An international food & beverages company sought to identify colmados (small shop owners) in South America most likely to manage successful, long-lasting businesses. This assessment would enable targeted investments into colmados with high growth potential.
The company's in-house data services team needed to redesign their existing 15-question survey to more accurately measure colmado owners' motivation and potential for business success. The challenge was to create a robust tool that could predict long-term business viability based on limited questionnaire data.
We initiated our process with an extensive literature review focusing on sales dynamics and factors influencing business success. Contrary to initial beliefs, our research revealed that motivation alone was a poor predictor of business success, as many highly motivated businesses still fail. This insight led us to identify four key predictors of future success: - Grit/ Resilience: how you fare when things get tough - Self Efficacy: the belief that you will be successful - Past Success: data on past performance - Growth-Focused: how much you are occupied with your businesses’ growth Given the company’s system constraints of a maximum of 15 questions, we faced the challenge of narrowing down the questionnaire to just 10 questions. This required distilling measures for these psychological variables, traditionally covered by 6-8 questions each, into a more concise format. To address the issue of grit and resilience, we leveraged survivorship bias by formulating questions around the hardships faced during the COVID-19 pandemic, assuming that continuing businesses displayed significant resilience. Additionally, we were cautious of social desirability bias—the tendency of respondents to answer questions in a manner they believe is favorable rather than truthful. We strategically framed questions to allow colmado owners to provide less optimal but more honest responses, enhancing the authenticity of the data collected.
Findings and Impact:
The redesigned questionnaire incorporated the four identified success predictors into its structure, balancing brevity with depth. Without a prior validation study, we avoided constructing a complex analytical model. Instead, we evaluated the four factors independently but gave them equal weight in our assessment model. This approach led to a normally distributed bell curve of colmado owners’ potential, confirming the effectiveness of our metrics in distinguishing varying levels of business potential.
The final questionnaire allowed the company to confidently identify and invest in colmado owners who exhibited the highest potential for success, based on a more nuanced understanding of what contributes to business durability and growth.
Insights
Beyond Motivation: Discovering that traditional indicators like motivation were insufficient alone to predict success underscored the importance of a multi-faceted approach in evaluating business potential.
Adapting to Constraints: Successfully compressing complex psychological measures into a concise survey demonstrated the effectiveness of creative problem-solving under strict constraints.
Navigating Biases: By designing questions that countered social desirability bias, we gained deeper and more accurate insights into the true character and potential of the business owners.
As a global international CPG company we are proud to work with Q in order to better help our customers thrive. Roy and Haggai helped us rethink our strategy on how to cluster our customers and better assist them run their business and detect ambition and potential! Thank you very much Q team for the dedicated work, you are highly professional and GREAT team-players!