“REFLECTIONS:” Looking Back on Four Decades in Business in the Rear-View Mirror of Experience – Decade Four
Overview
Take a trip through the decades! Throughout the month of June, we have been sharing Naomi’s reflections on the last forty years in business. If you missed out on the previous decades, go check them out here:
Decade four: 2012-2021
If someone had asked in 1981, “What are you looking to achieve by being in business?” Naomi would have answered: “Independence and unlimited opportunities to honor my own choices.” Looking back, she laughs at the naivete of such words, learning instead that being in business is the opportunity to say “yes” and “no” and fight for survival. She got choices, for sure, just not the ones she imagined.
She remembers saying “Yes,” more than once: “RIVA will accept that project,” [even though the approach may not have been what she thought best – but the one the client wanted], so that payroll and expenses could be met. “No” stayed reserved for projects that did not respect values that RIVA held, or offered funding so low it seemed RIVA would be paying the client for the opportunity.
“No,” also emerged when a client request stood outside the framework of RIVA’s skill set; however, RIVA will pass on projects to researchers within our network who’s skills better match the client’s needs.
This decade opened with hope and resilience, RIVA a little cautious but curious entering the second decade of the 21st century. Naomi had come to grips with being a widow, surviving brain surgery, and recovering from two business downturns: 9/11 and The Great Recession of 2008. Armed with lessons learned the hard way, she kept essential staff and hired 1099 contractors when needs arose. Carefully watching both financial and human resources, she built a reputation for taking on difficult topics as a researcher. Those subjects including talking to mothers who lost more than one infant to stillbirth; patients in hospice with less than six weeks left on life’s clock; NRA members about desire to own automatic rifles like those used by the military; and same sex marriages concerns among residents in states deep in America’s Bible belt.
Those projects got sprinkled in among traditional branding and advertising research, new product launches, and exploratory research when clients looked to consumers to aid them in finding desirable line extensions.
The RIVA Training Institute expanded classes based on student requests and offered more opportunities to obtain deep insights into the nuances of moderating and reporting qualitative data. In the previous decade, RIVA moved from downtown Bethesda to “The Pike,” a main travel corridor seven miles away in Rockville MD, near a metro stop and a hotel – both critical to serving students who attended classes in the RIVA offices.
Still honoring key lessons from Luc, Naomi always “paid RIVA first,” setting aside 10% of every revenue dollar into a reserve account for emergencies which permitted RIVA the opportunity to avoid interest on bank loans or lines of credit. This reserve fund allowed an extraordinary event on the occasion of RIVA’s 30th anniversary in business: an all-expense paid trip for seven staff to go to Paris which included: renting the house once owned by Pierre Cardin with a view of Notre Dame from the living room windows, eating in outdoor cafes, visiting key sites after riding the Paris Metro, and celebrating a staff birthday. RIVA’s anniversary lunch, inside the Eiffel Tower, made the trip a cherished memory for all.
Technology innovations forced RIVA to change or be left behind and staff learned new software programs and more efficient ways to provide recordings for students to view their progress in class. Additionally, staff learned more sophisticated ways to write reports and conduct research to meet the increasing needs of clients for qualitative market research to support strategic decision-making.
One of RIVA’s staff members, Monique, suggested in this fourth decade, Naomi should write a book, detailing her philosophy, research methods, and the “best practices” that create skilled moderators through training. Naomi had no interest in meeting this request, stating one main reason: “I have no desire to be judged by industry colleagues who reviled me in the 1980’s for “creating competitors.” One other underlying and unstated reason, fell into the category of a belief held by Naomi: “What chutzpah to write a book, you don’t even have a degree related to the industry.””
Naomi and Monique had many conversations about the book and Naomi now realizes that if Monique had been a general in a war, Monique would have won. Presenting Naomi with many thoughtful and rational reasons finally won her over and Monique served as a staunch cheerleader, coach, editor, researcher, investigator, and ally and pushed the book to published status in 2013 and later to reside on Amazon.
Positive reviews proved Monique justified in her quest that Naomi “leave a legacy.” A 2nd and 3rd edition provided additional information, and an industry glossary. Secrets of a Master Moderator is now a textbook in use at a US university and is often cited in industry conversations that start with “Like Naomi said in her book…”
In this fourth decade of RIVA’s history, Naomi put her energies on teaching the next generation of qualitative market researchers. She made a clear decision to step away from the constant merry-go-round existence of a seasoned qualitative researcher, crisscrossing America on major airlines, to lead focus groups 12-15 days out of 20 working days a month. Her personal tallies showed completion of over 6,000 focus groups, and, combined with survey interviews in the early part of her career, she can lay claim to having interviewed over 100,000 respondents in a 50-year career. To honor RIVA’s tagline: “We do what we teach, and we teach what we do,” Naomi conducts qualitative research projects for select clients, keeping her current in an industry that has yet to reach its 100th anniversary.
Midway through this fourth decade, Naomi toyed with the idea of what she might do with the next arc of her life. Now, well into her 70’s, the notion of semi-or-full retirement became a location on her horizon to place her focus. Questions she considered:
- Work 50% of time as a trainer in the Institute and travel more?
- Work on an “on call” basis for the just advanced classes?
- Move to Emeritus status and serve only on RIVA’s board?
- Transition the company to existing staff and serve as a mentor?
- Spend less hours on RIVA assignments and work on personal goals like write another book or finish that PhD she started years ago?
- Sell the company?
In the meantime, client work and teaching assignments, combined with CEO management duties, kept pushing the retirement decision off the screen of her life. And then the world turned upside down.
Floating into 2020, RIVA rode the surge of experience, wisdom, and credibility, thoughtfully booking client work, enrolling students in scheduled classes on the roster, and providing custom courses to meet corporate requests to combine two or more of RIVA’s standard classes to meet unique and specific needs.
2020 started with January attendance at QRCA, the premiere qualitative research conference in Austin, TX which provided a chance to catch up with former students, current colleagues and opportunities to hear what is new in the industry. Shortly afterwards, a trip to frigid Iowa, to teach a custom course, slid into February and a slingshot return the following week, to teach an open class at the RIVA facility in Maryland brought RIVA into early March 2020.
The last scheduled in-person class at RIVA ended on Friday, March 13, 2020, and on Monday, March 16, 2020 Federal mandates went into effect that closed down America and the word “pandemic” moved from a plot twist in a Stephen King novel to twisting lives across the globe from autonomy to angst.
RIVA thought that the mandates would be short-term, maybe 4-5 weeks so a bit of “vacation spirit” created the first of a cascade of emotions that ran 18 months and into 2021. The “emotion signposts” RIVA traveled through the Covid-19 pandemic included all the following and some more than once:
Despair Helplessness Hopelessness Fear Anxiety Terror
Anger Rage Sadness Depression Ennui Dread
Staff worried that jobs would be lost. Management worried about expenses to be paid and no revenue generated to pay them. 5,000 square feet of office space lay fallow and shuttered as our brick-and-mortar offices closed to tenants. The landlord held a position that “force majeure” [the right to stop rent payments in emergency times, didn’t apply in a pandemic] and hounded us for rent payments, knowing we had no access to our offices for revenue generation.
Thirty-nine years of teaching thousands of students in experiential, dynamic in-person classes evaporated in a mist of mandates, Federal/State rules and regulations and no one had answers to how long the mandates would run.
Death rates rose across the world, and everyone stood at risk for contagion. Store shelves emptied of necessities in minutes after stocking and hoarding became a symbol of how to be a smart shopper.
RIVA stumbled in the darkness of “not knowing” for several weeks, the “vacation spirit,” drowned in a sea of despair under the heading: “What should we do – fight to stay in business or close the business?” It wouldn’t be the first time RIVA faced national or economic crisis, having a history of weathering loss of business from 9/11 and the Great Recession of 2008.
Zoom calls to craft a plan captured the lion’s share of every day as the Executive Committee discussed Options A-Z to stay in business and move away from the negative emotions that consumed America. The end result of all those meetings: Find a way to teach some portion of 13 courses “online.”
This became a daunting task when the heart of RIVA courses is “experiential” and now that opportunity had to be translated into the cold world of tiny faces on a screen with a trainer lit by a trendy “ring light.”
A number of funny discussions occurred with the senior staff at RIVA around the question: “How do we teach online when none of us have any experience in doing so?” To remedy that problem, RIVA staff went “back to school,” taking courses online from the University of New Zealand, joining an association with workshops offering specific tools in how to succeed when teaching online, signing up for online webinars on the topic, reading books and articles, and questioning others like a colleague who moonlighted as a professor for the online University of Phoenix.
RIVA staff put finely tuned research skills to work to find answers and methods and dismantled the materials formerly used for in-person teaching. This conversion to the new territory of online teaching, allowed us to offer the first Zoom class in April 2020, just six weeks after the start of “shelter in place” mandates became the norm.
Making the traditional mistakes with new technology, new skills and new needs, RIVA laughed all the way into a new paradigm finally ending up with: “We should have done this years ago,” making true the adage: “In adversity lies opportunity.”
With two rounds of Federal payments through the Payroll Protection Plan, and some additional tax credit programs, RIVA kept staff on 75% payroll status and found creative methods to cut expenses. Leaving our 5000 square foot rental space, when the lease expired, and learning to “work at home” in yoga pants and business tops, provided a whole new angle of making lemonade from lemons.
As RIVA enters a fifth decade of being in business, the CEO is postponing retirement and examining what other opportunities exist for the growth of the company. The words that echo now in staff discussions include:
Rejuvenation Reinvention Resilience
Since no one has a crystal ball to predict the future, RIVA is moving forward on the three R’s above, excited about what challenges will come next and standing ready to meet them.
Written by: Naomi Henderson, RIVA CEO & Co-Founder