How Q helped Cairn Consulting stay nimble and cut analysis times by 2/3rds

Challenge

Combining several software packages to produce a single report

As the President of Cairn Consulting, Scott Bahr has decades of experience in market research: he’s been working in the field since 1992. He uses that experience to provide fast, in-depth analysis for his clients.

“We’re a relatively small consultancy, which is why we seek solutions that make us nimble,” Scott explains. “We pride ourselves on being responsive. That has been the key to our success throughout the years, being responsive and nimble.”

Scott’s business specializes in research for the outdoor sector. One of his biggest projects is a yearly tracking project for KOA Campgrounds: the North American Camping Report, which is publicly-available and provides valuable insights for the outdoor market. The report ranges in size from 300 to 400 slides, which his team needs to complete in about ten days.

“Our work isn’t necessarily a project, it’s more of a process,” he says. “The work for this camping report goes throughout the entire year. We will answer questions, we will reanalyze the data, repackage it, and look at it in different ways. It’s really ongoing.”

But Scott found that publishing this yearly report on a tight turnaround and reanalyzing it throughout the year took up a lot of his time: he and his team worked nearly nonstop during those initial ten days to meet their deadline.

To make matters worse, Scott needed to combine different softwares to perform all of the analyses he wanted. And afterwards, he had to manually input his findings into PowerPoint.

And because the analysis and the final product weren’t connected, quality assurance was another drain on his time and resources.

“It would take two people,” he says, “because we had to verify every single data point.”

Scott wasn’t satisfied with the solution he was using. He wanted a tool that would combine different types of analysis and help him save valuable time, so he could better respond to his clients’ needs.

Solution

An all-in-one solution with advanced analysis and automation capabilities

Scott didn’t go looking for Q. In a way, Q found him.

I wrote a short post on LinkedIn about my experiences with the software I had been working with for years,” he says. “I felt like that company had lost their way. They weren’t producing the products that were helping us in the business world anymore.”

The Q team reached out to him directly. They’d built their product specifically to solve the kinds of frustrations that Scott was facing, they told him.

“They took our concerns, and they listened to people like me about what we need and our frustrations in working with market research software,” he says. “And they developed their product based on that. It’s like any question or frustration I had, they had solved it in their tool.”

Scott was thrilled with how easy Q was to master.

“I could take anyone who’s worked with data, and in no time at all, I’d have them doing some of the basics in Q, whether it’s running some crosstabs, running an analysis, or even putting out a chart,” he says. “It wouldn’t take them long. It’s very intuitive. That learning curve is important to be able to bring new people on board and share information.”
It also makes collaboration much easier.

“Anyone can open up the Q file and they’ll see all the work you did. Anything you created, any folders with outputs, your analysis, it’s all in there,” he says. “If someone is on vacation and unavailable to answer questions, you can open up the file and be able to answer the client’s questions.”

His favorite aspect of Q is how he can tie his data points directly to his final output, which saves him a lot of the time that he used to spend manually formatting his reports.
“I really like the ability to tie your reports directly to data points. You can just export it to a PowerPoint,” he says. “You’re not taking extra steps to get the information into a report format, which in the past was the most time-consuming part of what we did.”

Most of all, Q has made producing his annual camping report faster—and significantly improved the final product at the same time.

“Because we’re so much more efficient at producing the content and the visuals, it allows us to take that extra time to be able to do the analysis and the writing of the camping report,” he says. “We can write detailed findings. We also can dig into the results and look at different subgroups and use some different analytical techniques, because we can produce that large amount of content so efficiently.”

Because we’re so much more efficient at producing the content and the visuals, it allows us to take that extra time to be able to do the analysis and the writing.
Scott Bahr, President, Cairn Consulting

Result

60% faster analysis and better insights for his clients

Thanks to switching to Q, Scott says his team can meet tight deadlines without having to stress. Q saves them over 60% of the time they used to spend on analysis, reporting, and formatting.

“It allows us to not spend 24 hours a day working on our analysis in order to meet our deadlines,” he laughs.

Q has also helped Scott lower his overhead costs by 20% and improve his profit margins, which in turn allows him to stay competitive for his clients.

“I can have people work with me on a project by project basis, which keeps us more competitive,” he says. “Our volume of projects is much higher this way.”

But most importantly, he says, Q allows him to provide higher-quality reports.

“If we were just producing visuals, that wouldn’t differentiate us from anyone. But the importance of Q is that it gives us that time and that luxury of being able to provide a much better product for our clients,” he says.

Our camping report is seen as the industry standard. And the software makes a big difference in the quality of that product.
Scott Bahr, President, Cairn Consulting