. And the part that’s crazy for me is I think we have regressed in the past quarter century in how to be able to use this.
Which is kind of weird because the total gross spend on market research supposedly is going up a lot. So I’m trying to figure out like what gives here. And what I’m realizing is that there’s a lot of spending that is going to validate ideas that people already have versus looking for the idea that is gonna give them the competitive edge. And that’s where I think I’m really, really pissed off with what I go and see, because there’s just a whole bunch of ego stroking or patting oneself on the back. And I kind of, you know.
I am a fan of market research that is kind of left outside the room often because I will not, you know, promote the Kool-Aid, if that makes sense. So that’s why I’m here. I’m shocked that I’m on the show, to be honest.
Priscilla McKinney: It’s my show, Edgar. I can have anybody on I want. I do want to underscore that pattern. I think that what you’re saying is that you see that pattern in companies that get research and marketing basics wrong. That we’re not here to use research just to validate what we’ve been doing all along. And we could talk about that in terms of survey panels and the respondents that are on it.
We could talk about that in terms of brand tracking. We could talk about crazy things like tying bonuses for CROs and CMOs to different metrics. And there’s a lot of ways that people then spend all this money digitally transforming their companies and creating these amazing platforms, amazing technology to deliver answers.
But it’s kind of like the old Douglas Adams, you know, the answer is forty-two, but what the hell was the question?
Edgar Baum: Yeah. I love that you went and brought that up because I still remember the first time I read the preamble to that book and I didn’t know what the hell had just happened to me. But I want to add two very key parts because I know the theme here is digital transformation, it’s the role of market research. But I think what’s so critical is what anchors the whole situation of the mischief making that is happening here. And so I’ll give you an example from another one of our client situations. Okay. Private equity owned, and private equity comes in and says, okay.
This is your revenue target for next year. Make the forecast show that you will achieve it. And I’m just like, this is like spreadsheet masturbation. Literally, it’s like all you gotta do is just make it look plausible enough to be able to happen. And so nobody’s actually figuring out what is the pathway to be able to get it. And it gets into this bizarre situation of like, I’m just gonna go and do things that look like we’re gonna get it. And if we get it, we’ll get there.
And if we don’t, well, we’ll just come up with another thing because nobody seems to audit what we went and did last year anyway. And this, I think, is the problem that is there on market research, and this is a problem that I see with CMOs, it’s a problem I’m starting to see in the finance function, as a lot of intelligence for finance is really getting turned on its head, is that there’s too much of an assumption that what worked for the past two to three years is a predictor of what’s going to work for the next two to three years. And we do not have enough.
Time left for that. There is so much what I would call acute disruption that is happening across every single industry that is being amplified by media and folks with money to be way out of proportion to what happens. But ultimately, and this is a market research principle, people’s behaviors are pretty consistent with the perceptions that they hold about what things will turn out as.
Whether that is real or not. And that is what is happening today. Right? We’ve seen AI adoption is not at the societal destruction level that was predicted a year, two, three years ago. We are seeing that we can have an absolute volatile chaos in the state of the global economy. And look, there’s a lot of people that are doing well because of it. There’s a lot of people that are not doing well because of it. And we just seem to have enough inertia that
It doesn’t seem to matter for enough that people don’t do anything about it. So, how does this come back to the market research side? It’s like, don’t give me the friggin’ average. Go and give me the leading indicator of where the change is coming from. And then also go and prove to me the stuff that is moving so friggin’ slowly because you got Charlton Heston there from my cold dead hands. Will I go and switch to an electric vehicle or will I go and buy a takeout coffee? Like
Like it doesn’t matter what that part is and we’re not showing that spectrum enough in our work. We’re trying to go and get to findings in one page and nobody bothers to go and look at the composition of those findings. And then people go and say, well, it went up like point two. I guess nothing has happened. It’s like, hell no. Do you realize that that point two was twenty percent of the market starting to hate your brand and fifteen percent of your brand market saying, my god, I found my nirvana and I’m only gonna buy from this company ever again?
But the average worked out to point two, so you do nothing.
Priscilla McKinney: Do you think it’s a case of, you know, we’re not doing the research right, or we just don’t know what to do with this research that is, you know, which is right? That you kind of oppose two different things because on one hand, you’re saying, look, people are kind of going through the motions, we’re regressing, we’re maybe not even doing the right kind of research, or the other side, which you’re saying, look, if the research is being done right, but
We’re not really looking at it and we’re not understanding it. It is just basically forty-two to us. Where those are two things you said. I’m just kinda curious where do you think we weigh out in that right now?
Edgar Baum: So okay, hold on. Let me go and, you know, blow up my foot a little bit before I stuck it in my mouth now. Okay.
Priscilla McKinney: Okay, well this is Edgar, you did actually warn me that you might go on one of your unemployable streaks. So go ahead.
Edgar Baum: Yes. Yeah, yeah. We may not even need to ask you that question. I think I’m about to demonstrate it. Okay. So here’s what I have. Okay. There’s a certain cadence that is happening across most, I don’t even want to call industries. Anything that is kind of institutionalized, okay? Academia, politics, volunteerism, nonprofits, NGOs. They all kind of fall into this rut. Businesses fall into this rut. And what it is, it’s the perpetuation of the status quo.
Where it is, I have a greater incentive to spend money at perpetuating the status quo rather than taking advantage of the fact that there’s a critical mass of people who don’t want to do it. So I’ll kind of give you an example. The political cycle pretty much doesn’t matter whether you are in the UK, Germany, France, United States, state level, Canada, Brazil. I don’t really care. You know what happens? You got elected and your number one job is to go and make sure you get elected again.
Okay, because you gotta perpetuate what’s gonna go and give that. So what is happening as equivalent to the market research world is we just want a client who wanted to go and get something. Why are we getting most of our clients? Well, most of our clients want us to go and demonstrate that their idea was right. So Charlie Munger says, “Show me the incentive, I’ll show you the outcome.” Hello, we get paid $300,000 to go and tell Joe and Jane.
That their idea about where to go and take their product or their brand or their business is exactly what they think. Sure, I’m pretty sure we can go and find enough evidence for it. And, you know, to protect our own credibility, we may go and push back a little bit on slide seventy-eight of the appendix.
Priscilla McKinney: Mm, okay.
Edgar Baum: Right? And that’s okay. Hold on. That’s the part that pisses me off. Hold my beer. I got 40. Okay. I still have a client situation in the research industry. I won’t say which client because it’s gonna out it too much. But I remember seeing a report from a year and a half before we were brought in. The best slide was in the appendix, which showed the composition of market research industry consumption. It was actually a really good study.
None of it was in the executive and the board level guidance. And I’m like, you guys went and paid hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe a million dollars plus, to go and get an intelligence report, and the best slide is in the fucking appendix. Like the rest of it, the first 20 to 30 pages was literally just like, yeah, you guys are fine, you’re gonna have some challenges, blah, blah, blah. I’m like, hold on a second. You literally gave the segmentation of who buys your stuff and who ignores your stuff. That should be front and center of what you do. But you know why they didn’t present it?
That’s not what they got hired for. They got hired for, yeah, you know, you guys are doing a great job with the products that you’re coming out, with your geographic expansion, you’re doing good at finding major accounts and partnering with blah blah blah. I’m like, screw that. I look, I take a look at it. If you do nothing, how long until your business goes bankrupt? Then you start building on top of that.
Priscilla McKinney: Okay, so that’s a lot of the problem that’s happening. Now let’s shift just a little bit and talk about what do you think should be happening here? Because let’s just pretend that Company X figures out that the most important slide is that one in the appendix, and they pull it out and they bring it to the top. And now what do they need to do in order to understand what’s changing in
Customer behavior and what they’re gonna need to do for better adoption. Like what would you propose the action would be to get away from what you’re calling this love and clinging onto of the status quo?
Edgar Baum: Yeah. So I think there’s two things. There’s the client-vendor relationship, and then there’s the client-to-their-customer-based relationship. Right. So the part that’s extremely frustrating is some variant of the client-to-their-customer relationship of “I want to keep generating revenue and profitability without having to change what I’m doing.” And then the vendor-to-client relationship is “I want to be able to go and make sure that I’m able to get this client back again,” versus
What, and this is where I’m in an extreme minority, and in fact I run an entire business off of this minority and somehow we still manage to make some money, is that we should not do the next phase of work if we are being paid to validate our own engagement at the full compensation for it, that’s a problem. That is not being impartial. And I think the aspect of it is you need to be able to convey that somebody else should be coming in and doing X.
Right? Like you’re able to provide intelligence, you’re not in the change management space. Go and find that for somebody else to come and do that. Like, who do you work with that is good at this aspect of it? We work with a bunch of agencies that are very good at articulating the communication findings that come from how we put a financial value onto the market research partners’ work that we pull in, or the research that we design ourselves because of the nuance of what is being asked for. But not a lot of organizations are willing to operate like that. And I think that’s the challenge here. So
What it kind of goes back to is why am I unemployable, because I am unwilling to go and perpetuate the status quo because I’m constantly asking the questions of how can I, without being malicious, take advantage of the status quo for mutual benefit. And that does not seem to be the training that we have across all of business and organizational governance. And then every once in a while we see companies that come in.
And actually operate that way, and we’re like, wow, they’re amazing, “how great brands grow” or “built to last.” And it’s like you cherry-picked one out of 30 million companies, and you’re like, well, this is how you do it. I’m like, there’s a reason why the other 29 million and change didn’t figure this stuff out because they had greater incentive to maintain the status quo. And going back to digital transformation, etc., what is digital transformation?
That is called I am keeping up with the Joneses at a critical mass for people who are like, why isn’t this digitized? You know, I had a conversation with my wife where she was explaining to our daughter who’s eight. She’s like, “How come we didn’t, you know, how come we’re using our phone to navigate and we don’t have a map?” And my wife had to explain to her, “When I was your age, every single bus route in our city had a map. They don’t print those anymore.” Can you imagine that you needed to have like 15 different maps because of 15 different buses that you take throughout the year?
And it’s like that whole concept of like, we consolidated a whole map industry into an iPhone. Right? So that’s that dynamic that’s there. So digital transformation is just like keeping up for how people will default to behave at a default level. And it’s unsexy. And I think that’s the problem with market research, is we’re not willing to say what will just change and you had nothing to do with it, and what won’t change, and there’s nothing you can do about it.
Priscilla McKinney: I hate to boil this down, but just as you’re talking, I just think it boils down to a couple of things. It’s first of all, what you’re talking about is a rigor. It’s a love of the rigor and being really sold out to that. The other thing which is just so sorely missing in business today is that critical thinking piece.
Like not being able to connect the different parts together. And I love that, to your point, when we can’t connect it, we end up doing parts of it very poorly, which means we don’t love the rigor, which, to your point, it’d be better to call someone in who’s an expert for it. But the other thing that I heard you say earlier, and I think it calls back here, is also if we can get the rigor and the critical thinking straight, then we have all of this extra time, space, mindset.
To be able to be creative and see what’s the thing out there that we can’t test for, but that we can embody, we can go explore. So that’s a great place to kind of put us to talk a little bit about your consortium of people. Like you have a cohort that you’ve put together at Avasta, and this isn’t a commercial for Avasta, but seriously, Edgar, it is a different approach, and I think it’s worth pointing out to people.
How you go to market. So even though usually I start with this at the top of the show, what do you do? Now let’s talk just really quickly about what you do because I think it will provide the context for a couple of questions I want to ask you about some advice about what people should do next. So tell me about your group there and how you all approach some of these things differently.
Edgar Baum: Yeah, I appreciate you kind of giving me that opportunity. I’ll put it within the lens of the market research space that’s there. We absolutely use market research and most market research spending by a company will never go through us. And the reason for it is we really play the objective, like who watches the watchers role that is there, because what we are very good at is whether from a market valuation and your opportunity to grab that value in the market.
Or from a which way is the wind blowing, or where’s the puck going, or where’s the football being thrown, pick your analogy, we put that financial benchmark and we identify how quickly and slowly it is moving depending on the cohort in the market. So we developed something called the winnable addressable market, which is, hey, given the total spending of this type in the category and the mix of the vendors that make this available, or the people, companies, service providers that bring this to life.
And the customer base and how well they understand this or not, who’s moving fast, who’s moving slow, who wants to do something but they can’t because they’re in a contract or they don’t have the financial or the infrastructure means to be able to make it happen right now. But if you solve that problem for them, they will buy from you in an instant, right? So we provide that. And what that does is it now goes and gives market research. It’s like, we don’t need to survey the whole of the marketplace for our pulse checks and our brand monitoring. We should be going and
Identifying very early in our screener whose voice we actually want to listen to, versus getting it put into a whole cloud of noise by trying to average out or use statistical probability from a whole bunch of people who aren’t even worth it in the first place. And it’s not a disparagement of them, it’s just that it’s not a fit. And I think we’re in this bizarre kind of, you know, everyone is equal. It’s like, screw that. Nobody’s equal when it comes to the world of business.
You very much want to sell to the person who will buy from you 10 times rather than the one who will buy from you once. And I don’t think we’re willing to acknowledge that aspect of it enough in the work that we do. So that would be that aspect of it that’s there. And on the valuation side, I am a massive stickler that you need to understand where and why is the range of valuation in your industry. At a minimum, we split it into quartiles.
Of transactions that happen in your space rather than, you know, our industry multiples are 11 times EBITDA. I’m like, that’s the most useless effing number on the planet because you know why? 98% of transactions don’t transact at 11 times EBITDA. They transact at two times EBITDA or at 40 times EBITDA. By the way, those are once in a blue moon. So there’s actually a distribution somewhere in there, and you gotta be able to figure out which one you fit. So we very quickly look at
Transactions as comparables. We’re like, my god, there’s like 300 transactions in this space in the past eight years in North America. We’re like, how many of them are remotely similar to what our client is trying to do and the company trying to buy them or the company trying to invest in them? It’s like, shit, we just threw out 90% of them. Well, let’s look at the remaining 10, they’re in that third quartile. You should be charging a premium. They want to charge a premium because their upside
Is there, it’s worth it for them to pay the premium to buy your company because they can’t find another company like you to buy at a lower price. And that thinking doesn’t happen.
Priscilla McKinney: It always brings us back to, you know, your company is worth what someone is willing to pay for it. So yeah, I love what you’re saying here. I know a lot of people ask you that opinion because there is a lot of merger and acquisition going on in this industry. And you’re right, it’s not just our industry. Anybody listening to this knows that this is not, we might be using market research as an example, but this is happening in so many industries. We are living really in a
Disruption age. And you know, if you think about how quickly disruption is happening, it is kind of mind-boggling. Yes, I get it, the horse was a disruption, you know. I get it that the car was a disruption of the horse. I get it, you know, and so on and so forth. But, you know,
We, in our own lives, if you give us 10 minutes, we could probably list a hundred disruptions that absolutely changed the way we work. I mean, we’ll start with Uber. So it is one of those things. And so because it is so accessible to have your company evaluated and then to put it out on the market, it is different now than it has been before. You can really get experts looking at it.
People think that’s kind of straightforward and easy. And I’m sure they come to you asking, tell me what things are selling for in this market right now. And I love that you’re saying that’s just not really true.
Edgar Baum: Yeah. Well, it’s not like, my favorite one is like, “gimme the answer before we hire you.” I’m like, hold on. I have a number of monochrome companies. They have an office here, here, here, here, here. Right? You can go to them and they will charge you ten times as much as we will. But we will go and give you the truth. And that pulls the Jack Nicholson, “you can’t handle the truth” aspect of it right there, ’cause that was just totally inadvertent. But I think
Priscilla McKinney: We got a lot of famous quotes from Douglas Adams on through Charlie Munger.
Edgar Baum: Yeah, absolutely. But they really point to something and that’s why they kind of perpetuate in society. And I think what all this kind of goes to is when you talked about rigor. And I think that aspect of that rigor is really, really absolutely, look, I got trained in market research from multiple angles. I got trained in market research from a macro, a synthesis point of view, in taking a look at like pension fund investments for ten to thirty years.
And you really need to be able to figure out, okay, how far down do we have to go before we find the signal? Right? And then I got trained from bottoms up at P&G, literally auditing how much more value can we get out of these new methods of market research that are emerging as society is becoming digitized. And we went and discovered that the modality of the research collection did not match the modality of how business decisions were being made. And then people are like, why are we spending this money?
And all you had to do, and it’s not simple, right, but all you had to do was translate how we collect to how we enact, with the bridge being the customer. And I think that has stopped because we have become more interested in a standard research report rather than what will my client be able to do with the information that I find for them that is consistent with the business decision that they need to make.
And that’s no longer happening and not enough people are pushing back. Why? Because they’re in the political cycle of “I want to be able to get this revenue back for myself and I’m willing to do it.” And look, I’ve been guilty of it throughout my career and I’ve increasingly just taken a look at, okay, am I willing to walk away from this business because they want me to validate something that we may come back and show is not a fit. And if they say, “no, prove me that I’m right,” I’m like, don’t hire us.
Priscilla McKinney: I can’t do that. That does remind me, it is constant in the CMO world where their bonuses are based on outcomes in the brand tracker. And so then your job becomes eventually just to basically manipulate the brand tracker. It is, in my opinion, cut from the same cloth of these problems. But listen, what I want to do as we close
Is to think about this. Now I gave you the favor, if you really want the truth about your company where they’re at, definitely call Edgar and his team over at Avasta. But for my listeners today, what’s something tangible they can take away from your mindset about that winnable, addressable market methodology that you have? I think it’s so keen. And I think if people could just start thinking differently
That would be helpful. So what would you say to business owners who are wanting to make sure that what they’re doing is creating value?
Edgar Baum: I would say the number one thing that I’d recommend, and this is something any market research buyer can start asking for, and any market research seller can start delivering, whether they’re qualitative, quantitative, or data synthesis and analysis, and the biggest one for me is you gotta break the market down into consumption cohorts. Don’t slice by income, don’t slice by age, don’t slice by gender.
If it’s B2B, don’t slice by product that they’re buying from you or whatever the hell it is. You have to figure out when can people transact in-commerce. And I don’t know why that is not perpetuating. I have read hundreds of client market research engagements in the past 70-plus years since I started Avasta. And it blows my mind how time is like an absent element in the research in almost all cases.
There’s trajectories, it’s how much we think the valuation is going to come up, but just split it up. Ask the question: when do you want to buy? When can you buy? When did you buy? Or whatever the equivalent is, like when did I, I don’t know, go to the university or make a donation or go to the hospital or my doctor or something like that. But some unit of time, I just don’t get it. Everything’s either a snapshot, and then you have to have your client figure out which way the wind is blowing.
Edgar Baum: Or it’s such a vast number that it gives a false illusion of success being imminent.
Priscilla McKinney: Hmm, okay. Gosh, you know, what will it take to get this switched? I mean, that this is just not how people are approaching research at this point.
Edgar Baum: Yeah, I have an inference that because of the challenges to the finance function that is being adopted increasingly, like half of our client engagements are now either finance funded or run through finance in terms of it, because they’re in the same boat. Like, “we’ve been growing at eight percent per year, let’s grow at eight percent per year in our forecast for the next three years.” That’s getting them fired. So they’re now having to become
Able to start demonstrating this. And if they can go and show the cadence of demand and what is a responsible forecast that they can generate, I actually think that the access to market research credibility is to being able to de-risk the finance function rather than ego stroke product, R&D, marketing, brand, creative, whatever the heck it may be. And I’ll stake my business on that.
Priscilla McKinney: Wow. Okay. Well with that we’ll drop that last bomb, the Edgar bomb. So if you are interested in continuing this conversation, first of all, just go to dinner with Edgar, because that’s what I do in order to keep having the conversation.
Edgar Baum: I’m game. I’m happy to give you my calendar of travel schedules across North America and Europe and Asia.
Priscilla McKinney: I love it. I love it. Well, go check out what they do at Avasta.co and obviously you can find Edgar on LinkedIn. It’s Edgar, E-D-G-A-R, Baum, B-A-U-M. So go look him up and start a controversial conversation with him. Edgar, thank you so much for sharing your expertise so willingly.
Edgar Baum: Priscilla, thank you for letting me start out of the box.
Priscilla McKinney: Ha ha.
