As many of you may have read or heard, Tom Quirk, founder of Quirk’s Marketing Research Review, passed away in May at the age of 87. I’ve written in this space before about my early years (“Trade Talk: 23 years and counting,” October 2011) when the magazine celebrated its 25th anniversary. And, elsewhere in this issue we are rerunning portions of Tom’s 2011 article on the magazine’s origin story (he retired in 2002) along with some thoughts from his son Steve, our current president and publisher, so I’m not going to cover that territory again.
But, as I have reflected on Tom’s legacy in recent days, I keep coming back to his exemplary performance as an entrepreneur and small business owner. He had vision and dedication. He knew his market. He trusted his employees. He was creative and strategically nimble. He was honest and placed a great deal of emphasis on integrity. And he believed in giving back to help those less fortunate.
Like so many other small business owners, he started by seeing an opportunity in the market. Smart enough to know that he didn’t know everything, he assembled a team of friends and advisors whose skill sets could help him realize his vision and produce those first issues starting in 1986.
He was frugal but he wasn’t cheap. While our office furniture for years was a combination of used items, office-complex dumpster rescues (it always amazed me what businesses threw away when they moved out of a building!) and garage-sale finds, Tom understood the many efficiencies that technology offered and thus he invested early in desktop publishing and other forms of tech to maximize our productivity.
He also set an example by his work ethic. Rather than coasting in and out of the office, he was often the first one in and the last to leave each day. No task was beneath him. In the early years of creating and publishing our annual directory of research companies, each summer we had to collate thousands of listing forms and stuff them into envelopes, a process Tom enthusiastically led. And when it came time a few weeks later to phone all of the firms who hadn’t sent back their forms to update their listing information, he always took the biggest stack of call sheets.
He knew that many of the research companies that advertised with Quirk’s were run by entrepreneurs like him and he wanted to help them get the most from their marketing budgets so he offered advertising options with a range of price points. If people fell behind on what they owed us, he worked out payment plans, mindful of the havoc cashflow problems can cause.
But perhaps his greatest gift to his fellow business owners – and the marketing research industry as whole – was producing a magazine that was full of positive, useful and informative content about their profession. Tom believed in the value of marketing research and knew that the more evidence of its effectiveness he could present in the magazine, the more others would be able to also see and argue for its value as well. Despite that aim, he knew that the content, while frequently pro-research, had to be as substantive as possible. From the day I started as editor he instilled in me the need to steer clear of puff pieces, as he called them, that were more focused on promoting a research company than on informing the audience of client-side researchers.
Though not vindictive and certainly always very humble, I think he took great satisfaction in the magazine’s success, after being met in the early days with arrogance and skepticism from some industry leaders who felt that his magazine would never succeed. He always joked, in fact, that one of the reasons he put his last name on the magazine was that, if it didn’t survive after a few years of trying, he would at least have generated some name recognition to help him secure his next job. He certainly earned that name recognition but thankfully it was for the opposite reason.