Some companies are born from business plans. Canadian Viewpoint (CVI), a full-service market research company, was born from a teacher helping her mother complete projects after she finished her school day.
“I started doing it after teaching,” Carol Udell, CVI’s owner and founder says. “I’d come home at around 4:30. There’d be so much work [my mother was doing], I’d have to go on my phone and start doing interviews. And then she started recruiting for focus groups!”
Focus groups were a relatively new methodology when Anne Bomza started recruiting for them. Were it not for the telephone interviews and the focus group recruitment, Carol would never have started working in market research.
After her mother passed due to scleroderma, Carol kept going. “I had the names of the clients and I had her Rolodex. I told the clients, ‘I’m Anne Bomza’s daughter,’ and they said, ‘Well, we want the names [of the key focus group recruits].’ I said, ‘No, you’re not getting the names, but I’ll work for you.’”
It worked; they hired her to work on their projects.
From there, the company grew far beyond focus groups. This is the story of a company that reinvented itself with industry shifts, but with the right people and a culture of excellence in customer delivery, has stayed open for 45 years – and counting.
The Moment Carol Saw the Future
Fast forward a few years, and Carol was looking for another way to stay involved in market research. Someone suggested she could be an interviewer conducting mall interviews. That’s when Carol describes having a moment of absolute clarity.
“A bang goes off,” she says. “You see your future in a minute. I don’t know how to describe that. And I knew right away I was going to open a mall, and I’m not going to be an interviewer. I’m going to own the company, and I’m going to hire interviewers.”
She had no business degree, no industry connections, and no capital. What she had was an entrepreneurial instinct instilled in her by her mother. She worked with her accountant to learn what running sensory research would cost and secured her first mall contract for her business, CSU Market Field Services. She paid attention to who the companies were that were making all the products she saw on shelves at the grocery store.
Soon enough, she had her first client: one of the major goods manufacturers whose name she kept seeing in the grocery store.
Learning the Methodology
Asked how she managed to secure such a large customer, she replied, “46 years ago, people answered their phones!” She had worked on a project that resulted in some of the wording used in ads that were run by that company, so she secured a meeting with their advertising department.
She told the market research department she’d be in the building meeting with the advertising department, would they like to meet with her while she was there?
As the story goes, they put her in a boardroom with three people and wouldn’t let her husband in. “They asked me why should we use you over everyone else? I said, ‘I’ll do it your way.’ And that’s all. Within a week, they gave me a job.”
They didn’t just give her a job. They sent six people to train her staff of three and enough work that Carol needed to get more mall contracts.
Those years shaped everything that followed. The company didn’t just send studies, they sent standards.
“They would constantly come into the malls and watch us do briefings and everything,” Carol says. “That’s how we learned how to do quality. And we kept that quality all through the years.”
Reinventing Without a Roadmap
But then came a strategy shift that pulled the work away. And that’s when Carol realized she had relied too much on a single company. Nobody else knew about her company or what they did.
So, she changed the name of the company to Canadian Viewpoint, made a brochure, and started selling.
Canadian Viewpoint landed a customer. Then another. Then another. Over time, the work shifted. Instead of running studies directly for manufacturers, CVI became the fieldwork partner for research agencies across North America.
One Sentence That Led to the Next Evolution
Every long-running business has a moment when the ground shifts. For CVI, that moment came from a casual conversation between Carol and her son.
Four years into a five-year contract with a company doing research at malls, the company told her, “We’re going to start collecting email addresses.” Carol told her son, and his reply was, “Mama, they’re going to start doing surveys online.”
That was all she needed to hear.
“I knew right away I had to have an online business. Immediately.”
The Online Addition
Knowing you need an online business and building one are different things. Carol needed a group of people across Canada who would take surveys by email. She couldn’t just pick names from a phone book. She needed a system.
Enter Jason Zweig.
Jason had been working in online marketing, focused on building large contact databases. He joined CVI and started building what would become the company’s 100% Canadian online panel infrastructure that now powers studies from coast to coast to coast.
What’s fascinating about CVI’s evolution is that the online shift didn’t replace the malls and phones. It layered on top of them. CVI still offers recruitment at malls for in-person testing. It still offers focus groups and in-depth interviews. But now it also has a Canadian-built, proprietary online panel.
A Team That Stays
Ask Carol what she’s proudest of after 45 years, and she’ll tell you that it’s CVI. “It’s my life’s work, aside from my family.” But she doesn’t start telling you about CVI by talking about the revenue or the list of clients. She starts with the people.
“I love it. It’s like my third child,” she says. “I’m impressed by how hard my team works to please the clients.”
The culture, Carol says, wasn’t complicated to build. She was present, took people to lunch, and she celebrated birthdays. She gave direct feedback as soon as she saw it was needed to keep her team in top shape, delivering excellence on projects and continuing the Canadian Viewpoint reputation.
The team today is diverse, drawn from all over the world, and sees staff stay for decades.
Raising the Bar for the Whole Industry
CVI’s influence goes beyond having high standards for the work they do and a culture that draws long tenures.
When the Canadian research industry’s previous association dissolved, there was a gap. Carol accepted a position on the founding board of CRIC (the Canadian Research Insights Council) with a specific mission: make sure the new organization was as strong or stronger than what came before it.
Jason occasionally stepped in for Carol and eventually joined the board himself. “Having an industry association is so important,” Jason explains. “Standards are critical to what we do. We follow the highest standards. It’s important to us that others do too.”
As for the impact CRIC has had on his own career, Jason says, “From supporting the organization’s financial stewardship as Treasurer to helping guide discussions around emerging technologies through the AI Committee, I have enjoyed contributing to initiatives that strengthen and advance the Canadian insights industry.”
Jason isn’t the only CVI employee heavily involved in CRIC, either. Lisa serves as Chairwoman of the CRIC Diversity & Inclusion Committee. There, she states she is “proud to have the opportunity to help advance important conversations around equity and representation within our industry.”
CVI Today
CVI today offers so much to customers. There’s the national online panel, offline capabilities (malls, IHUTs, taste tests), quantitative and qualitative expertise, North America coverage, and specialty niches (e.g., hard-to-reach audiences, fast turn, complex multi-method projects).
There’s also the 60-seat, bilingual virtual call center (English and French), staffed with experienced interviewers who have worked consumer studies, B2B projects, and medical research.
And there’s mystery shopping, eye-tracking, and survey programming. CVI doesn’t intend to stop there, either. They just continue to innovate.
CVI keeps layering capabilities, delivering quality to customers, and defining what “full-service market research” can really mean.
