by Lyle Durbin
ReconMR is excited to announce our 30th birthday this year! It’s been quite a journey, growing from a small office in northwest Austin, with 12 interviewing stations, into one of the leading providers of data collection services, along with a recently expanded Insights and Analytics division. We are proud of all we have achieved! It has come through hard work, adhering to our core values, and focusing on what we do best – embracing social science principles to provide reliable and actionable data to our clients.
While we’ve had staff come and go over the years, it’s endearing to continue working with staff that have been with us since the beginning, along with those that have joined the family along the way. Building such an impressive team over the years is one of our greatest accomplishments. We’ve shared many stories of struggles and success, watched as we’ve all grown in our personal and professional lives, and had many memorable celebrations. We’re now a company spread across three call center facilities in Texas along with a presence in Southern California, Seattle, Chicago, and New York, with a full complement of over 50 project managers, methodologists, analysts, programmers, and management staff overseeing 1,000 telephone interviewers and related support staff. Sometimes it’s hard to comprehend how far we’ve come!
Think back 30 years ago, and realize we started in 1994, while the Internet was still at its infancy, cell phones were a very expensive novelty, texting didn’t exist, and we had to drive ourselves to the store to buy things. In our company’s infancy, we only dialed landlines, surveys were filled out on paper with pencil, telephone lists were printed out and managed on paper, and data tables and reports were printed and put into massive binders and shipped to clients. High-speed internet wasn’t a thing, the sound of dial-up modems was etched in our brains, and the answers to all of your questions couldn’t be found on a google search page.
As a company, we’ve embraced the changing technology and our ever-evolving world. Our current IT infrastructure would have seemed like the imaginings of a science fiction novel when we were first starting out. We wouldn’t have imagined the abandoning of landlines, the sophistication of online surveys, and the lasting reliance on traditional mail surveys. It’s an ever-changing landscape, yet the fundamentals of study design, quality data collection, and insights and analytics still remain the same.
While it’s been a lot of hard work, and we’ve endured and persevered through many struggles, this journey, and this company we’ve built, has been extremely fulfilling and rewarding, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything! Upcoming blog posts will share some of our favorite stories of the adventures we’ve had along the way, along with exciting and notable studies that we were fortunate to have been a part of.