PURESPECTRUM - Michael McCrary (Founder & CEO). The entrepreneurial journey to build a $50m+ business in 5 years, trends and differentiation in panels, the battle to maintain data quality.

The evolution of the sampling/ panels business and Michael's entrepreneurial journey

Brought to you by Horizon, the #1 Market Validation Software  https://www.gethorizon.net/

 In this episode we cover:

• How Michael has one well-behaved dog
• Pathway through the industry
• The evolution of panels and panel economics
• Raising money
• Advice for early stage businesses
• Balance between growth rate and ebitda
• Product development & sales approach
• The relentless pursuit of data quality
• Working from home vs the office

As well as Michael's book recommendation: 
NO RULES RULES: NETFLIX & THE CULTURE OF RE-INVENTION   by Reed Hastings and Erin Meyer

All episodes available at https://www.insightplatforms.com/podcasts/

Suggestions, thoughts etc to futureviewpod@gmail.com

Chapters

• 3:41 Pathway into the industry
• 7:23 Evolution of research panels
• 12:11 Launching the business
• 15:59 Creating the initial platform
• 20:48 SaaS & managed service
• 24:20 Managing revenue growth/ ebitda
• 29:14 Encouraging feedback
• 30:59 Survey vs other data types
• 33:02 Maintaining panel quality
• 36:25 Quickfire round

Transcript

Michael McCrary: One of my challenges has been how to not try to be everything in the business and how to become a CEO versus a founder salesperson person.

 Henry Piney: Welcome to Future View, and that's a very short extract from this week's chat with Michael McCrary, the CEO and founder of Pure Spectrum. For those who don't know if Pure Spectrum was founded in 2015, started actively selling its platform in 2017, and has been one of the fastest growing companies in the space, now achieving in excess of 50 million in annual revenue in around five years. In our chat, Michael talks about building a sales team from scratch. The key principles he followed in building the business, the progression of panel and sampling companies, and maintaining data quality across the ecosystem. I loved having the conversation, and I hope you enjoy listening too. But just for a moment, before we get going, I'd like to introduce our sponsor for this episode, Horizon. Horizon is a pioneering, SaaS company, Consumer Insights. They're taking a new approach to consumer research to help support strategic product and pricing decisions. They do this by moving beyond the written concepts and the often basic stimulus that used to be used in this type of research, and introducing a new approach called Presatyping. The really cool thing about pretotyping is that it gives consumers the chance to interact with new products and pricing options and concepts in real environments. From a client's perspective, they're able to make consumer centric decisions based on real behavioral data, in addition to traditional metrics like stated intent. Leading global companies such as Bosch, Siemens, and beauty brands like Essence are already using Horizon to make better product decisions. Check them out on gethorizon. Net. And now onto the interview with Michael.

 Henry Piney: So, Michael, it's a pleasure to have you on the podcast.

 Michael McCrary: Pleasure to be here. Good to see you.

 Henry Piney: It nice to see you again. So we've got lots to talk about, but first off, I wanted to start with a bit of an ice breaker that I'm using for many of these interviews now. So there's quite a lot of information about you online. Not that I've been snooping too much around you, but if I Google, certain things come up. If I look on LinkedIn, some things come up. What's something about you that most people wouldn't know?

 Michael McCrary: Most people wouldn't know that I have four dogs. Yes, four dogs. It's excessive. And that I've always loved dogs. In fact, when I was a kid, probably till about the age of six or seven, I probably thought I was a dog. I'd like to drink from a bowl and just enjoyed playing like I was a dog. So, yeah, I love dogs. I have four of them, and in addition to my kids and my wife, I enjoy spending time with them, too.

 Henry Piney: Fantastic. What breeds are they?

 Michael McCrary: They're all Labrador retrievers. I have three of them that are like creamy white. And then our newest one is he's all, like, jet black and he's hilarious. He comes to the office every day. He's the only one that will actually get in the car. The other ones are terrified to get in the car, but he's at the office every day. And then when he gets home, he likes to go for a swim. He's the only one of our labs that actually swims. Labs are naturally supposed to be swimmers. The other dogs are terrified of the water. So he checks all the lab boxes. He has his head out the window, ears slapping in the wind, gets home, jumps to the pool. He's a good boy.

 Henry Piney: Sadly, our golden retriever actually died a couple of weeks ago. Our elderly golden retriever. So the family is all a little kind of a little down about that.

Henry Piney: She had a very good life.

Michael McCrary: Sorry for your loss.

Henry Piney: Yeah, thank you. So jumping onto the main topic of the conversation and the insights world, one of the things that is online is your sort of journey through some very influential players, particularly panel companies in the space. Greenfield kind of lucid, and now you head up one of the fastest growing companies in that particular area. First question, what was your journey to founding pure spectrum?

Michael McCrary: Yeah, so I got into the panel side of the business in the early 2000s, quite frankly, because my wife's brother was really good friends with Keith Price. Keith Price was head of sales at Greenfield. Went on to co found critical Mix, the Reimagined group. And I was looking to get out of magazine ad sales because I could see that print was going to have a rough time ahead of it with the digital transformation. And it was just a wild west of online advertising. No one really knew how that was going to shake out. So I ended up in this industry. It was in sales at Greenfield, and that was a really, really wonderful experience. I really enjoyed the data elements of it, the fact that it was online, the fact that it was extremely useful to producing insights. So I instantly imagined that I would be in advertising my whole life. But once I made this transition, it was like, this is exactly what I really like, ultimately was the head of sales for north America, which at the time was a pretty big book of business, probably 65, $70 million, and made that move pretty quickly from sales rep to sales leadership. And from there, what was incredibly intrigued with some of the innovation that was happening, in particular with scent. I really thought the model of an exchange model and a tech driven user model was really fascinating. So I made a move to Scent after probably six, seven years at Greenfield, and it didn't spend a ton of time there, but did help them kind of get the business going in north America. Really enjoyed the time there, really have a great admiration from the founder of that business. Still stay in contact with him. Just a wonderful guy, a very visionary great leader. And then from there joined up with what's now called Lucid. Back in the day, it was called Federated Sample, and that was founded by Patrick Comer. And that was an absolute wild bride. We had super fast growth, very disruptive business model. And after that, Henry, I always kind of itched to start a business and talked about starting a business. There's a phrase called being a entrepreneur where you want to be an entrepreneur.

Henry Piney: I like it.

Michael McCrary: Yeah. And I was absolutely an entrepreneur and ultimately decided to start pure spectrum. And people joked around. Actually, the first investors in the business were key price. So first boss ends up being first helpful investor.

Henry Piney: It seems to happen so often, you would have thought they'd know all your failings. I don't mean yours, I mean mine. But they seem to keep coming back.

Michael McCrary: Exactly. Yeah. No, I should probably be buying keep price take dinner for the rest of my life for getting in the industry and helping get this going.

Henry Piney: Got you. Michael, just to back up a little bit for people, maybe you're less familiar with panel businesses and all the rest of it, could you describe just in simple terms of what a research panel does, the way it used to be done, for instance, going back when you started in the business and then how the likes of St. Lucid were sort of disruptive.

Michael McCrary: Yeah, I know. It's a fascinating story, actually. So back in the day when you were in panel, you ran a consumer website that people would join. They were the members of your panel, and you would send them emails with links to surveys, and that was how you got surveys done. Greenfield was one of the first companies to roll out what was called a river product. What happened was that the attention of the people that would take surveys was being shared across different websites, and websites that were offering more than surveys became much more popular with people that took surveys. So that was the beginning of river. And it was incredibly, I don't know if I would say disruptive, but it was hard to sell. Right. A lot.

Henry Piney: I remember we were sold on the site that was buying it and we were very dubious around the quality of the sample and that type of thing. But maybe we were wrong. You tell me.

Michael McCrary: Well, I think it was a necessity, right, because the ability to run a consumer facing website that exclusively offered surveys became non competitive.

Henry Piney: Yeah, I think so.

Michael McCrary: You had to augment with other affiliates, if you will, to be able to get willing survey participants from their websites. And then the transition to scent, and then ultimately Lucid and still does have a very interesting model where a lot of their panels are actually housed on their technology on behalf of companies that aren't in the business of selling Sample. So you think of like a media company that builds a panel so they can do research for their sales efforts. They want to do surveys with their own web participants or property participants. And they had a novel concept that they would allow people to use their software basically for free, so long as they could resell capacity to their marketplace.

Henry Piney: Just playing it back. If I have a community or I'm a publisher and I've got a whole lot of subscribers, you'd get the Synth software for free to help manage your relationships with them. But then Synth can resell your subscribers for surveys, I assume. Inappropriate environment, and maybe you get some payment back as well, I imagine from Cent for them, for the ecosystem. Got you.

Michael McCrary: Exactly. So Cent would provide a portion of the revenue back to the user or the company, which they wouldn't turn use that for research credit. It was really novel. You transition to Lucid. Lucid really was about pulling back the curtain. This was when it was federated Sample and the product was called Fulcrum. It was about, we're not going to hide who these publishers are. You're going to know that there's a company called Inbox Dollars and a company called P two Sample and a company called Protege, and we're not going to hide it from you. And that was crazy because these rivers are so secret. Those companies like Greenfield, it was a secret. Like, we're not going to let people know who these affiliates are. The economic model was pretty much the opposite, where we were paying more out to the suppliers than we would keep, which is a traditional marketplace model. It's not a 70 30 split in favor of the marketplace. It's more like a 30 70 split where the publisher gets most of it. So that would to me, was sent open the door for it, and then the now Lucid, which is now sent.

Henry Piney: Just to clarify for everybody, there was a major floated last year, I think was it, I'm sure, a very reasonable valuation. It was north of a billion euros. And then they announced also last year that they were acquiring Lucid for just.

Michael McCrary: North of a billion.

Henry Piney: Yeah, just north of billion. Those two companies are now one for anybody who doesn't follow this space. And lots of visa.

Michael McCrary: Exactly. Yeah. So that was a major shift in the market.

Henry Piney: I see. Okay, so but more about transparency. So then Pure Spectrum comes in, shakes the whole thing up. What did you do? What was the idea behind Pure Spectrum?

Michael McCrary: I'd love to say that I'm the most innovative person in the world, but that's just not the truth. I just study business, and markets like to have competition. And it was just simple that I felt like there were ways to satisfy the market with a different way of going about it, even if it was incredibly similar. So one of my favorite times in the business was actually the first year where we made a choice not to do any business, but exclusively to focus on the platform. Oftentimes when you're starting a business, you try to make money by doing services, aggregation, whatever you can do to feed money. I took a route of raising the round early. It was a $1.6 million round that closed in June. I was funding it myself before that, which was tense.

Henry Piney: I could see you smile, like, getting the sense that it's no longer quite as tense.

Michael McCrary: I hope it's not as tense now. I tell people when they talk about risk now, that was the risk back then, because you're not making income. You're actually using your family's money to develop a product. And to me, there's no greater risk because we had three children, a mortgage, dogs, all these things that needed caring and nurturing. And my wife and I were like, no. She was like, Go do it. You talked about it. Go do it. Jump and the net will appear kind of moment.

Henry Piney: Sure. Well, I mean, huge credit to you and your wife, for that matter, and your dogs, who I'm sure were supportive.

Michael McCrary: They were very supportive, yeah.

Henry Piney: So for other sort of potential entrepreneurs out there, not necessarily about this sort of particular kind of space, but how did it work? I mean, did you go and pitch venture capital? Was it strategic? Was it seed investors?

Michael McCrary: Yes. So I was the seed. Right. It was using my cash. At first, I didn't go to friends and family. I didn't want to show up at Thanksgiving and have people asking me how the business was doing. Because they were. Yeah. So I didn't do that. I was very fortunate to have a commitment, which now, later on, I realized that commitments don't always mean execution. I just trusted it would happen to get that initial round from Keith Pricey Davis and John Almaeda. They were the guys running Reimagined, and then they brought in research now to be a part of that, which is, of course, those companies are now combined. And that's part of dynata. So it was raising the money was strategic in the beginning, so working with companies in the space and we didn't raise money again until last year.

Henry Piney: Okay.

Michael McCrary: From there, it was all about not raising money and about trying to gain customer traction and to be incredibly capital efficient and lean with everything that we do. And I'm glad we did it that way, because as a company, you build a DNA of taking non diluted capital, and that's in the form of customers, and you gain customers, deliver to customers, get paid by customers, and that funds the growth of the business.

Henry Piney: So the initial platform, what did that do? I'm kind of interested. You spent a year or so just building the initial platform. So this has got to be good. It's got to do certain things. And then you've got my Lean team guys get out there and sell it. What was the initial platform?

Michael McCrary: So the initial platform, oddly enough, looks very similar than it does today. Right? So when you're building a product that you expect people to use, login and use, it's hard to change your UX and UI once you get a bulk of users, because people don't like change, even if it's inferior, once they kind of learn how to use it, relearning a different way of using it's just as hard as the initial pain. So we focus very much on simplicity of use. I remember we spent the first three months without code, just working on how does somebody log in and start the process and can they finish logging in, defining an audience, putting their targeting criteria, putting in the quotas, nesting quotas, if necessary. All the things that have to happen in our industry. Drop a link into our system and launch. Can we time ourselves and get that done in less than a minute? That was the goal. Right. Wow.

Henry Piney: Fantastic. But I love that as well as sometimes people talk a lot about KPIs and that type of thing, but that was a very simple KPI. These are the core functions and it.

Michael McCrary: Needs to be less than 60 seconds exactly right. Because I had the strong belief that at the time, market research agencies and brands were pretty resistant to doing this work themselves. They thought it was just as easy to send an email to five or six different panel companies and to pick the winning proposal that they trusted the most to send them a link test back forth. Back forth. I don't see what that's broken. They just didn't recognize that. If you can just take 60 seconds, drop in your audience requirements, you've programmed the survey, put the link, you've already got everything instilled with your redirects. You do that one time, it works every time. And launch, then it goes. Right? So you save so much time, and because there's less labor involved, that allows there to be cost savings. So if we have to do all of the other manual work, then I have to employ people. I have to employ those people if they're busy or not busy, and months that are strong and weeks that are strong and times that are not. So when we can have our users, our customers actually doing the work, and they do it on their own time, they launch surveys Saturday night, 10:00 p.m. Whenever they want, and they don't have any dependency on somebody else to do anything for them. I always believe that we should share in the economic savings that we enjoy by not having the labor and pass that along to the customer.

Henry Piney: It's a very good sales pitch. I don't necessarily mean it's kind of bullshit sales pitch. It's very clear and it kind of makes sense. And you've grown the business really kind of first. So how did you get out there and grow pure spectrum?

Michael McCrary: Yeah, well, as fun as 2016 was, 2017 was probably the hardest year because I figured as a veteran salesperson with a handful of other wonderful sales people that decided to join early, we struggled for the first year almost from like an October launch to July August of next year to get people to work with us. We were exclusively doing self serve. We said, Listen, we don't want to fall into a trap of becoming a service based organization. So out of the gate we added a difficulty level of gaining a customer. So not only did they have to decide they trusted working with us, they had to try it a new way. Right? So that was difficult at first. The second, which I really didn't understand, and now I do understand, is that a company that's working with a brand new startup is actually taking a fair amount of risk. Even the person who makes that choice, maybe if they're not an executive, there's somebody in operations who's running a survey. If it doesn't go well and they made that choice, then they have to explain to somebody why the project is late or it didn't get filled or things didn't go as they planned. So it's hard to get people to take that risk in the beginning. People are much more driven away from risk than towards opportunity. So that played a part of it. And our choice to be selfserve only or UI based only was harder and.

Henry Piney: You stuck with that. Part of the reason why I ask is some of the businesses that I'm involved with and we chatted about. Some of them. I think are having to make some really hard choices and struggling with this balance between do they stick with more of a a selfserve kind of like model or do they kind of follow what appears to be the more immediate dollars of a corporate client that is prepared to pay them. Arguably for a more sort of consultancy or managed service type through a model? And it's a really difficult thing that they're wrestling with immediate revenue as opposed to sticking to kind of the long term plan. What did you guys do?

Michael McCrary: I really think if we hadn't found success by the third quarter of 2017, we would have sold lemonade if we had to, to make ends meet.

Henry Piney: We would have done anything.

Michael McCrary: We hit a point in July August 2017 where it went from we were barely making anything. It was just this massive jump, like less than 100 grand a month in gross sales, which is not much in the marketplace model, to all of a sudden it was 4000, 500,000. We had three customers that we didn't work in all at the same time. And there were four of us working and we were like our hair was on fire. It was a different problem, but those customers sitting all at the same time, that was when we could take a breath, okay, we can continue on the path of following this in the self serve model or API tech enabled model. And we did. We have ultimately added a service element around it because as fast as we were growing, there were still some customers that were so valuable that we're just not ready to meet on the terms that we wanted to meet with them. We wanted it to be self serve, and they just weren't hearing it. So we decided not long ago, like maybe a year and a half, two years ago, that we should add a service offering for those that are unwilling or not capable to do that. And I do not regret it at one bit because it's really helped build the business. It helps us get to customers that we weren't able to get to. The difference is that once we engage with these customers and we start to see some challenging, difficult work that they do, that probably does warrant having help and service assistance, if you will. And we're like, yeah, that's a great fit for us, helping out with that. But then they'll send us things that are so simple, and that's when our account management team will engage with them and say, do you realize how simple and fast it would be for you to be able to do this? So most of our customers are not exclusively there's a ton that exclusively self serve. And of those that require service, most of them are not exclusively serviced. They kind of pick and choose what's the right way to engage with us at that time. We would have done the path earlier if it was required. And if I'm giving advice to a founder who's looking to just get exit velocity to gain enough traction to where they're scalable, it's okay. It's okay to do some things that aren't on the original plan just so you can do what's important, which is to make money so you can grow the business and use the excess profits to grow the business.

Henry Piney: Are you able, Michael, just to give us sort of sense of as to what fast growth means in the early.

Michael McCrary: I mean, I forget the exact numbers, but you're not talking about less than 100% growth in the early years. You're talking about, can you go three 5700%? Like, can you go from 1 million to 3,000,003 to 7 million? And those numbers and our progression was really especially since we were trying to go self serve pretty good. We went from zero to these are rough numbers, zero to three, three to 1212 to 20. And then it starts to get bigger, where it's like twelve to 30. And this year gross will probably be somewhere in the mid seventy s. And this is our fifth full operating year. You got 17, 1819, 2021. So this is our 6th full operating year. And then now there's what's called a rule of 40. So rule of 40 is your growth rate percentage plus your EBIT of percentage. Right. So if you are growing at but you have a negative 10% EBITDA, then you're still rule of 40 company.

Henry Piney: I see.

Michael McCrary: And from an investor perspective, at least in 2021, it's a little different. Now that was viewed as a really strong growth company, especially if it's a little further down the road, you know, and it's four fifth or 6th year, we like to try to do rule of 100, right? So we want our growth rate percentage and our EBITDA percentage to equal 100%. So it gets harder when you have bigger denominators. And so for us, growing 60, 70%, we don't always we're not trying to be 30%, but for us, we're really trying to maintain roughly 20%. And it's not an obsession, it's like roughly 20%. And then with that, can our growth rate percentage be in the 60% to 80%? So we're nearing 100% and that gets much harder. Like, we're starting the budget process for next year and we're like, okay, that's a lot of extra revenue to achieve that much percentage growth. Eventually on an organic basis, it becomes nearly impossible to keep up that growth rate. So you have to start looking at inorganic, passive growth. But we rely mostly on organic for our growth.

Henry Piney: Well, honestly, huge congratulations on everything you've.

Henry Piney: Been able to achieve so far. Can we just drill down a bit further into organic growth, particularly sales and product development process, and how you thought about that?

Michael McCrary: I pride myself on the group of executives that I've been able to attract and bring into the business. They've stayed, they're in it in the mission. And that is above all, the reason we've grown so much is not because of me, other than the fact that I was able to attract those people into the business.

Henry Piney: Which is modest of you to say, I'm sure, Michael, but also makes a lot of sense. And is there potentially a trap for someone like you where you know the sector well, you've worked across major players in the sector, people will back you and you kind of go, I'm going to just do it myself, I'm the best sales guy.

Michael McCrary: Yeah. It was a grand ambition to the size of the business. So very early on, I knew that I couldn't be the only sales person. So it was important to be able to bring in people to be able to do that. One of my challenges has been how to not try to be everything in the business and how to become a CEO versus a founder salesperson product. This is what I wanted to do and to let go and to let a guy like Mark Menig who runs product, run product, and a guy like David Butler who runs the sales organization, run the sales organization. We have all we call playing tennis, where whenever they're not sure what they should be doing, I rarely like to tell them what they're supposed to do. I like to work it out, talk it through, because if it's my directive instead of direction, then the buy in is a lot less. And then honestly. Probably if you were to talk to other founders that were at the phase that I am. Which is in year seven or eight. There are times when you're trying to figure out what you are supposed to do if you do it right and you have a wonderful operations manager like we do in Todd Myers in marketing with Stephanie. It's like all these things like. Okay. These people are doing their jobs. What's my job, if you don't mind?

Henry Piney: It's slightly kind of cheeky question here. I love the idea of direction as opposed to directives, but to what extent do you encourage people to genuinely kind of push back and say, you're the CEO, you know the sector really well. I just don't agree. Does that happen often within pure spectrum?

Michael McCrary: It's an absolute request that we have within our company, which is candid feedback. That's useful. And we like to test our new employees because what we will tell people is that they do not work for their manager. They work for the company. You're here to work for the company, not to please your manager. So you may disagree, you may have your own ideas, and you're expected to give feedback if you think the direction or directive is wrong. We just spent two months talking about the direction of one of our channels, and I was dead set with the direction we should go. This is where we're going. And we have by the exec team, essentially like, we do not think that's the direction we should go. We think that we should really think about this other direction and that's the direction we're going, the way that they went. Because I know if they're not bought into the direction, we're probably going to fail. We're not going to have much success in them following a path that they disagree with.

Henry Piney: That's a great example. And it sounds like you're not falling into kind of the cult of the CEO trap that maybe some businesses kind of do. I am kind of conscious of time, and I could probably ask you questions about the sales process and how you hire people or that type of thing, but for probably hours on end. But maybe that can be another podcast if you're up for it. But there were a few other kind of questions I wanted to get to. In general terms, just about survey based data, like sample based data. I've been around this sector for quite some time. At one point, I think there seems to be a real pushback around survey based data, sample based data going, who are these people? The industry is full of professional respondents, people. Don't tell the truth in surveys. And over the last year or so, maybe 18 months or so, for various reasons, survey based data seems to be very much back in vogue. What's your take on all that? What would you see as the strengths and weaknesses?

Michael McCrary: Yeah, so I've certainly lived through all the different times where some other sort of data was going to replace the data. It was social media listening, then it was big data, and then it was the observational data that download a meter. And all those are very important pieces of data. There may be some legitimacy that some of that data is closer to the reality of what's going on in the moment than survey data, which surveys are a very, very structured environment where somebody has a set of questions and there's an expected set of answer choices. But honestly, I think there's just no other mechanism to get the why. Like, the why are people making the choices they're doing? Humans, their brains are you can change your mind in a second, and you may not be dishonest that you favor Burger King over McDonald's. And that could change with one experience today and it's a different answer tomorrow.

Henry Piney: Yeah, it's interesting. One of my kind of early mentors in his business was actually a guy called Mike Warhouse. You might know, but he was at Maggie. One of the first things he said to me is that you have to remember that all research data is flawed. All of it is. But you've got to understand how it's flawed, why it's flawed, and where its strengths and weaknesses are. And I thought that was a really good bit of advice, and it still remains the case today about data as a whole, not just research data.

Michael McCrary: Those are sage words.

Henry Piney: How about this question, though, about panel quality? I get lots of complaints about sample quality from all sorts of brands and companies. So tell, what's your take on that?

Michael McCrary: Well, I think it's a challenging topic, and we refer to it as a relentless pursuit of quality because even though we've built out technology using machine learning AI, text analytics to be able to figure out if the person is giving consistently good answers, it's also imperfect. We still have returns from our customers for bad data, just like everybody does. I think it is just that, though, it's a relentless pursuit of, like, how do you find the balance of you want to eliminate, to the best of your ability, outright digital fraud, to the best your ability, but you have to realize the surveys online or simply an online offer that has an incentive. It's going to attract people who want to try to find a way to exploit it. And most of the time, it's not that a survey has a bunch of people that are fraudulent. It's that there's a handful that get in and find a way to exploit the system and they'll find a way to give answers to that survey 30, 40, 5100 times as fast as possible so that they can game the system. We don't try to pretend that it's perfect when you buy from us, but we do commit that. Our data Science team works on ways to detect fraud and ways to prevent it every day.

Henry Piney: What are some of the ways in which the companies can prevent that?

Michael McCrary: There are some companies that they focus exclusively on trying to detect that right. So these are companies like Imperium Research Defender. They're looking for Tor networks, bots, things of that nature. That is one layer that we use as a third party to try to detect that. What we are doing is our own technology is we interact with respondents. Yesterday there were 750,000 people around the world that came to our system to take surveys that could be less than 750,000 unique. But there's so many sessions we had in the system. So we have an Iterative process. Okay, can we present a question asking me to type something out and get a contextual answer, and then that's using NLP to see, and if it's not matching, then we'll just keep them out of the survey. I've been in this industry a pretty long time now, and I know what the traditional return rates are bad data reconciliations. And as a company that does as much as we do, we experience single digit, like four, five, 6% in a month, which is pretty unheard of. It's generally in the 10% to 20% across these different groups. And we know that getting to zero is probably impossible, but that's why we call it kind of a relentless pursuit, because every time we do something, there's another group that's trying to find a way to bypass it.

Henry Piney: And either way, you're really realistic about it. By the way, for someone who's been doing it for so long, you're very young as well. Michael, that must be the good team you have working for you.

Michael McCrary: Thank you.

Henry Piney: Well, I'd love to keep talking and.

Henry Piney: I'm conscious of time, so before I.

Henry Piney: Begin to age you unnecessarily, I'm going.

Henry Piney: To close up with the quick fire round.

Henry Piney: Who have your mentors being? So who have you learned the most from and what did you learn from them?

Michael McCrary: Yeah, there's two. One, I've talked about Keith Price. He's been a great mentor to me in the industry. And then another is Alan Grassani. He's passed a couple of years ago. Wonderful mentor, was very supportive of this journey, a good friend. When I think about all of the different people that had an interest in their interest in giving advice, I always really enjoyed the fact that I felt like I was just in my corner. The Rocky movie. You had Mick in your corner. He was nick.

Henry Piney: Fantastic. What have you changed your mind about recently, apart from that product initiative that your management persuade you to change your mind?

Michael McCrary: About. Yeah. So the last couple of years have been eye opening, very dynamic to manage a business. So I never imagined that we would have so many people that could perform while not coming to an office. So that paradigm happened in 2020 with the onset of COVID. So I had to change my mindset there. I still prefer people, when possible, coming to an office for some period of time. I do believe, like, we had six interns this summer, and one of the number one pieces of feedback they had was, when I work, I want to work in an office. I don't. It's dynamic, and I'm not going to say that we'll never have people in the office. I still believe in putting forever answers on episodic events. It's like, okay, we'll do this for now. So that's probably the number one thing where I was really worried about the Pandemic, and we heard 70 people during the Pandemic, never did see them. It's amazing.

Henry Piney: Nobody would have believed that was possible the day before the Pandemic that would ever happen.

Michael McCrary: So that one was the one that really changed my mind the most.

Henry Piney: Sure. Final three questions quickly. Advice for entrepreneurs. What would your key points be? Two or three points. Entrepreneurs in this sector? Yeah.

Michael McCrary: So there's really one major thing you have to do, which is to not run out of money. Just obsess over your cash, over your capital, and do things to not run out of money. Enjoy the journey. So I enjoy this phase of the business, and I enjoyed the prior phase of the business, and I'm excited about the future phases of the business and just the talent. Just be so focused on the talent that you hire. And if you kind of focus on don't run on money, get the talent and live in the moment while you're still thinking about the future. That's what I would say.

Henry Piney: I think that's great advice. Sort of like, enjoy the struggle as well. Any favorite books or recent books in recent years you'd recommend?

Michael McCrary: Yeah, so I do more audio books. And probably the book that was most influential over the last few years I hate to even say it because Netflix is struggling so much right now was that read Hastings book called no Rules? Rules. And that book really kind of changed our executive mindset around freedom and responsibility and letting autonomy with decision making because we were entering a phase in the business that was I thought we needed a lot more controls. Like, oh, we're going from 50 to 100 people, and we have to do things that I really never enjoyed as an employee. So the book no Rules Rules, I think, was probably the most influential book I've consumed in the past couple of years.

Henry Piney: Fantastic. And where will Pure Spectrum be in five years time?

Michael McCrary: Well, that's a great question. We just want to keep growing, and we want to keep finding ways to work with more customers to innovate at what we're doing. I know this sounds it's not an exact answer, but I look at what we do in our sector with the platform and how inefficient it is still today compared to other industries that run exchanges. If you look at financial exchanges and how absolutely there are people who make margins on milliseconds and this is an industry that still has incredible waste, even if it's done through programmatic means or API means. So I think that this is still very early. Very early. Even if it's growing, like the precision that we operate and the way that things happen are still pretty far from perfect.

Henry Piney: Yeah, I think that's really kind of refreshing and realistic and brother trying to kind of claim that everything is sold.

Michael McCrary: Well, if it was all sold, then we wouldn't be needed, right?

Henry Piney: Precisely. Thank you so much. It's really been great. As I said, I could probably ask you questions for hours about all the details of various areas of the business and getting your advice, but I'm conscious of where at times it's been an absolute pleasure.

Michael McCrary: Yeah, pleasure here too. Thanks for having me on, Henry.

Henry Piney: I see it's so much fun to talk to Michael, and he also makes so many great points. For instance, around product development, the 1 minute guideline for the key functionalities. His users should be able to achieve.

Henry Piney: The discipline to get that right before.

Henry Piney: Launching and building for an assertive sales presence that wasn't just reliant on him right from the outset. So if you have any follow ups, please let me know on Future Viewpod@gmail.com. And feel free to subscribe, write or write reviews on Apple, Spotify and the other platforms we're now on.

Henry Piney: Next week, we'll have another great guest.

Henry Piney: And before we go, let me just take a moment to remind you about our sponsor. Horizon puts real consumer behavioral data into the insights process and you can check them out @gethorizon.net. That's gethorizon. Net.

Henry Piney: See you next week.