Ambika McGee Shoots for the Future

In honor of Women’s History Month, GreenBook is talking with female leaders from across the insights industry to celebrate their achievements and inspire the next wave of professionals. Join us each week for the CEO Series as we sit down with top female leaders for a conversation on industry trends, overcoming challenges, and developing leadership skills.

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This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

 

Lenny Murphy: Hello, everybody. It’s Lenny Murphy here with our continuing series of showcasing women CEOs in honor of Women’s History Month. And today, I am joined by Ambika McGee. Ambika, welcome.

 

Ambika McGee: Thank you for having me.

 

Lenny Murphy: Glad to have you. So, little history. Ambika reached out to me, what, a couple of months ago on LinkedIn. And we just had a wonderful chat, talking about the industry and opportunities because you have the great luck of deciding to build a business during a pandemic, right?

 

Ambika McGee: Oh, yeah. I’m so lucky. So fortunate, right? So, yeah.

 

Lenny Murphy: Yeah. Well, let’s talk about that. Rather be telling your story. Why don’t you tell the audience a little bit about your background and what got us to this conversation and we’ll go from there?

 

Ambika McGee: Yeah, so for me, I mean, I started out at 15, 16 years ago on the client side of market research and had a great career. You know, learned a lot, traveled the world doing lottery and gaming market research, and just, in the last five years, felt like, OK, well, maybe I could be more impactful. Maybe I could actually have more work-life balance if I do my own thing.

 

Lenny Murphy: Hah! We should’ve talked way before that then.

 

Ambika McGee: Exactly. Exactly. Do you know you know I blame? I blame my husband because he comes from a family of entrepreneurs and he was the one that was like, no, this should be the year that you do your own thing. You know, we’re not getting any younger, dada dadada. And so I’m like, all right, fine.

2019 we filed all the paperwork to start this business so that it could kick off in January of 2020. Then the world collapses. But it was– I mean, it’s not been all bad, right? I mean, I think that we all have that kind of feeling where there are some things with coronavirus that have just been horrible, terrible. People’s careers have been obliterated in certain instances. But for me, I mean, the whole purpose in starting the consultancy was really to bring more technology into the research that we do, which meant that most of our projects were online anyway. And I remember the first project we did, we had great participation because people had nothing else.

Nothing else to do. They were happy to fill out our survey, right? And so it’s been a challenging year and there’s been a lot of just everything going on. But it’s not been bad for business, and I mean, I think that for me, I never really saw a lot of women, or even African-American women doing market research throughout my entire career. And I felt like, all right, well maybe you can be the solution, you can fill in the gaps you never really saw for other young people, other women, other men. I mean, just be the piece that really you never really got to participate in or be a part of.

So it’s not been horrible, but I do work a lot of hours though. That part of it, I’m like, what is going on here?

 

Lenny Murphy: Yeah. Yeah. That work-life balance, you know? Yeah. I’ve been on [INAUDIBLE] 20 years and, yes, my average workweek is– a low-level workweek is 60 hours a week. And that’s just the way that it is and everybody’s adapted. So you broke [INAUDIBLE], and I thought about this a lot. So especially in the last year, right? I mean, let’s just be aware that the issues around diversity and inclusion certainly are kind of part and parcel of this explosion of consciousness that occurred in 2020 and that’s wonderful and important.

And a lot of folks trying to kind of understand, well why is this industry so not diverse? I mean geographically, certainly, it is. But let’s say, in the United States or Europe, it’s not. And I don’t think that’s by– I think it’s just kind of by accident. Now, I may have a warped perspective and I own that. It’s unfortunate. I could think maybe I know 10 people, 10 African-American people in the industry. Maybe 10, off the top of my head.

Now that doesn’t reflect my personal– I know lots of people in my personal life, but– sorry, it’s kind of an awkward question Ambika, I’m trying to get to it. Why are we not more diverse? Do you think there’s anything systemic in the industry or is there something that we’re not communicating effectively to students or– why are we not attracting or people like you?

 

Ambika McGee: Mhm. Yeah, I mean, I think it’s a combination of reasons. Like for me, when I think about my pathway, the route that I took to get to where I am today, it was completely by accident. I mean, I did not plan on doing what I’m doing right now. I mean, I always aspired to be an entrepreneur, but it wasn’t like– I didn’t have anybody in my family that was an entrepreneur. So it was more just an aspirational thing. That’s the goal, but I don’t know how I’m going to get there. And my very first job ever in life was doing patient satisfaction surveys for this health care company.

I just remember thinking, this survey is stupid. I don’t know who made this thing, but it’s way too long. Never thinking that that was a career. I mean, I had a little bit of exposure to market research through that job, but there was no connection there at all. So I’m a first-generation American. My family is all immigrants, and it was like, you need to be a doctor, you need to be an attorney because those are the pathways that they saw as being successful, you know?

Nothing else was really a consideration. There was no one that I could speak to in my family that was like, all right, well, I’m an attorney, or I’m a researcher or whatever, I’m, going to help you, at least expose you to what I do. And I think that that’s the big problem with a lot of Black and brown people, is just there’s no– you don’t have an example. You don’t have someone that you can turn to that looks like you, that’s doing a wide variety of things. And so because you don’t have that example, you just kind of succumb to just human existence. Like you’re just kind of going along and you just kind of– taking whatever you can get, not necessarily aspiring to be an engineer or whatever it is.

And so that’s definitely a problem. And I do think that there are some systemic things in our industry that do prevent people who are diverse from getting in. And I think that I’ve even fallen into that, where, in my corporate role, I would only look at applicants that had a master’s degree from this program or a degree from that college or whatever because that’s just what I was told I needed to hire. I didn’t really push back or felt that I could push back and say, well, no. For this job, they could have no degree and we’ll train them or whatever.

And so I think that there’s definitely an elitist mentality too, in terms of to be a trained researcher, you’ve got to have these credentials. Well, there’s a lot of things in research that is not– you don’t necessarily have to have a master’s degree or college degree or whatever. And we should open that up and say, well, let’s train for these things. I mean, some of the best research teams that I’ve been a part of, we had an artist, like, our own dedicated artist that took all the data and made it beautiful and made it understandable.

Why isn’t that? That’s an insides position. So there’s a lot that’s going on and a lot that needs to be changed. One of the reasons why I’m on the IC is for that same reason. It’s to just expose people, expose students to just what we do in the hopes that they are Black and they’re brown and they’ll want to at least intern or something. So there’s a lot. There’s a lot of reasons why.

 

Lenny Murphy: So that is actually a really nice point. I don’t talk about this very often, but here’s a secret. I don’t have a degree. At all. I screwed up college. I screwed up college really well and never went back.  And I’ve experienced that myself, that elitism over the years. And now 20 years in, I think people assume that I have some type of advanced degree. And, no, I have a high school diploma.

I learn by doing. So I learn by trying and through that process. And I think you’re right. We don’t create a good path for really talented people that bring lots of diverse skill sets to the table to be able to grow, to come into the industry, and grow.

Like you, in my first research job, I worked for a company called the Myers group, here in Atlanta, doing health care satisfaction surveys. And my experience– yes. That was it, the CAHPS survey. I was running the call center because I had been running a different type of call center prior to that. And I thought, oh, I can do this, and realized it was a radically different thing. Point is, I lucked into this and learned through the process. And now years later, whatever, here I am.

 

Ambika McGee: Here you are!

 

Lenny Murphy: Here I am, for whatever that’s worth. Do you think that there’s a possibility of building almost a moving away from the formal educational system that we have been so enmeshed in into more of a pragmatic internship– and I’m sorry, I just realized the sun is shining right in my window right here– almost an internship-type program. And would that help? Would that help us to attract really, truly talented people for, whatever reason, didn’t know that we as an industry existed and haven’t gone down that path so far, from an education or career standpoint? What do you think? I’m just throwing it out there.

 

Ambika McGee: I think it would help. I mean, I definitely think that it would help because, like you, I think at least half of the world learns by doing. We’re demonstrative. Like, you can talk and tell me, explain, or show me pictures, or whatever but until I actually do it myself, I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about. And so I think that it would help, but I’m also reminded of the fact that Whitney Dunlap-Fowler, who’s the president of the Insights in Color Association that I’m a board member of, likes to remind us that in some ways, market research is kind of boring.

We’re the creators behind the behind. Like, we do the analysis, we do the preparation, we do the screeners, we do all this stuff and that’s not attractive. It’s not showy for a lot of people, showy enough for a lot of people. And so they may come in, they may leave just because it’s like, I want a job where I’m doing something a little bit more enticing, especially in this age of social media and influencers and all this. So it may not be enough to get people to stay in the industry for their entire career, which is fine.

But I think that, at least, if we start with a basic goal of saying, hey, let’s introduce this industry to as many different kinds of college students, high school students, maybe even middle school students as possible, then I think that in 5, 10 years, we’ll definitely start to see an influx of people that look more like the population that all these products that we’re testing actually serve. Yeah. It’s a start.

 

Lenny Murphy: A good start. And that’s nice. We should have a follow-up conversation about that as well. I mean, it’s interesting. My goal has always been to be as helpful as I can be in as many ways as I can be. And that’s GreenBook’s perspective, but we also recognize that when it comes to– [COUGHS], excuse me, pollen– when it comes to building programs like that, that is the role of trade associations like the one you mentioned or the Insight association or SMAR, whoever. But I certainly think that we can help drive awareness.

So, happy to have that conversation to see if there’s a way to do that because I think that’s important. Because when I think about this though, the industry that we’ve been in, I think it is exciting. I mean, I’ve had the privilege of participating in– one of the largest projects I ever did early on when I started Rockhopper was we were doing the original research with Alcatel-Lucent on the development of 3G technology globally. And it’s like, man, we helped change the world, you know? We really did.

Now, obviously, Alcatel-Lucent changed the world, but the research that we were doing was important, it was impactful, it was interesting. And maybe that message has gotten out there enough that we really do interesting things. So anyway– or I’m just a geek and you know–

 

Lenny Murphy: No. I mean, no, I’m right there with you. I think that what you described is exactly one of the first things that the IIC plans to do in terms of education is just kind of showcasing some of the failures like this is what happens when you don’t do market research and look at how horrible this is.

 

Lenny Murphy: New coke!

 

Ambika McGee: Right. All of New Coke. And, yeah, start there to say that a lack of not including market researchers could lead you to this. And enticed people in with that and then get them to see, OK, well, now look. You do market research and look at some of the benefits, look at some of the products, some of the marketing campaigns that have really flourished because they did market research the right way. So yeah. Yeah, no.

 

Lenny Murphy: Even when to think about the other career path that seems to be so desirable for– or the idea of success for so many people of color, of celebrities, rappers, entertainers, all like that great stuff. But what’s always impressed me about this is they’re really great marketers, you know? They inherently are fantastic marketers. And maybe this is a way to capture that idea of, look, these folks, they have– even kind of maybe in the rap community– you see these people that just market the hell out of themselves. They understand their population, they target them effectively, they build visibility and awareness of their brand. And maybe there’s a way to even tap into that message of, look, maybe the end result is that, yeah, they’re up on stage making a bajillion dollars, but the process to get there is what we do.

 

Ambika McGee: Right. Exactly. Right, right. What they see and what they are being impacted by with this particular celebrity, there was a method to it. There was a pathway that was followed in terms of how that person is where they are, to a certain degree, and if we can leverage that, maybe we should have, like, a, I don’t know, market research celebrity collaboration or something. So I can’t think of any celebrities that I would be excited about, but I’m old, so.

 

Lenny Murphy: I hear you. I hear you. But you know, there’s a few. But I think I’ve just noticed that. Maybe it’s my lens that’s like, you know, this guy’s– you know, they really know what the hell they’re doing. They’re really working on the marketing process. Anyway, that’s incredibly useful and interesting. I’d like for us to have a conversation, a follow-up on that.

 

Ambika McGee: Yeah, absolutely. And I think that through having these conversations with people like you, folks who are maybe even in schools and have access to some of the population groups that we really want to, at least, bring in to market research, having a collaborative effort, I think is where we start to really get some of these goals accomplished. Because the world is changing, you know? And if we want to make sure that people that look like us, people that come from where we come from, people who have our experience, our education, and all that have a shot at the future, we’ve got to start now.

I see all these articles now about how all of our jobs are going to be just completely done away with. The machines are going to do it all, even research. And it’s like, but you still need a human brain to interpret some of this.

 

Lenny Murphy: Right. Right. Right. And we need a background, right? And, totally, I’m never dismissive of all of my peers and colleagues who have the formal training. There’s times I even wish that I had the formal training. But, whatever, our paths are different. But I think that, to your point, achieving that type of representivity of experience and finding all of the opportunities that we have across the board for really talented people to do great things regardless of this kind of structured way. Maybe that’s just part of being researchers, we think of things in very structured ways. Maybe we all need to become qualies. Maybe that’s the way that–

 

Ambika McGee: I don’t know. My brain doesn’t really– I don’t know. I respect qualitative research, you know, but it’s not my natural way of thinking and doing things. I need categories. It’s so hard to think, for me, all of the buckets that we fall into are valuable. We need a mix of all of us. We can’t all be Ph.D. statisticians.

Some of us need to be OK with just, I don’t know, coding the data. I don’t know. It’s just all of us have value and we all should come together because that’s the way that we get a holistic team and set the stage for inclusion in other levels as well.

 

Lenny Murphy: Yep. I agree. So at the cost of time, like the last time we chatted. I think you and I can just go on and on for a long time. Let’s zero back in on the first part of the conversation, though, of, OK, so you started the business in the middle of the apocalypse– or at the beginning of the apocalypse. What have you learned? What have you learned as an entrepreneur, as a woman, anything that has kind of wrapped that up in this past year, you look back and say, hey, this was interesting, all of these lessons that you could share with our listeners?

 

Ambika McGee: Oh my goodness. I think that, for me, the biggest thing that I learned is that those courses that I kind of had a little bit of an interest in, whether it was in college or even in my corporate job, that I thought about taking but didn’t feel like I had enough time or whatever, I should have just taken the damn course. I always had a little bit of, like, OK, well I want to take that graphic design class. Never did it. Oh, I see that there’s this business class to understand statements, financial statements, I don’t have time to do it. I should have done it.

You know, things like that. Do those things when you really do have the time, and then it’ll make your older years just a little bit easier because it just would have, I think, just broadened my base of knowledge for starting my own business and having to do all of that stuff myself.

 

Lenny Murphy: Right, right. And all the mistakes that come along with it when you’re– yes. Got it. Yes.

 

Ambika McGee: Well a lot of people expect that you know this stuff. They’re like, oh, you know, I mean, I’m going to send you this statement, we need you to, where is this, where is that? And I’m like, what are you talking about? I don’t even understand what that means. Yeah. So I’ve learned that I should have just gone and listened to my interests instead of being so focused on whatever it was that I was just honed in on. Just do the fun stuff too just because you never know.

 

Lenny Murphy: OK. That is a good message. Always be learning.

 

Ambika McGee: Always be learning.

 

Lenny Murphy: Always be learning. All right, so think about– we’ve made it through– hopefully, fingers crossed– the worst of this weirdness we’ve all experienced. Now, where do you see yourself being two years out, three years out? What’s that vision look like for you?

 

Ambika McGee: My vision. My vision is to have a market research practice that includes even more technology than what we’re using now, where we’ve got all these relationships all these different companies that automate things, that we’re doing more automated things. We’re getting away from some of the more manual things. That I never again in my life have to do another 20-minute survey. Please, Lord, no more long surveys.

Things like that where it’s like, we’re just making it as easy as possible for consumers and the people that we need to get feedback from to give us their feedback easily. Easily. We’re tapping into more blockchain solutions. We never have to ask any demographic questions. Things like that, where it’s just like, we’re just able to– we have this information. People can update it whenever they want to update it, and we’re just getting to the meat of what we need to ask so that we can get to the solution and get the insight.

 

Lenny Murphy: Thank you for the validation. Yes. But I, yeah, totally agree with that. So then I assume that the next step of that is so that the value really is based upon leveraging your IP and your team’s IP and experience and helping to activate the insights to focus on, this is what we do around these business issues rather than the process of research itself.

 

Ambika McGee: Exactly. Yeah, because the process is eating up so much time and effort and it’s like, wait a minute. This is the moment, you know? I mean, I guess that’s part of why we’re researchers because we get excited about that. The data’s all back and now we get to make sense of it. Yeah, but it took us three months to get it. That is unacceptable.

 

Lenny Murphy: I hear you. I hear you. All right, so it is early on a Friday morning for both of us. And I’m going to be conscious of the time, and, again, I think you and I could go on a lot more. And I think that we– I’d love for us to have another conversation, not on camera, about some of the stuff you talked about because I think it’s cool. But I also would like to– let’s follow back up and talk about this idea around building a more inclusive industry and how we can help do that in different ways.

So let’s have that follow-up conversation as well, and, yeah, that’s great. So I loved our first conversation, I’ve loved this conversation even more, and I hope that we have more and more of these, Ambika, this is great.

 

Ambika McGee: Absolutely. Thank you so much, Lenny.

 

Lenny Murphy: No, thank you. So have a great rest of the weekend. Thank you so much. Congratulations on the success so far, and I’m sure that there will be a heck of a lot more to come.

 

Ambika McGee: Hope so. Thank you.