Market Research and Data Analyst Susie Mullen
Meet Susie
Our member stories are a chance to showcase the wealth of knowledge and insight within the IPSE community. You can find inspiration and advice on how to get started in self-employment, growing your business, building your network and more, all from people who have been there and done it for themselves.
As a specialist in market research and data analysis, we spoke to Susie Mullen about her move from senior roles in-house to working for herself, and how her business has developed.
Can you introduce yourself and your business?
I’m Susie Mullen, I run a very small market research and data analysis business. I’m a freelancer, really, and I work across a range of different sectors and companies.
What led you into becoming self-employed?
I used to work for a range of different marketing agencies. I worked for a company called Nielsen, and a company called Dunnhumby, and what they do is a range of data analysis, market research and marketing. So, I gained quite a lot of skills in that area.
Through a number of different career moves, I worked for quite a large charity. I was their Head of Data and Insight and I stayed there for about five years. I was really surprised at the similarities between the charity sector and the retail consumer goods sector that I’d previously been working in, that really interested me.
I’m really interested in market research and data analysis, and I’m even more interested in simplifying it. But I knew that to keep progressing my career path, I’d be going more and more into management. I would no longer be able to do the stuff that I really loved, which was the actual job.
So I set up on my own as a freelancer initially, to help charities do market research, analytics and to understand their actual supporter database. And as the business has grown and my life has changed, I’ve kind of moved into a range of different sectors. So, I still do stuff in the charity sector, but I also work for a number of different marketing agencies.
When they’re a bit stretched, I’ll go in, do a project, and jump back out. So it’s great – I’ve got my own clients, and then I jump in to help other agencies when they’re really struggling.
Would you say becoming more niche and specific helped take your business to the next level?
I’m quite a broad-spectrum market researcher in that I do survey research, or develop segmentations. I’ll do qual, and I’ll also do the data analytics. It’s quite a broad skill set.
But there are certain things I don’t do. So, I don’t do any data processing. I don’t do things that require a lot of managing data and pulling a whole lot of data together. I could do it, but I don’t.
And then I choose my clients very carefully as well. So, I often work for people that I’ve worked with before and that I’ve really enjoyed working with. If I’ve enjoyed working with somebody, whether I’ve been employed or self-employed, chances are I’m going to enjoy working with them again. So that’s a big role for me as well, to try and work with people who I get, and who get me, and that makes life a lot easier.
What was it like to go through that period of self-reflection?
Honestly, everything just stopped. I had projects in field and we had to pull everything. I didn’t have any work on, and I really didn’t think I’d get any more work until that September. So, I thought I’d be out of work for six months. You know, that’s difficult. I didn’t qualify for any of the furlough support, or anything like that. By the time I started getting work back in, I was ready to do any other kind of key worker type work I could do at that point.
So, I cleaned a lot. It was a difficult period, but I did become very focused on what I like doing, who I want to work with, and the types of projects that I want to do. And then I was so lucky, because one of my established clients came to me and said “We don’t understand how our workforce is managing. They’re all at home and we need to understand if we’re providing them with what they need, how they’re coping, what they need and want”. And I ended up doing a staff survey for them, and we’ve repeated it every three months since May or June 2020.
Because I did that, there were other clients who wanted me to do something very similar. And then it just snowballed. I was so lucky.
