Colson Steber: I have a passion for getting to learn absurdly too much about extremely obscure topics.

Merrill Dubrow: My name is Merrill Dubrow, CEO of M/A/R/C Research. I'm a 35-year veteran of the research and insights community and the host of our podcast, On the M/A/R/C. On the M/A/R/C is focusing on executives and thought leaders in the world, sharing their insights, strategies, and personal experiences. I promise this podcast will be filled with tough, pointed questions with real, insightful, and emotional answers. Today's guest is my good friend, Colson Steber, Co-CEO of Communication for Research. Colson, welcome to the On the M/A/R/C Podcast.

Colson Steber: Thanks, Merrill. Happy to be here.

Merrill Dubrow: All right. So we're gonna get into it. Before we get into some serious stuff, I've got to tell you something. I found something on your LinkedIn profile over the weekend that I was kind of curious about. So it says something about dough tosser extraordinaire on your LinkedIn profile. So, if I'm having a pizza party, are you the guy I send for to come over?

Colson Steber: Yeah, absolutely. My side passion is definitely cooking. And I spent four years of college at the iconic pizza place of my college town. And there, in the early days of smartphones, there was lots of videos of me tossing pizza dough in the corner.

Merrill Dubrow: Wow. So do you have the record of this – In this pizza place of tossing it 19 feet in the air and catching it behind your back or something?

Colson Steber: No. But anybody that knows Shakespeare's Pizza knows that every single weekend, day and evening, it's a line out the door and a two hour wait. And I can definitely throw a pie, sauce it, and cheese it in under 30 seconds.

Merrill Dubrow: Can you really? Wow, that's fast. That is really, really fast and impressive. So, now, let's get into some serious stuff. Why don't we start with just give the listeners an overview of your career in your company.

Colson Steber: After I finished my MBA in Finance and Economics, I was way finding as an adjunct professor of statistics and personal finance. And my father was begging me to come back and help him to run the business. And, so, I joined the company beginning of 2012 and went on what I called the accelerated life path. I actually ended up purchasing the business four years later in May of 2016 with a guy that had worked for my father for 15 years before that. And we became Co-CEOs and have absolutely transformed the business model in the last five years to grow the company and grow up as leaders to meet the current needs of the research industry.

Merrill Dubrow: That's great. So let's start with that, with your dad. I mean, was it when you graduated you knew you wanted to go into research or was there pressure when you were playing T-ball also from your dad, "Hey, you gonna go into the family business when you're old enough."

Colson Steber: Yeah. I mean, if you'd have asked me three months before I did it whether I would have ever worked for my father, I would have told you absolutely not. So I did, obviously, have an affinity to market research, as I spent my young years doing data entry on syndicated research that we actually still run today. Did telephone interviewing for a couple of different call centers in the early days. I mean, it was a constant topic in my household, but I didn't realize it was for me. I just knew I wanted to be an entrepreneur and own my own business. And, then, when you get out of college and you're facing going to be a financial analysis at some mega company, you look around and say, "Wow. If I just go join my family business, I can probably own this thing within five years." And market research is something I already know a hell of a lot about. And it became my adopted industry because I have a passion for getting to learn absurdly too much about extremely obscure topics.

Merrill Dubrow: So you bought the company about a little over what, four and a third years ago?

Colson Steber: Yep.

Merrill Dubrow: And give me, maybe, four or five words to describe the first four plus years of experience for you and your partner. Just a few words.

Colson Steber: Survival. Excitement. Strategy. Growth.

Merrill Dubrow: How about one more?

Colson Steber: Difficult.

Merrill Dubrow: Wow. You know, it's funny, I thought you were gonna say stressful, but you didn't. So let's talk about this for a second, in terms of you mentioned a few minutes ago, you've transformed the company from what it was four years ago to what it is today. Let's talk a little bit about that. What's transformed and how did you guys do it?

Colson Steber: The company was always a market research data collection business that – Who's most of the revenue, even when I joined in 2012, well, it came from telephone interviewing, which was quickly disappearing in a world where the default option is to do online surveys. So I set out to expand our capabilities based off of our deep expertise in agriculture research, which was about 80 percent of what we were doing. I realized that we knew a lot about how to engage B2B respondents, and felt that we could take those recruiting and data collection skills and apply it back to other markets. So I spent the next, probably, five years working to expand what we're doing to where now agriculture research is only about half of what we do. And we're really a partner back to the market research industry, doing what I call research logistics, planning, executing, and setting other researchers up to succeed with output that is ready to use and technically sound.

Merrill Dubrow: Cool. No, that's exciting. That's great. It's funny, I get asked this a lot, "Merrill, you're a CEO." Yeah. "What do you do?" I'm gonna ask you that. What's an average day for you as a Co-CEO?

Colson Steber: Average day, I wake up at 5 am. I have a set of five core habits and a ritual for the morning that takes – That I complete over the first two hours. Say bye to my family, get here to the office about – Between 7:15 and 7:30. I review my priorities and typically am trying to knock some things out before – That are on my own to do list. And, then, by nine o'clock, I'm typically on video calls. And, then, I'm on video calls until 5 pm.

Merrill Dubrow: Wow, that's interesting. So you and I have at least one of those things in common, we both get up at 5 am. You mentioned five habits, what are the five habits?

Colson Steber: I start every day by reviewing all of the pictures from the same day in previous years on our Amazon Photos, and sending one to my wife and telling why – Her why I'm thankful for her and our family. Then I meditate for 20 minutes.

Merrill Dubrow: Wow.

Colson Steber: Then listen to an audio book or podcast while I do some form of cardio workout. And, then, I have my fifth that I added more recently is that I do a check in with every member of my family, where they – Everyone shares how they're feeling to start the day and what they're looking forward to during the day.

Merrill Dubrow: Wow, that's nice. So if I kind of bucketed those together, it's almost like you take care of yourself before you're ready to take care of the business and your staff. That's really special. Good for you.

Colson Steber: Well, it is very essential and fundamental.

Merrill Dubrow: That's great. Let's start with an easy one, what's the hardest part of your job?

Colson Steber: I view things that are clearly extremely complex as simple in my own mind, and have a difficult time meeting others where they're at and being an effective leader, meaning I have to be very intentional about listening, my own coaching skills, and realizing that other people don't know what I know, and I need to not be an arrogant ass when I go to help them with how to get better.

Merrill Dubrow: That's good. It's interesting, you talked about leadership, and you mentioned a few minutes ago that you grew up as a leader, you've grown as a leader. How do you think you've grown as a leader from, maybe, Colson from, maybe, in 2015 or '16 over the last four or five years Colson, how have you grown?

Colson Steber: I'd say in 2015 I believed that my vision was so strong that I had to force things to happen, and have always prioritized thinking about systems, but I always had somewhat of an ego that I knew the best way. Whereas, that was clearly not the case. And I spend an immense amount of time reading and absorbing information from outside sources now to gain awareness and keep my own growth mindset malleable so that I can learn from what comes in and better influence those that are actually on my team.

Merrill Dubrow: No, that's cool. No, that's – To have self-awareness, Colson – And that's one of the things, I've known you for a lot of years and, truth be told, I knew your dad and I know how proud he is of you and everything you and your team has accomplished, and good for you.

Colson Steber: Thanks.

Merrill Dubrow: To have great self-awareness is something that not a lot of people have. When you have self-awareness, you know how to change, you know how you're perceived, you can get better at things. And not enough people have that, in my opinion, so that's great that you definitely have that. We're going to switch gears for a second. True or false, your company is gonna be stronger after COVID. True or false.

Colson Steber: True.

Merrill Dubrow: Yeah. I knew you would say that. Now here's the big question, why?

Colson Steber: March, I did probably did a year's worth of deep dive on financial forecasting, budgeting, and modeling that is – Are now systems that will forever improve our own – Our managerial financial decision making. I cannot ignore the enormity of the impact of the essentially free credit that is being handed out right now. I was ridiculously undercapitalized and now have taken on an immense amount more debt, but am more confident than ever that that'll be able to fuel growth. And, then, business was so slow that it forced me to slow down. I was supposed to have three days in the office in all of April because I was traveling. I obviously went nowhere. I had never had people dedicated to customer development, account management in sales until the beginning of 2019 with two internal promotions. And I realize that my own sales management was massively lacking and I needed to really upgrade the skill set of them, which – And we had the space to do that because we received as many proposals in the month of April as we typically do in a week. And we – I spent over 40 hours with those guys that month, just doing sales skills coaching.

Merrill Dubrow: So you obviously mentor a lot of people. Have you had – Other than your dad and probably your partner, do you have mentors that have helped you along the way?

Colson Steber: Yeah, absolutely. I'd say I have taken a lot away from, in terms of influential people within our industry, Jude Olinger, I'd put you on that list, Jamin Brazil, which you guys actually talked about self-awareness on his podcast episode with you.

Merrill Dubrow: Yep.

Colson Steber: I've learned a ton from – I have a mentor through the Young President's Organization right now. I am a mentor in the WIRe Mentor Program right now, which has been a great experience. I have a very tight knit support group. One of my very good friends is a partner at Chapman & Co. Consulting Firm here in St. Louis. We lean on each other constantly. That would just be the start of the list.

Merrill Dubrow: Yeah. I mean, certainly, I know a number of those people, Jude, Jamin, I mean, and first of all, thank you for putting me on that list. That's very kind. I mean, those guys are really terrific leaders in the industry, very, very smart people who love to share, so that's great. Why don't you finish this sentence, clients of today don't understand blank.

Colson Steber: How important screening questions is to the quality of their data.

Merrill Dubrow: That's great. So they're just rushing through it and they're not giving you as much information?

Colson Steber: I mean, we work with researchers. Researchers, oftentimes, are extremely focused on the objectives of the research study, the data, and how they're going to do analysis on that. But making sure that you've got screening questions that appropriately include everyone that should be part of the sample population, but also don't kick people out that shouldn't, is an art. As the data collector that does 85 percent B2B work, where you're dealing with audiences that have technical expertise within a subject matter area, it is extremely frustrating to deal with subjective screening requirements or to lack an understanding of how the decision making models might differ between different supply chains. And, so, we work to understand the audience and how we're going to engage them and provide feedback to improve those screening criteria to be reflective of getting a representative population. But that is typically us at the bottom of the totem pole challenging something that has already been approved by ten different people. No one had spent any time reading the screening questions.

Merrill Dubrow: Yeah, no there's some good takeaways there. I appreciate that. So, look, being a CEO myself, there's a ton of pressure that I put on myself, obviously the responsibility of all the staff that works on our team adds pressure. There's a lot of pressures on today's CEOs. I mean, other than meditating, do you have any best practices or can you share with the listeners how you handle stress when it gets really overbearing and it's just, wow. You're having that type of day that you're ready to explode. How do you handle that? Any ways that you can share?

Colson Steber: In a short-term bad situation, I take a walk. I work a lot to have continual processes for self-renewal and creating awareness. And that includes having, essentially, an annual journal that I set aside an hour a week, half a day, a month, and two to three days every year, to just sit and take that clarity break and get crystal clear on my priorities and work priorities and exactly what my goals are and how I'm – How my actions are aligned to achieving them.

Merrill Dubrow: That's great, Colson. So let's end with this. We get a lot of executives who will be listening to this and whose companies may be struggling a little bit. Is there any last minute comments or any best practices or anything you want to throw out there to help them through this difficult time?

Colson Steber: Reach out to me and let me know what the situation is. And I read at least 25 books a year, most of which are business and leadership and self-improvement books, so I can – I usually have a book that I think goes deep on any given topic. Right now, I'm reading Team of Teams by General Stanley McChrystal. It's a great book.

Merrill Dubrow: That's great, Colson. Well, listen, I can't thank you enough for your time today. Thanks again for listening to Colson Steber. This is the On the M/A/R/C Podcast. My name is Merrill Dubrow. Have a great day.