Interview with Dan Womack

All of our CEO series interviews are special, but today’s is particularly so because of my personal history with our guest. Dan Womack has the dubious honor of being my very first direct brand-side client waaaay back when I started my career in market research almost 20 years ago. He was an insights leader at GE Financial at the time. Somehow we connected, and I sold him on the idea of building one of the early online proprietary panels. We built custom software to manage it and conduct surveys. Through doing so, we learned on the fly best practices for building and managing a B2B panel. Dan was always looking to drive innovation across his organizations and was an early adopter (or at least experimenter!) of emerging methods and technologies; many suppliers besides me owe him a debt of gratitude for being an early advocate and business partner.

For some reason we kept winning his business, and for close to a decade he was one of my favorite clients across his career at GE Financial, Genworth Financial, and Aflac. We also became good friends over the years, and it has been a pleasure to see him become one of the few client-side leaders engaged in a visible leadership role across events, associations, and published materials.

So, why the interview today? Well, Dan recently decided to come back to the supplier side and has assumed the role of President of KLC (formerly KL Communications), another early innovator around combining crowdsourcing and communities to drive impactful insights. Kevin Lonnie, the founder of KLC, is also an old friend whom I respect immensely, so Dan joining KLC is particularly cool! Now that Dan is porting his over 20 years of client-side experience to one of the leading innovators in the industry, I have high expectations on how he’ll leverage the assets of his experience and deep industry knowledge to really grow the business and challenge the industry to innovate further. In this interview, we explore a bit about what they may look like.

Obviously with all of our history this is a very friendly and casual conversation, but I think you, dear listeners, will learn a lot and enjoy it as much as I did.

The text has been edited for clarity.

Lenny Murphy: Hello, everybody. It’s Lenny Murphy here with another edition of our series of CEO interviews. And you know, I always say all of these sessions are great and special. But this one really, really is. Because my guest today is Dan Womack. And here is a story for you. Dan was my first independent client when I went solo back in 2002, 2003, Dan?

Dan Womack: I think a while ago.

Lenny Murphy: Yes, so Dan at that point was at GE Financial, and he had this idea to build a proprietary panel. And somehow, I wiggled my way in there and won that business. And then, he’d been a client for many, many years throughout. And in case you don’t know, Dan’s going to introduce himself in just a second. He has been around the industry, again, almost 20 years that we’ve known each other, in very influential roles. And he’s got some news to share about a new influential role.

But it’s great. So you’re going to hear us kind of cut up a little bit because we’ve known each other for 20 years and we’ve been clients and friends. And it’s just a real joy to be able to have this conversation. So Dan, now, you introduce yourself after that intro.

Dan Womack: Wow, yeah, well, thank you. This is a lot of fun. I know you and I talk from time to time but it’s been a while, and I haven’t actually seen your face for a long time. So it’s nice to see you. And thank you for the introduction. Yeah, I’ve been around for a bit. I started out before you and I met, working for a small research firm. I spent about four years there, learned a ton, and did a lot of qualitative work.

About 70% of my time was as a moderator, traveling around the country, doing focus groups. But then I came over to the other side of the world, the corporate researcher, client side at GE Financial, then Genworth Financial, and in the last 13 plus years at Aflac until very recently. So I’m excited to say I’ve joined KLC, formerly KL communications. All of your listeners probably know Kevin Lonnie. But I’ve joined Kevin and his team as president. And yeah, I’m delighted to be there and excited about the possibilities.

Lenny Murphy: I love it when we bring people back to the dark side, you know. And especially for a company like KL. Again, yes, I’ve known Kevin forever. When I first heard the news about you guys connecting in this way, my thought was, wow, what a perfect match of just incredibly smart, nice – and I think that really counts, right? – good people that have really made an impact in the industry over the years. To see that joining of forces, so to speak, it did my heart good. And that’s why we wanted to have this conversation. So why? Why did you make the jump? And why KL?

Dan Womack: Yeah, great question. So I mentioned, I was at Aflac over 13 years. I’d been thinking about a departure from there, just a great company, and a great team I worked with. But I’d gotten a little bored and wasn’t getting to do a lot of new things. And so, I decided in the spring of 2020 that I would start searching for a new job. It turned out to be one of the dumbest ideas I’ve ever had in my career. So March hit, and I thought, no, maybe this is not the best time to job search. – It was in March 2020, just to reiterate that it was not the best time to go on a job hunt.

So I hunkered down a little bit. I decided to ride this out, see what’s going to happen with this new world it looks like we’re moving into. But near the end of the year, near the end of 2020, Aflac offered a generous, what they called a voluntary separation program. And it was my cue to step out. A nice runway – it gave me a little time to step back, think a little bit, and then, search for a role.

And I’ll be honest. I didn’t start out thinking I would be coming back to the research provider side. But Kevin gave me a call, I think it was in the spring, late spring maybe, and said, “Are you still looking for something new to do?” And I said, “As a matter of fact, I am.” And he said, “Well, I got something I want to talk to you about.” So we spent a couple of months talking about it. Like you, I’ve known Kevin for a long time. I was a customer for a while at Aflac with a great experience. But I knew him well before that.

And we both wanted to make sure that this made sense for both of us. And ultimately, after I probably drove Kevin crazy to be honest, I looked at it at every possible angle it can be looked at.

Lenny Murphy: Oh, I remember having you as a client, what that was like, so.

Dan Womack: Yes. At the end of all that, I was very comfortable and confident in the decision and just excited about working with a great team, with a great customer base, and just tons of possibilities.

Lenny Murphy: So that’s cool, and it’s a great story. I joke about having you as a client and being persnickety – but in which you were always a joy. But I think this is maybe the interest point. You were always focused on the future, right? I mean, my God, again, we were doing proprietary panel back in early 2000 and online panel for insurance agents in early 2000, right? That’s about as progressive in future thinking as you get.

So I have to imagine that as you were examining your options and thinking about the role with KL that innovative niche, that drive for the future was in there as well. So can you talk a little bit about that?

Dan Womack: Yeah, sure. I think KL (formerly KLC) has been known for technology to some extent since their founding. Kevin started the company more than 25 years ago. And as you and many of the listeners may know, proprietary online communities are a big part of that business. Are they purely a new technology today? No. But they are certainly still in that realm of new to many companies and many clients I reach today.

I think the innovative, the moving forward from there for me and what excites me is the tools are great, and even we have a couple of proprietary tools, those are fantastic. But it’s the way I believe those tools can be leveraged as new challenges are faced by corporate researchers as I saw for many years. I think those challenges are ramping up, they’re getting just more intense today. Some of them are the same but more intense, some of them are completely new with COVID and lots of other things going on in the world.

There’s just a lot we don’t know about customers today. And what I love about the suite of tools and capabilities that KLC is that I believe we’re very well positioned to help go into the future and answer those questions about where our customers today and maybe even more importantly, where they go on.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah and I obviously, I agree. I think that as we look at the – well, it’s in the dynamic out of 2020. Let me see if you agree with this based on your experience on the client side. We were all kind of tracking along you know, and then, here came this, oh, crap, scenario. And it seems as if the instant reaction was, OK, we need answers now. We need them fast and we need them cost effectively.

So there is this massive shift towards all-things digital and kind of in this DIY broad category as this initial reaction, just to get a handle on the situation. And then a progression as people start to get a handle on – as much as we could if we even have a handle on it yet. Realizing that there were actually massive changes that were occurring, not just the kind of your basic purchasing behaviors, those type of things, but true kind of paradigm shifting behavioral changes, cultural realignment, just huge implications crossing the board.

And we’ve seen a shift now towards more strategic research but with a focus on, I think – my sense is that researchers, particularly brands researchers, are now in the place of understanding, look, we need agility, we need cost and speed efficiencies, we need to be able to answer questions right then and there. But we need to understand and understand the why, understand really what is driving folks is not as simple as a quick fast survey or quick fast group.

We need to build long-term engagement models that allow us to really, really get under the hood, so to speak in this change of dynamic. So is that – from your perspective, am I reading that right?

Dan Womack: Yeah, absolutely Lenny. I think that’s a big part of it. And I think I’ll use the term that I’m starting to hear more and always on. So fast, efficient, accurate, yes, all those things. But with as fast as consumers are changing today and as quickly as companies need to move the concept of always on technologies and always on tools, I believe are just more important today than they’ve ever been.

But yeah, the changes – and we certainly saw this at Aflac, and I’m sure most corporate researchers did as well, that the changes on both what customers’ attitudes and behaviors as well as internally, the demands and needs of leaders inside the organization were changing daily as well. Because they were getting new information and partial information in most cases. And in this case, I’m talking about what’s going on with the pandemic, when are we coming back into the office? How are employees feeling about all this? Are we being as productive as we used to be? All those things, right?

So leaders are also in this constant new pressure, new change situation. So that leads to new questions about a customer base that is also constantly changing from day to day. And just another part of that too is – I love the combination of customer insight, if you will, that comes from attitudinal types of work. So the places market researchers point in being combined with behavioral data from the big data, the internal data that sits in databases.

But one of the challenges we started to see, and I think what a lot of people have is the quality of insight coming from the 10 years of data or 15 or 20 years of data in the big data sources all of a sudden coming into question. Because if there are huge shifts in behaviors, your past data isn’t very good at predicting it anymore.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah, right. When the norms get broken, well, you got to develop some new norms, right?

Dan Womack: Yeah. Sounds a little bit like a mutual fund ad. But you know, a very good performance is not a predictor.

Lenny Murphy: So now, when I think about everything we just said being true, the community as the hub, I guess for lack of a better term, or one of the foundational tools in the researchers toolkit to be able to drive both this agile, always on capability, but also, this in-depth exploration. And I know that KL particularly has always focused on the idea of wisdom of the crowd as well and weaving that into their offering.

So is what really excited you about the opportunity particularly at KL to build that future off of that foundational knowledge that this basic offering, this philosophy or thesis really is what’s going to drive the future as we move forward as an industry to address a variety of inside challenges across the board.

Dan Womack: Yeah, to a large extent. And I’ll be honest, I’m a couple of weeks in here so I’m getting my head around just what all the capabilities are. But the way I’m kind of looking at it is the platform, if you will, the community platform is a chassis that adapts really well to any kind of technology you may want to build or bolt on to it. And it’s just an incredible chassis for answering the key business questions that I know come up every day inside of a big corporations. And that’s, yeah, that’s a really exciting thing for me.

You know, the platforms, the enabler, but you can do just about any type of research off that chassis that you may ever need to do. Obviously, there are some limitations. But I’ve started to dig into this and I don’t know everything yet. But just looking into in the last year, what types of questions have been coming to us from customers. And just doing that little exercise, and I’m not even halfway finished with it yet, I see that just incredible variety of needs that are being fulfilled from this chassis and several tools that have been bolted on to it, so.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah, I agree. It’s fun and exciting times across the board. I want to be conscious of time. Of your time as well as the listeners because you and I can go on and on for a long time as we have done many times in the past. So this is kind of the last question. Is your entry in this brave new world of coming back into the dark side during massive change, how are you going to measure success for yourself? Right? A year out from now, what do you think, if I can accomplish this I know that I’ve done it well. But if not, then, I don’t know. Maybe, I made the wrong choice. So what does that look like for you?

Dan Womack: No. That’s a great question. And I’m going to attack it from a couple of angles. One is just on a personal level, on a Dan level, if you will. I’m at a point in my career where I want to do things that are meaningful and have some fun while I’m doing it. So that’s part of it on the personal side, right? I think we’re definitely in a place with KLC to do some meaningful work for people we already are. So I feel good about that part. So far, I’m having a lot of fun with it, meeting some great people. So yeah. So those are two key things on the personal side.

And on the professional side, you know, growing the business, bringing new customers so they can experience what we can do for them, and growing teams and people. I’ve inherited a great team, which I was fortunate that I knew some of the members before Kevin and I started talking. And I’ve gotten to know all of them a little better now. And that’s really important to me is understanding where people are today, where they want to go, and how I can help them get there. So developing the team, growing the company, that would be the professional side.

Lenny Murphy: Very cool. And I assume adding to the record collection while you’re going off to the side.

Dan Womack: Yeah. Well, yes, folks will be able to see a slight portion of my record collection. And yeah, unfortunately, it’s a habit I cannot really break. But not traveling makes it easier. I’m not stepping into a lot of record stores all over the country these days.

Lenny Murphy: Well, hopefully you actually get to enjoy them then, have a little more time to break them out and dive in. Dan, I know this will be the first of hopefully many conversations over the course of time. But it’s such a joy to be able to reconnect. Guys, for those who just don’t know Dan, you need to. He’s just one of the best people in the world. Hey, he’s not a client anymore so I’m not blowing smoke.

Dan Womack: It would nice.

Lenny Murphy: Yeah. So truly, I rarely go this far, but if you haven’t had a chance to reach out and talk to Dan Womack just as a friend, you should do that if you can have the pleasure of working with him, then, even better. You will not be disappointed. You actually spoiled me, Dan, back in the day. Like, but wait, all of my clients are nice like Dan. Some are really jerks. [LAUGHING]

Dan Womack: You know Lenny, I appreciate that. And I would tell people to – I would also say if you don’t know Lenny, you should. But I’ve just remembered, everybody knows you. Everybody knows you already, so I can’t really say he’s the nice guy, you should get to know him. It’s true but they already know you.

Lenny Murphy: It’s like a bad penny. Well, we have a great mutual admiration society, and I’m glad that we had a meeting of that society, Dan.

Dan Womack: It’s good.

Lenny Murphy: Congratulations on the new role. It really is cool and very exciting. I think KL is a wonderful company. I have tons of respect and admiration for the team and for Kevin. I can’t wait to hear what you guys accomplish next, now that you’ve had this mind meld to drive things forward. That’ll be fun and exciting.

Dan Womack: Thank you, Lenny. Really enjoyed it, always great to see you.

Lenny Murphy: You as well, my friend. So take care. Thanks, everybody for listening.