Bethesda consumer and market research company Collage Group wants to hire, innovate and achieve scale — at the same time.
It’s a tall order for the 13-year-old firm, but the tasks will be helped by a $25 million growth capital raise led by Boston’s Wavecrest Growth Partners, the firm closed this week.
What began as a consumer research firm that focused on the U.S. Hispanic community now provides research and insights into multiple racial groups, across gender, sexual identity, age and more. Its revenue has grown by 50% for each of the last three years as it has expanded its areas of expertise. The company declined to share more precise revenue figures.
As the company evolves, though, it will need to tap new avenues to keep growing. The new capital will go primarily toward scaling the business in terms of both technology and marketing, said Collage Group CEO and co-founder David Wellisch.
“It gets harder and harder to retain those growth rates and the only way to do that is to scale both sales and marketing,” Wellisch said in an interview. “What does that mean? It means more salespeople, it means more systems, more marketing.”
To make that happen, the company has already done “significant hiring in sales,” Wellisch said, and is continuing to hire across the company, including in marketing, product and data. With 65 employees today, the CEO predicts headcount will reach 75 or 80 by the end of the year and continue growing after that.
On the technology side, Collage Group wants to add more ways to interact with its data. Currently, the firm offers insights to companies primarily through curated content and searchable form. The plan is to add many more ways for its clients — which include The Walt Disney Co., Meta Platforms Inc., McDonald’s Corp. and Google, to name a few — to interact with the data, and more ways for them to learn from it.
That will include new modules, dashboards and predictive models, Wellisch said, that will help companies predict consumer outcomes. “The linkage and the experience require the next level for us, which is what we’re investing behind,” he said. “So folks do get a lot today, but they’re going to get much more as we continue to innovate.”
The company is “close” to filling its chief product officer role, Wellisch said, one that will be key to technological growth. Earlier this year, the firm filled out two other major C-suite positions. In April, it hired Pinkie Gunderia as its first chief financial officer. Gunderia was previously senior vice president of finance and legal at New York technology insights firm CB Insights. Jose Puyol — formerly senior vice president of global sales at Mountain View, California-based market research firm NetBase Solutions Inc., now NetBase Quid — joined Collage Group in February as the company's chief revenue officer.
Puyol, based in Chicago according to the firm’s website, is indicative of the now spread-out nature of Collage Group’s employees. Prior to the pandemic they were mostly in Greater Washington, but today around 40% of employees are based outside the region and the company is still working remotely, Wellisch said, although it’s likely it will add a hybrid day or two in the future while continuing to embrace flexibility. “We’re for sure keeping the space [in Bethesda] and sort of monitor our demand capacity as the months go,” he added.
Meanwhile, Wellisch said he’s preparing for a more competitive landscape in the future. Currently, he said, Collage Group stands out because of its “depth of expertise” in what it calls cultural intelligence, a focus that larger consumer insights companies lack. “We don’t generally see the competitive landscape as significant, and that may change in the future,” Wellisch said.
If that does change, with the entry of more companies into market research into diverse communities, he said the company is ready. It's been profitable for years, he said, and is focusing on innovating. “You have to just keep being better, being better than you were,” he said, adding, “Being very close to both the consumer understanding and the behavioral shifts and changes but also on the brand side, understanding how that’s evolving and how they’re looking at the world.”
Wellisch is a Washington Business Journal Diversity in Business Awards 2022 honoree.
