CFR Pulse
September 2019 Company Update
From: Colson Steber To: CFR Stakeholders
Starter
I spent the last two weeks traveling for CFR attending conferences. I remind myself anytime I get tired of the travel that the opportunity to get out and go to events like this where I learn from speakers and talk to people endlessly about our business and research is a pretty awesome thing to get to do. I get a mountain of great ideas about things I need to do and how to move us forward.
Team
- Erin Spicer, Telephone Interviewer
- A few weeks ago I was talking about how we were doing on a study with Tim Jagears, Supervisor Manager on the day shift. We were checking in to discuss resource allocation and ended up on a job that had lower production than we wanted. Tim’s words were, “well, I put Erin on it the last few days because she is one of those people that I can use to test a job. Like if she is not doing well, then probably nobody is gonna do better so there is almost definitely a sample or screener issue.” A pretty big compliment! One that I agree with...and came up again.
Customer Relationships
- How did this conversation with Tim about Erin come up again?
- On my trip, I got to meet with a full-service research company that we have started to do more work with this year. Our main contact was praising how good our recruiting has been, both for efficiency and getting qualified people to participate in IDI’s (in-depth interviews) and focus groups (online and in-person) for them. The researchers there that have used us so far all want to use CFR as their preferred recruiters.
- My response was, “Yea, my supervisor manager and I were assessing our internal productivity reports. We were just commenting on how he has a core group of 15-20 people that have been with us for years and we can always trust to be a great measure of whether a job is set up well.”
- Long story short… A huge win directly because of how good we actually are.
Finances
Shout out to Misty Summerhill, Interviewer Advocate and HR Manager. I told her to be ready to buy a sign for the Waynesville office and as soon as I had money and approved her to spend her budget, that she get it ordered. A couple of weeks ago, our cash-flow caught up to the point that I was willing to go back to spending on improvements and positivity. Literally the next day I had a request for payment of an invoice for a sign in Waynesville. I LOVED it. New sign on its way.
Continuous Improvement
I have been on a deep dive to figure things out and am spending much of the next two weeks meeting with people on being aligned to execute in Q4 (October-December). CFR does ~40% of our revenue for the year in these 3 months. This is where we test our own systems. We have to stay focused and take ownership of our responsibilities within our individual roles.
Questions? Email or talk to Colson Steber, co-CEO. My direct line is 573-259-0320 and e-mail is CSteber@cfrinc.net
