Leede Research just recently observed its’ 40-year anniversary.
Dean Halverson tells Seehafer News he started the company in June of 1982, shortly after graduation from LTC’s Marketing program.
He said it was a shoestring business at first.
“We literally started in the basement of my mom’s home,” he recalled. “She was kind enough to kind of build an office area in the basement. She actually bought out one of my early partners and became a full-fledged partner in the business. She actually was one of our first employees. She and a couple of the ladies from the senior center were some of our first telephone people.”
Leede is a combination of three Lee’s and a Dean, the original founders of the marketing research company.
Halverson said “simply put, our job is to help our clients make decisions. In doing that, they identify a need for information. Hat might be about a product, that might be about a service, that might be about understanding their customers, that might be about how their advertising is working, and our job is to design and implement a program to get the information they need to make decisions around that item.”
Halverson also told us Leede has grown to a team of more than 50 information professionals with offices in Manitowoc and Minneapolis.
Their clients come from across the U.S and around the globe.
He explained they gathered the majority of their information through telephone interviews until the early 2000’s when needs began changing and more work was moved to online interviewing.