A Sit Down With Rebecca Brooks

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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I have followed the public work of Rebecca Brooks and her team at Alter Agents for years now and have been consistently impressed by the topics they have tackled and the depth of research (and corresponding insights!) they produce; check out their thought leadership. However, I have never found the time to chat with Rebecca, and I am thrilled that our focus on Women CEOs for Women’s History Month gave me a chance to change that!

First, any conversation that starts with the other person noticing my “Wall of Geek” is a sure sign that I am REALLY going to like this person, and that was absolutely true in this case too! However, as much as we might have liked to spend our entire together discussing that stuff, we re-focused and dived into our shared passion: market research. As I suspected from the quality of work produced by Alter Agents, Rebecca’s leadership has produced a very special company doing great things and that is inspired by the singular vision of Rebecca herself. She and the company she has built is truly inspiring and is a great example of how living your values leads to not just business success, but to actually doing good in the world.

I think in this interview you’ll see what I mean, and I bet you’re going to be inspired to. Enjoy!

 

This interview has been edited for clarity

 

Lenny Murphy: Hello, everybody. It is Lenny Murphey here with another one of our interview series with leaders in Research. And today, it is my great pleasure to be joined by Rebecca Brookes, CEO of Alter Agents. Hi, Rebecca.

 

Rebecca Brooks: Lenny, good to be here.

 

Lenny Murphy: It’s good to have it for, for our listeners.

You know, I’m geeking out a little bit more than maybe normal, Rebecca. I just discovered a mutual love of geeky things. Now, we gotta talk about less fun things like you. If we had a research company that just focused on comic books and RPGs, Yeah.

 

Rebecca Brooks: I think there’s an opportunity.

 

Lenny Murphy: We should talk about offline.

 

Rebecca Brooks: Wizards of the Coast is my dream client, for sure.

 

Lenny Murphy: I would love to have Marvel.

So, Rebecca, I’ve been following Alter Agents for years. I’ve always been impressed with the depth that you’ve provided in your press releases on different topics you’ve covered. Now, why don’t you tell me your takes that you’ve built the company and how you got here and then, what it stands for?

 

Rebecca Brooks: Sure, I mean, you don’t think the way that we describe ourselves to clients is that we are the people you call when you have a knottier question to answer. We do tracking and copy testing and that kind of thing, too, but we’re the ones [to call] when the traditional sort of research tools and products aren’t going to answer that question for you.

So, for example, and we’ve been very lucky that, this past year, in particular, we’ve had a lot of clients that wanted to publish the work. So, it’s giving us a lot of visibility, but it also means I could talk about it, which is great.

We did an international study for Snapchat on friendship and really trying to understand like, what are the mechanisms of friendship, how is it changing, how is technology encoded leading into that?

So, it was sort of this multimodal approach, the response. But we also talked to 16 experts across the globe psychologists and anthropologists and sociologists, historians, and so it, we love that kind of really, maybe, more sort of philosophical stuff. It’s a thrill for us.

We tend to work really well in more sort of challenging situations or really unique situations. So, a client that’s really trying to break through and do something different or they’re the underdog.

Or in the case of Viking River Cruises, which is one of our biggest clients we’ve had for a long time. They’re so dominant in the space that regular research doesn’t really capture. You know, what their challenges are and what the things coming down the pipe.

So, that’s kind of what we do.

 

Lenny Murphy: How did you get there? I know you’ve been in the industry for quite some time. What drove you to build an agency that tackled that type of, of those thorny issues?

 

Rebecca Brooks: Yeah, so, so two things, one professional and personal.

I’ll start with the professional one because that ties into the thorny issues, which is that I had been dealing for some time that we were looking in the wrong direction or measuring the wrong and then the information I was getting back to my clients really wasn’t that helpful.

Many other market research companies have sort of a philosophy or an approach, kind of a model of the way that they think about research in the world, which can be very valuable. But I felt like the world was changing in a way that, know, we’re trying to duct tape sort of new solutions to the existing model it should work.

So, the example would be that I talk a lot about grandma cynicism in our questionnaires, traditional questionnaires are like:

• “Do you know me?
• What do you know about me?
• Am I better than the competition?
• Will you use media again?

It’s sort of it’s like a needy boyfriend, right? It’s just like, “Do you love me?” “How much do you love me?” “Do you love me more than the other guy?” And it’s the wrong question because consumers don’t think that way.

I’ve never weighed two different products and thought, “Well, this one’s trustworthy. But this one has value for the money.” We just don’t think that way.

So, I felt like the information we were taking back to our clients really wasn’t that useful, And I wanted to try some new and different, and I knew I couldn’t in the ecosystem I was in. So that was the professional reason for wanting to start something different.

On the personal, which I think is really relevant for Women’s History Month, and being a woman in this industry, was that I had noticed again, not just in the company, I was in many companies that there was this sort of strange phenomenon Where the junior levels were, majority women. But then as you moved up the chain, they weren’t. And I have noticed that it really was sort of an inflection point with family and burnout.

Mothers tended to leave the organization, go client-side, do something else because the demands of being on the vendor side and being in client service were too great.

Also, things like maternity leave and having to run to doctor’s appointments and take care of the kids became burdensome when the expectation is, you know, a 60-hour workweek and you’re on call all the time.

I just felt that there was this sort of, not malicious, but just the way that the system has been built was not allowing women to become senior leaders in their company. And I wanted to find a different way. I wanted to have a family. I didn’t want to start a family in that environment.

I thought, putting those two things together, maybe I can do something different. Start a company to ask different questions, and also have a company that allows me to have the life that I want to happen to, to be with my family in a way that I feel good about. That’s how I got started.

And we are celebrating our 11th year this year, so, I’m super proud of that.

 

Lenny Murphy: That’s fantastic, and that is that it’s fascinating. I don’t think I even thought about it until just this minute that this industry rewards workaholism.

And I am absolutely one of those, right. My norm has been 70 80 hours a week for 20 years, Right, that even you know, this, that my illness stuff? It slowed it down, so now work is 50, 50 hours a week, right? That’s a light week.

That work-life balance thing, I just hadn’t thought about it in those terms, that I’m just so fascinated that you brought that up. I just hadn’t thought about it, that we force these tradeoffs that maybe are unhealthy, right.

So, what I heard is you decided. “I don’t want to make these tradeoffs, or if I am just going to be on my terms”, to be able to have the best of both worlds.

 

Rebecca Brooks: Yeah, and that is such a passion of mine, like, of course, I want to end my career and have people being like, oh, she was a smart cookie, did good things, and clients like there.

 But the main thing that I want is I want to prove, by demonstrating that you can have an exceptionally high level of client service, you can have really happy clients, and really happy employees that have lives outside of work that feels fulfilled by other things.

I don’t think that whenever we start having 1 or 2 weeks when we’ve got people working, 60 hours, we start thinking about the staff. Because, to me, I had seen so many people burnt out, and I’d see turnover and clients getting frustrated because people they liked were leaving or, you know, moving onto different accounts. It’s not a recipe for success.

We’ve had tremendous success holding onto our clients since we opened. Our growth is exceedingly in client retention. We’re not a heavy, sales culture and the reason it works is that, and we hear this all the time from our clients, that we are their favorite phone call. Everybody they talk to is happy, they’re accommodating, they’re adaptable. They’re willing to go the extra mile because they know that we’re taking care of them.

I always say to people, when I’m interviewing, like, I do expect you to take the client call on Saturday night if there’s an emergency. We’re not limiting these hours to 9 to 5 and we’re not denying access to our clients.

On a Tuesday morning, if things are light, take a nap, go for a walk, shut down the computer, make choices that allow you to save your life. I think it really reflects our employees and our happiness of all people work that they do.

And then also it allowed us when covert hit to just instantly transition into work from home, we now have people who have moved out of LA that continue to work in teams.

I’m super passionate about it. We have unlimited vacation, Unlimited sick and personal days. We support each other and we come together and help each other out because I know if I step up and take off for somebody that isn’t doing well that day, they’re gonna do the same for me in a month or whatever.

It’s really reflected in sort of how we run things, you know, day-to-day, just the little decisions you have to make who’s going to be in this meeting, who can take this issue on, who’s got time to alleviate this at 7 PM?

So, we work really flat, and we’re very collaborative stuff because you need that sort of network to support the work when you’ve got people who are living their lives.

 

Lenny Murphy: I love that. Balancing staffing needs, based upon the task load with the expectation that, you know, there are infinite flexibility and schedules, there’s no time clocks.

I hate that concept as well. you work when you can work and you don’t work when you don’t have to work. if we’re all working all the time, then that’s probably doing something wrong, right? We’re too far on the Lean side.

So, I love that you’ve built the business that’s, that’s driven by that same idea, and it sounds like you’ve done it better than I ever have in my own businesses.

That I think we all kind of went through was Ok, what good comes out of this? I can see that one of the immediate things was going to be, well, work has just gotten divorced from location.

That, that I think we’ll see this evolution of, of changing dynamics in, many businesses from being detached, not just for location, but also from, from a schedule. To be more focused on task-oriented and what good comes from that with when employees can have work-life balance, because you’re actually at home, you know, doing these things all the time.

so, it’s been interesting to hear another story, right, that you were able to seamlessly transition into that world because you already had the fundamental principles in place. And driven by your experience, as, you know, what, it’s willing to be a mom and wanting the whole package, right. You didn’t want to sacrifice anything you wanted to have.

So, from that idea of, a female, entrepreneur, and leader who has built a successful business is there any advice, any tip, that you would give to other entrepreneurs, other females that that go, don’t want to trade off either?

 

Rebecca Brooks: Well, first of all, I don’t think that you have to start your own business. Jenna Landi from Pinterest spoke at the WIRe event that we hosted in LA in the fall of last year, about how she went to her bosses, and said, “I see a need here, and it also fits my personal needs and interests,” and she created a whole new department within our company, and it’s super happy now.

So, I think there are certainly ways to work within the system, too. So, I’m not advocating that everybody just, you know, bailout, give a middle finger to the old company.

But I think that one of the things that has always come back to me is I played poker or used to before kids a lot and there’s this sort of saying in poker that the players who in are the players that don’t care about money.

I’m naturally not money inclined. I don’t, I find it confusing. So, I think that I’ve made some decisions and taken some risks that other folks wouldn’t have because of a focus on money.

I also very much believe that if you’re going to do something entrepreneurial, you have to have a ‘leaders eat last’ attitude. It can’t be about going in and trying to do with MoneyGram because then you’re putting yourself ahead of your, of your team yourself ahead of your clients.

So, for instance, when COVID hit and Viking Cruises at the time is our biggest client and we didn’t know they weren’t on the water anymore. We didn’t know what they were going to do with the research.

Luckily, they kept it, but we came up with a plan right away, like leaders are taking pay cuts now. Then, we will give you guys at least a 2 to 4-week notice before we ask you for pay cuts. then before we start, we had a very clear plan in place where the primary goal was protecting our people and not about.

 

Lenny Murphy: Protecting your money.

 

Rebecca Brooks: Yep. Oprah spoke at Fall Trips a couple of years ago and she said something really fascinating. Somebody asked her If she could go back and tell her younger self something, what would it be? And she said I would tell myself to listen to the whispers.

We all have those that’s sort of like, doesn’t feel right or, you know, those kinds of feelings.

And we push them aside because they’re rationalizing where we don’t want to deal with it, or whatever, and so I really try to listen to if something doesn’t feel right, like dig into that, Why.

And it almost inevitably, 100% of the time leads to better. That doesn’t mean those are the things that I used to kind of open up together.

 

Lenny Murphy: Those are words of wisdom.

 

Rebecca Brooks: Not mine, but, yeah.

 

Lenny Murphy: But, you know, it’s, it’s the life lessons and their hard-won. So, I don’t think any of us create this stuff, right? We just pick it up through repetition.

 

Rebecca Brooks: Yeah.

 

Lenny Murphy: Thank you so much, Rebecca. Thank you for taking the time to chat with us today.

 

Rebecca Brooks: Yeah, thanks, Lenny.