BLS Interview with Henry Ho, Co-founder and Partner at Field Agent, Part 1

Derek Champagne (CEO of The Artist Evolution) and Jay MaGee (Brand Outreach Coordinator at The Artist Evolution) interview Henry Ho, Co-founder and Partner at Field Agent. Henry discusses the process of starting his revolutionary app, staying ahead of competition, and how to effectively lead a team.

Field Agent is a revolutionary iPhone App that that allows businesses and individuals to gather the information they need from anywhere. From the store shelf to the to a restaurant’s table, they utilize thousands of people who use the app across the country to gather data quickly. Whether as a merchandising tool or a research method the app helps find opinions, answers, and information.

Listen to the Podcast here.

Derek: Welcome to the Business Leadership Series, where our goal is to inspire you to be the best leader that you can be. I’m Derek Champagne, your host and I have got Jay Magee, our co-host here today – he’s a Brand Outreach Coordinator with The Artist Evolution. And we’re excited to have our special guest, Henry Ho today. Henry, thank you for being with us.

Henry: Derek and Jay, it’s great to be here.

Derek: So Henry, tell us a little bit about your background and what got you to where you are today. Just anything you’d like to share.

Henry: Yes, I moved to the US when I was seven years old and grew up in New York. I had a 19 year run with Procter and Gamble. I was one of the founding members of the P&G Walmart team from the very inception – that’s what brought me to Northwest Arkansas and in some ways we never left. I left for about five and a half years, as part of that 19 years, to go to Asia to work with Walmart and to run some of the businesses for P&G. I started Northstar partnering grouping in 2001 and Field Agent, our current business, is our third business that we started since 2001.

Derek: So what was the process of starting Field Agent? What brought you to that actual point of- I mean what was the process to starting?

Henry: It really is one of those ideas that came out of the back of a napkin. I was at a lunch meeting with a friend who was a researcher and it was the early days of the iPhone. The first iPhone that came out, I had one and he had one. We started talking and saying, “You know, with this technology in our hand we should be able to solve some real problems for the supply community and for retailers.” The more we talked about it, the more we realized that we had a pretty interesting idea. Shortly after that we went and shared it with my partners in the business and we realized that we had something interesting but the thing is, we thought it was a good idea but we thought someone else had to be doing it already. It was such a good idea.

So what we did, we met as a group and we said, “Hey, you know what? Let’s all go and do our Google research and over the next couple of weeks, let’s see if anybody else is doing it.” After about three weeks we got back together and said, “You know, I haven’t found anybody doing something like this. This is a pretty good idea,” but in the back of our minds, we always thought someone else was doing it. The interesting thing was that after about five months of sitting on this good idea, we just finally decided, “Let’s do this.” We had two good businesses running at that time and we said, “We have to do this on nights and weekends.” So this was kind of our version of our garage, we had full time businesses that we were running already and they were successful.

So we decided we were going to get together and nights and weekends schedule. We put together a small team and we started concepting it out and starting talking to prospective customers. And over probably a two or three-month period, we decided to pull the trigger and start the software development part of the business model. After about nine months’ worth of development, we launched in April of 2010. The idea was created in January 2009 and so we did that kind of due diligence and then development.

Derek: Well that’s pretty exciting. I mean, it seems like there’s very few ideas that haven’t been thought of already. We work with several clients like that and to be able to actually search, it must feel like Christmas morning to realize that there’s actually nothing else like it. Then you’ve probably got to move pretty fast before somebody else thinks of it right?

Henry: We did. We have a pretty interesting distinction with Field Agent. It was early days of apps and fairly early days of crowd sourcing. We were the first app that paid our agents real money. Prior to that in the early days of the app, everything was about subscription models and buying things through your app. So people were paying people who owned those apps, money for whatever service they were getting. We were the first app that was out there that paid people for doing tasks through the app. So it’s been a lot of fun. Within probably 12 to 18 months, there were three other competitors in this space. So it was pretty fun.

Derek: Right, we always tell people, if you don’t have any competition, look in the rear view mirror because it’s coming pretty quickly. So you need to get ready; it happens very fast.

Henry: One of our guys on our strategy team today talked to someone who’s doing our model in Germany. We always reach out to people in other parts of the world to kind of learn what they’re doing and sharing to the extent that it makes sense. This company started in 2014 and they took our model and adapted it to the market. So it’s fun to see. We get inquiries throughout the world. We’re already in six countries outside of the US and looking to add a few more key markets in the next year.

Derek: Wow, so with all the competition, with all the changes and continued updates in technology – how challenging is it to stay ahead of the game?

Henry: You know, it’s an everyday challenge. In fact, we recently restructured our company to make sure that we have a focus on innovation and strategy and strategic partnerships. I now lead that group, along with our international development. So we look at the business model as a global model. We look at serving our customers on a global basis and then we’re looking to leverage strategic technologies and methodologies to serve our clients.

Derek: So is that all systems and processes?

Henry: It’s all the above. It’s learning what technologies are out there that we want to be connected with to create value together. It’s about working with some new methodologies that are out there. Right before coming out to this conversation, we were on the phone with our UK partner that does video analytics. Part of what Field Agent does is we capture the shopper’s shopping experience and behaviors in store. Well, we can capture that through pictures and surveys and also videos. So we need a better way to process videos. Videos are very clunky, as you know, to process. It’s not that difficult for two, three, five videos but 300, 500 videos, as great as our technology is, as good as our bandwidth with Wi-Fi and connectivity, that’s still really clunky and heavy. So we’re working on developing capabilities in that area.

Derek: So it seems like you work in several different niches with several different Industries. Who is your target customer?

Henry: Our target customer is any business or even an individual but really, more businesses that need to gain information and insights about their customer or about their retail business environment, so anything in the public space. We think of Field Agent as the eyes and ears of the industry. That could be suppliers to Walmart, or Walgreens or Target or Family Dollar, Dollar General. You name it, Costco, anyone who wants to understand what is going on in the marketplace. I remember when I was with P & G, we used to go on market visits and we would spend hundreds and thousands of dollars flying to Minneapolis for example and checking out maybe, if it was a good day, we would check six to eight stores.

Overnight, meals, the whole thing and we’d come back, maybe there was three or four of us and you put six or eight thousand dollars on a trip like that. Well today, we can get to Minneapolis and do those same stores and do much more comprehensive collection of information, what’s going on in the market, in the matter of maybe a couple of hundred bucks. We’ve created access to what’s going on in the market place, anytime, anywhere. We say it’s an on demand service. When we first launched, people didn’t believe that we could get out to our market, collect information get a report back to them in a matter of, sometimes of hours and definitely in a matter of days, back to our clients.

The challenge in those days was they weren’t used to getting information that fast. The way it was done before Field Agent was, “Hey, I need some information, I need you to send a team out there to collect it.” They had to schedule a trip and all that or I send my broker out there or I do whatever and you know what, I put that order in and three weeks later I get that information. I pull those reports and I’ve got three-week old data but that’s the best available. When we introduced Field Agent, we could get stuff back in a matter of days and they didn’t know what to do with it because they weren’t expecting it until three weeks later. So we really changed the way the world collected business information and insights. We’re on that mission and it’s quite a ride.

Derek: Wow.