Rolling Up Mystery Shopping: Market Force CEO Karl Maier (Part 5)

Sramana: Is the workforce widely distributed?

Karl Maier: We have built a shared service center that has allowed us to centralize back-office operations here in Colorado. We have 45 people here and we handle legal, HR, new product development, and IT. We have then built a center of excellence outside of Atlanta and one just outside of Albany, New York. Those centers of excellence coincide with some of our acquisitions.

When we made our acquisitions, the companies we purchased had distributed operations. We moved them to a centralized model. Most of our mystery shopping operations are based out of Atlanta. Our modeling and merchandising operations is based in Albany. We now have just under 400 employees. There are 45 in Colorado, close to 150 in Atlanta, and the remainder are in Albany.

Sramana: Where are your independent contractors located?

Karl Maier: They are located everywhere. We have 300,000 of them distributed all over the U.S. and Canada.

Sramana: How do they find out about you, and how do you recruit them?

Karl Maier: We do a lot of different things. We buy a lot of AdWords. If people search for “mystery shopping,” we come up high in the results. We do Facebook advertising. We are members of several trade organizations. Through all of those ads they find us.

The demographics are incredibly representative of the U.S. population. There is a higher percentage that is female. Over 70% are female and over 50% make over $50,000 a year. Most have a high school or college education. We have college students, retirees, and a lot of stay-at-home moms. It is a huge cross-section of the U.S. population.

Sramana: Did you acquire any companies that were backed by venture capital?

Karl Maier: They had all been around for a while and had all been bootstrapped by an entrepreneur. The first company had been started 35 years earlier. The youngest company we purchased had been around for 20 years. None of them had venture capital money.

Sramana: That makes roll-ups a lot easier. Outside investors make valuations complicated.

Karl Maier: You are absolutely right, and we have found that to be challenging. I am knocking on wood that we are going to close two more acquisitions in the next 90 days, and in both cases there are outside investors.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Rolling Up Mystery Shopping: Market Force CEO Karl Maier
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