My Big Idea: Research Clever

Hi Ross! What’s your elevator pitch?

Research Clever is a global market research partner helping agencies, consultancies and insight teams make better decisions through better data. We provide global data collection, survey programming, tabulations and wider research support across more than 130 markets worldwide supporting B2B and consumer target audiences.
 
We have built the business around quality, transparency and strong delivery, with a real focus on making complex research easier for our clients. Ultimately, we want to be the partner clients trust with their most important projects and keep coming back to.

‍Why does the market need it?

Too much of the research industry has become commoditised. Price and speed matter, but when they become the main focus, quality, communication and delivery can suffer.
 
Before starting Research Clever, I had spent almost a decade in the industry and had seen too many good projects affected by avoidable problems: poor communication, unrealistic promises, inconsistent quality and a lack of ownership when things became difficult.
 
I felt there was a clear opportunity to raise the standard. Not by reinventing market research, but by combining strong technical delivery with a better client experience, clearer communication and a genuine sense of responsibility for the outcome. That became the foundation of Research Clever.

‍Where is the business today?

We have grown quickly since launching in 2023. We’ve achieved two consecutive years of roughly threefold turnover growth and built a team of more than 10 people supporting agencies, consultancies and insight teams around the world. We've achieved a lot in a short period of time, but the focus is firmly on what comes next.

The challenge is now to continue scaling while strengthening the quality, service, and culture that helped us grow in the first place. We have a lot of ambition for the business, but growth only matters if we become better as we grow. ‍

What opportunity did you see in the market?

Having spent a number of years in the industry, I had a very clear view of where I believed the standard needed to be higher. Too often, suppliers were winning work by overpromising on feasibility, timelines, or price, and then struggling to deliver once the project was live. Clients were left dealing with the consequences.
 
What I kept hearing was that people wanted reliability. They wanted better communication, better judgement and a partner who would make difficult projects easier rather than adding another layer of complexity.
 
That is a big part of the role we play. We take on the heavy lifting around data collection, survey programming, tabulations, fieldwork and delivery, freeing our clients up to focus on the higher-value work: understanding what the data means, developing actionable insights and making strong strategic recommendations to their end clients.
 
I could see an opportunity to build a business that was consistently better at the things clients actually value: quality, delivery, transparency, judgement and service. That was the gap I saw, and it gave me the confidence to start Research Clever.

‍What’s your biggest strength?

I would say our biggest strength is trust.
 
We build that through transparency and, most importantly, by doing what we say we are going to do. When we commit to feasibility or a timeline, our clients know we have properly thought it through and are confident we can deliver.
 
We are also comfortable being assertive when we need to be. If we see an issue in a brief, or believe there is a better way of approaching something, we will say so. Our clients respect that because they know it comes from wanting the project to succeed.
 
Ultimately, our job is to make our clients’ lives easier and make the research better. That means being reliable, thinking ahead and taking ownership of the parts of the research they have trusted us to deliver.
 
Trust is hard-earned, so we are very conscious of protecting it in every project.

‍What is the secret to making the business work?

One of the decisions that has mattered most has been investing in infrastructure before we desperately needed it. Growth exposes weaknesses very quickly. When a company is small, you can compensate for weak systems through effort. As the business grows, that stops working.
 
We made a conscious decision early on to invest in operations, systems and quality assurance alongside commercial growth. Our first permanent hire was an Operations Director. That was deliberate because I wanted specialist operational expertise in the business from an early stage, rather than waiting until problems appeared and fixing them retrospectively. That focus has helped us build much stronger foundations as we have grown and has recently contributed to Research Clever being shortlisted for the MRS Premier Award for Operational Excellence.
 
But infrastructure is only half of it. The other half is people. You cannot expect people to care deeply about clients if they do not feel valued, trusted and able to make an impact themselves. A big part of that is getting the right people into the right roles, being clear about what good looks like, and then leading from the front.

The best teams understand the standard, know what is expected of them and have the confidence to take ownership. I’m really proud that employees gave the company an eNPS of +60, with 100% stating they feel able to do their best work.

For me, empowerment does not mean an absence of accountability. It means giving good people the trust and space to make decisions while being very clear about the standards we expect and the responsibility that comes with that trust. A small, aligned and accountable team of 10 can outperform a disengaged team many times its size.

‍How do you market the company?

Our marketing has evolved naturally as the business has grown. In the early days, most of our growth came through relationships, referrals and repeat business. The focus was simple: deliver well, build trust and give clients a reason to come back.
 
As the company became more established, we became more deliberate about communicating what we were building. LinkedIn became an important way to show the growth of the business, introduce new people, celebrate genuine milestones and contribute to industry conversations.

More recently, we have expanded into PR, editorial coverage and industry awards. We still do very little traditional paid marketing. For us, the strongest marketing comes from having something genuine to talk about and a reputation that backs it up. If clients are recommending you, your team is proud to talk about the company, and the business is genuinely progressing, marketing becomes much more powerful. You are amplifying something real rather than trying to manufacture attention.
 
What funding do you have? Is it enough

‍Research Clever has been bootstrapped from day one, and I think that has been a real advantage for us. We do not have to chase gross revenue at all costs. We can focus on building a strong underlying business rather than optimising for a headline revenue number.
 
It also means we keep control of our decisions internally and can be selective about the clients and projects that genuinely fit how we want to work. That gives us the freedom to think long term and protect the culture as we grow. Most importantly, it keeps us close to the customer. Growth has to come from creating genuine value for clients and earning the right to keep working with them.

‍Tell us about the business model

We are a B2B research services business, supporting clients with global data collection, whether that is sample-only or taking on the full heavy lifting across fieldwork, survey programming, translations, tabulations and wider research support.
 
Most of our work is project-based, but repeat business is a major part of the model. A client might start with one project and then work with us many times across the year and across different markets.
 
We are in the business of building long-term partnerships, and everything from our service model to the way we communicate and deliver projects is designed around making those relationships stronger over time. That means making ourselves genuinely useful to clients, understanding how they work and becoming the kind of partner they would struggle to replace by consistently creating value across every project touchpoint.

‍What were you doing before?

Before launching Research Clever, I spent almost a decade working in market research and research operations.
 
I started my working life in retail, and my first taste of entrepreneurship came from running a small dog accessories business. It was short-lived, but it gave me an early sense of how much I enjoyed building something of my own.
 
By the time I started Research Clever, I understood what clients valued and where I believed the standard could be higher. That combination of industry experience and wanting to build something better gave me the foundation to start the business.

‍Are there any technologies you’ve found useful?

Technology is becoming increasingly important in research, especially around quality, efficiency and fraud prevention. We have built our own proprietary supplier platform, which we continue to develop around two things: protecting our clients’ data and making our operation more efficient.
 
On the quality side, we integrate fraud-prevention technology and additional controls to help identify suspicious or poor-quality activity and strengthen the integrity of the research. On the operational side, we use automation to remove repetitive manual tasks and streamline project delivery.

Rather than focusing on simply working faster, we are developing technology that frees our team up to spend more time on quality, problem-solving and supporting clients. For us, that is the test for technology: does it protect quality, remove low-value work or create more value for the client?

‍What is the future vision?

We have grown quickly in our first few years, but we still see this as the beginning. We want Research Clever to become one of the most recognised and respected names in the research industry internationally.
 
We want to keep expanding, keep investing in our people and technology, and continue innovating so we can increasingly outcompete on value across every project touchpoint. The goal is not simply to scale. It’s to become better as we scale.
 
More capable, more innovative and more valuable to our clients. We want Research Clever to be known not just for the quality of our work, but for the way we work, the team we build and the experience clients have at every touchpoint. If we can do that at scale, we will have built something very difficult to replicate.