Recorded live in Miami, Jamin Brazil interviews Rob Volpe, CEO of Ignite 360. We hope you enjoy this mini series taking you into the minds of some of the most influential CEOs in Market Research.

Find Rob Online: LinkedIn https://www.ignite-360.com

[00:02]

My guest is Rob, Ignite360.  What year did you start Ignite360?  

[00:09]

January 2011.  So it’s just been over eight years now.

[00:13]

What day in January?

[00:14]

January 1st.  1/1/11.

[00:16]

[laughs]  That’s awesome.  Super easy to remember.

[00:20]

Very, very easy.  Yeah, good anniversary to celebrate.

[00:23]

Yeah, so what exactly do you guys do?

[00:25]

So, we’re a full-service insights and strategy firm as there are so many.  What really sets us apart is the depth that we go and bringing empathy between our clients and their consumers or their constituents, and then delivering all of that through compelling story.

[00:43]

Do you use technology?  Is it predominantly services around that?

[00:47]

Yes, it’s some tech; a lot of face-to-face, in-person; 101 interview groups.  We combine often qualitative and quantitative, depending on what our clients are looking for.  I often talk about our clients coming to us for, what I say, are the higher degree of difficulty problems, things that C-Suite might be looking for, those natty problems that they need to really spend some time thinking through.  We tend to be their partner to go through and solve that.

[01:16]

CEO Summit 2019, Insights Association – what’s your one big take-away?

[01:21]

First of all, it was amazing.  I came in, first time here, came in with no expectations.  I wasn’t sure what I was going to get. I have a client that here that kind of put it on my radar.  And I thought, “Oh, let me go check this out.”

Really appreciated the honesty, the openness, the vulnerability of the other CEOs.  Something I went through when I was starting my company is you realize that that saying, “It’s lonely at the top,” is true.  It’s very difficult to be CEO of a company. You can’t even… Your most trusted partner in crime does not understand everything that you’re going through.  And I’m also the owner of the company, so there’s that added layer there. So being able to network and meet people and hear like, “Yeah, Ok, we’re all going through very similar things.”  I’ve been able to talk through some of our business challenges, what we’re thinking about and see how that’s lining up to what other people do. For us, particularly, it’s around business development and what habits and practices other people have to grow their engine.   

[02:30]

Love it.

[02:31]

The business development piece is kind of interesting; I’m pulling that out because in business there’s operational development, there’s HR, there’s legal, there’s all these tranches of expertise.  As you know, given your founder status, you have to be an expert in everything.

[02:49]

Yeah.

[02:50]

And we all know that’s really hard.  Oh, and you also have to be a really good researcher,   

[02:53]

Absolutely.  First and foremost, yeah.

[02:56]

Right.  So, in that framework, it’s great to be able to pull information from other people who might have more experience in any of these other areas so that we can get shortcuts in our business and not have to go through the 101 learning stage.

[03:12]

We resourced intentionally against that when I brought my COO in.  She’s a functioning COO: client-side, agency-side, goes out into field, does research.  But she is so brilliant at systems and processes and so when we came in, she joined us in 2013.  Pretty much everything before that was like the Wild West. And I look back now, and it’s amazing to me that we got stuff done and that we didn’t have more problems or issues than we did.  But Lisa came in and really put systems and processes into place, which we still follow to this day and continue to evolve. There’s no sacred cows in what we do; so we’re always at process improvement.