When a research project goes well, almost none of the work is visible.
The survey launches, the right participants show up, and the quotas fill. The data lands when it was supposed to. From the outside, it can look remarkably like very little happened.
From the inside, though, it looks very different. There are programmers checking logic and translations, project managers managing quotas, recruiters chasing a hard-to-reach segment, someone diagnosing a technical problem nobody saw coming, and someone else on the phone with a client who needs a significant change before fieldwork closes.
Canadian Viewpoint turns 45 this year. To mark it, CVI asked the team a few simple questions: what has your journey been, what happened behind the scenes that stuck with you, and what do you do when you’re not here?
What came back was a set of stories about the culture behind CVI, how people learn about this business, and what makes them stay in it.
A Perfect Gig That Turned Into Decades
Bryon Seale was a high school senior when he started at CVI as a phone interviewer. Being bilingual in French earned him an extra dollar an hour interviewing people across Canada.
“[It was] a perfect gig that I would have no clue could lead to decades as a career,” he says.
After high school, he tried telemarketing at a firm in the city and found out quickly that it wasn’t for him. He came back to CVI for full-time interviewing work, where he was set to work on more complex studies. Then, one day, someone at CVI came to him with a question.
“We need someone who speaks French to test out our French surveys, would you be interested?”
Bryon said, “Sure, why not try something new.”
Testing French surveys turned into wanting to build a survey, which turned into training as a survey programmer. Eighteen years later, he manages CVI’s programming team.
“[CVI] is a place I grew up,” he says. “Although I’ll take most of the credit, [it] helped me to create the life I have today.”
Multiple Roles, One Company
Bryon’s path isn’t unusual here. Cindy Loac joined in 2022 as a market research interviewer in the phone room. From there, her career grew. She moved from interviewer to Assistant Panel Manager, then Call Centre Supervisor, then Project Coordinator, and now Project Manager.
Crystal Tran started as a Project Coordinator in 2019, was promoted to project manager in 2020, became a Team Lead in 2021, and has managed the Online Project Management team since 2022.
Hemasheenee Sookdeo came in as a Project Coordinator and worked her way to Senior Project Manager, taking on more complex studies and mentoring newer team members along the way.
Mike Shaw, Panel Support Manager, arrived with no market research background at all and learned about the industry by doing the work.
Different starting points, same result: people who’ve seen the process from several angles at once.
“Each role has given me a deeper understanding of the research process and has shaped the way I approach projects today,” Cindy says, “especially in balancing operational detail with client and fieldwork needs.”
That’s how internal expertise grows and shows up in projects over time. A project manager who spent a year in the phone room knows what a badly worded screener does to an interviewer at 7 p.m. A programmer who used to conduct the interviews knows which logic will confuse a real person.
How Complicated a “Simple” Project Really Is
Ask the team what has stuck with them most, and the answers converge.
“What has impacted me most is discovering how complex a ‘simple’ project really is once you see it from the inside,” Mike says. “The coordination, problem solving, and quality control behind the scenes to deliver solid data, and the level of teamwork required from start to finish, have really shaped how I see the business and my role in it.”
Hemasheenee puts a finer point on the day-to-day. “No two days are ever the same. A project can be running perfectly, and then suddenly a key respondent drops out, quotas shift, or a client requests significant changes just before fieldwork closes.”
None of that reaches the client. Instead, it gets absorbed by someone thinking on their feet and working on the problem with recruiters, moderators, internal teams and the client at the same time.
Tara Chmielak, Project Coordinator, says she doesn’t have one dramatic behind-the-scenes moment to point to, and that’s rather the point. “It’s the day-to-day work that happens in the background that has made the biggest difference. Coordinating projects, supporting the team, solving unexpected challenges, and making sure everything stays on track often goes unnoticed, but it’s those behind-the-scenes efforts that help keep things running smoothly.”
Hemasheenee’s summarizes it beautifully: “By the time the client receives the final report, they see a successful project, but there’s often a great story of collaboration, creativity, and problem-solving behind it.”
Finding a Path to Yes
Ben Hillei, Director of Technology and Development, was still a relatively new employee when Jason Zweig, Managing Partner, sat him down for a short conversation that turned out to be a lasting one.
His job, Jason told him, was to figure out a way to get to yes. If a client asked for something that wasn’t currently feasible, the job was to try to make it feasible or to offer a viable alternative.
“That short meet resonated and stuck with me, and it’s become a major part of how I operate,” Ben says. “Almost no ask is impossible, it’s just a matter of figuring out a path to ‘yes’.” He’s had the same conversation since with his own teams and trainees.
It’s a small story that explains a lot about how CVI operates. “We can handle that” doesn’t always mean the original request works exactly as imagined. Sometimes it means finding another route to the same destination, like recruiting the hard-to-reach segment by phone because email won’t reach them or building the tool that doesn’t exist yet.
New Eyes
As the person responsible for most things technical, Ben periodically must do what he calls “cleanups.” That can mean reorganizing CVI’s digital space, migrating to newer servers, or clearing out old projects and deliverables.
“When you are working on something intensively, you tend not to see the big picture,” he says. “I tend to focus on the negative details as part of my job is to find and correct these, so rather than seeing a slick, intuitive interface, rather than seeing Picasso and Rembrandt, I’ll focus on the 14.5pt font not matching with the 14pt font, or a table being 3-4 pixels longer than another element that should be in parallel.”
A cleanup usually means he hasn’t looked at something in a year or more. So, he sees it fresh. “It’s a cliche, but when I review certain dashboards, or custom tools, it often feels like I’m gazing at them for the first time and become very impressed.”
Nobody Carries the Challenges Alone
Roshan Nair, Intermediate Programmer, remembers one particular project clearly. “Our team had to deliver on a challenging project with a tight deadline. Instead of feeling stressed alone, everyone stepped in, shared the workload, and constantly checked in on each other.”
Jason describes the same instinct at a much larger scale, in the stretch that tested it most: the rapid changes the industry faced during COVID-19, when the team reworked processes, supported clients and kept the business running through a period of real uncertainty.
“Watching people come together, embrace new ways of working, and remain focused on delivering for our clients reinforced the importance of flexibility, trust, and teamwork,” he says.
Lisa Wright, who joined in 2017 as Vice President of Strategy and Business Development, names the same quality as the thing that’s had the greatest impact on her CVI journey: “witnessing the resilience, innovation, and collaboration of the CVI team.”
Neither of those is a process you can write down. It’s an ethos that comes through repeatedly in the stories you hear from CVI employees. For each person, they share that a problem for one of them is a problem for all of them, so they work together to find solutions.
Beyond the Capabilities Page
It’s rare to find people who have spent ten, eighteen, twenty, or twenty-nine years at a company. Yet you’ll find that at CVI.
Ask people what they remember from those years, and the projects aren’t what come up first.
For Bryon, it’s the CV Band. It may have only been one gig, by his account, but they rocked it. He also remembers lunches out of the office, holiday parties, bowling and barbecues, and the people he still catches up with years after they left.
Ryan Magder, who joined in January 2018 as CVI’s first Sales Team Administrator and is now an Account Manager, is one of the people at CVI who remembers working in the office 100% of the time. He remembers potlucks, lunches, and what he estimates is a career worth of bubble teas. Ryan also remembers telling peers he’d gotten engaged in 2019 and arriving to find his desk and monitor decorated in “bride-to-be” gear.
He took the prank and ran with it: veil, sash, bouquet. There’s a photo, but “You’ll have to ask nicely if you want to see it.”
Shannon Friday, who joined in 2022 and is now a Senior Project Manager, points to the surprise bridal shower her team threw her. “Feeling such genuine warmth and celebration from the people I work alongside every day truly solidified the sense of community and support we share here.”
Gity Safai, Accounts Administrator, has been at CVI for more than 29 years and has watched the company grow and reinvent itself several times over. She sums it up nicely. “The people I work with at Canadian Viewpoint are like family for me. They are the true highlights.”
Off the Clock
When the workday ends, the people behind CVI’s research scatter in a genuinely impressive number of directions.
Nick Soomarooah, Project Manager, is doing a challenge with his sibling to complete the Grouse Grind once a week. Shannon bakes sourdough and shoots 35mm film. Cindy crochets, knits, bakes, cares for and trains her animals, and builds Gundam models and Teddy Blocks. Ryan is out on trails and playing retro video games from the 90s.
Mike collects and researches historical items and keeps a small online storefront for them and follows local professional sports closely enough to track the standings. Tara spends summers on Manitoulin Island boating the North Channel, and hunts and fishes in the off-season, because the winters up north feel long. Hemasheenee does yoga, BodyPump and meditation, and gets outdoors whenever she can. Crystal cooks for her family and says there’s nothing better than watching people enjoy a meal she made. Mimi Leong, who’s been programming here for almost ten years, goes for walks. Roshan travels, listens to music and games. Lisa mentors’ Black youth, volunteers in her community, and experiments with new recipes.
Jason is an assistant coach on both his son’s and his daughter’s baseball teams, spends summers at the cottage, and is usually behind a grill or a smoker on the weekend, working on his pizza. Bryon plays guitar at home with his toddler.
In other words, the people behind the research are people.
Forty-Five Years
Clients don’t need to know who specifically watched the quotas, who caught the programming error before launching, who found the replacement participant, or who figured out the workaround that kept fieldwork on schedule. They just need it all to work.
But after 45 years, there’s a reason it does. Canadian Viewpoint is made up of people who started in the phone room and now run projects, people who learned research entirely from the ground up, people who’ve been here since before the online panel existed, and people still discovering how complicated a “simple” study really is.
They’re programmers, project managers, recruiters, technologists, salespeople, and field teams. They’re also hikers, gamers, bakers, photographers, coaches, collectors, parents, and have at least enough musicians to make one market research rock band with a single gig to its name. These are only some of the people who make up Canadian Viewpoint. But every project has people like them behind it
That’s the part clients don’t see. It’s also the part that makes everything else possible.
