In just a week, we are collectively heading to the Roaring Twenties (sounds funny doesn’t it?). The past year was our 16th in business and like a pimply faced teenager, 2019 proved to be defiant, moody, and ultimately one filled with great optimism for the future.

We did A LOT of great in 2019. We celebrated our successes, learned from our losses, and are stronger than ever to reach new peaks in 2020. Allow me to share with your how we followed our “Why” and Did Great for each other, our clients, and our community in 2019, as well as give you a bit of a sneak peak of what we are planning for the year ahead.

Do Great For Each Other:

We are defined by our strong culture. Company culture is not based on trust falls, funny hat days, or the annual pot-luck. The strength of a company’s culture is based on its core values and how every single member of the organization lives them every day.

In 2019, we built ourselves a brand new website that truly speaks to who we are as a company – we own our work, we’re approachable, and care deeply about everything we do. Check out our expertise, the services and products that we provide, and the special culture that we created.

We started the year with our annual Kickoff to launch new goals and initiatives both internally and externally. All of those goals are inspired by our “Why” to “Do Great for each other, our clients, and our community”.

We celebrated another graduating class of gapMBA graduates and flew them to Zappos for the day to throw their caps and gowns in the air. Our gapMBA program is a 10-month curriculum that teaches best practices in Management and Leadership. We learn about one-on-one meetings, feedback, coaching, delegation, and hiring. The course is also based on the teachings of Jim Collins (Good to Great), Garry Ridge (Helping People Win at Work), and Simon Sinek (Leaders Eat Last). Let us know if you want a syllabus!

We also had a lot of fun: we celebrated our Sweet 16th Birthday, we had twice monthly gappy hours, and held a fiercely competitive Bop It competition.

gapUniversity held classes on personal taxes, project management, gardening, the country of Bali, and hosted a number of guest speakers including Patricia Ames of The Imaging Channel on journalism, Sonja Stolzenberg of Keller Williams on buying real estate, and Nii Ahene of Tinuiti on Amazon Marketplace marketing. Our gapU student athletes fiercely competed in kickball and volleyball this season, trained together, meditated together, and drank it all down by brewing our own “GoldenEYE-PA” beer (yum).

We again held our annual spirit week, baking challenges, pumpkin carving for Halloween, and even hosted our own gapUniversity golf tournament – hosted by gappers and competed for by gappers.

Do Great For Our Clients:

In baseball you can swing for the fences or hustle to get base hits and most Hall of Fame hitters strike out 66% of the time. In 2019 we swung for the fences and missed, but also landed a bunch of singles and doubles for our clients.

First the home run swing: Lookout was our big initiative for 2019 and a service that addresses the growing need to effectively enforce Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) and Unilateral Pricing Policy (UPP) programs. The Lookout value proposition led with the industry leading accuracy of our data that uncovers all of the pricing violations that impact our clients’ brands and we misread the market, which values convenience and process efficiency much more.

Though we swung for the fences and missed, our hard work resulted in a number of technologies that will help us deliver more compelling data in 2020 and beyond.

• Patent pending technology that allows us better obtain e-commerce pricing and placement data
• The ability to accurately crawl Marketplaces on a daily basis
• The ability to screen capture multiple web pages

We did connect with a number of hits in 2019, including the launch of three new Market & Data Intelligence categories. Our two new Data Intelligence services are all about air: Air Purifiers and Hair Dryers. Headphones is one of the fastest growing, most profitable product categories in consumer electronics and we’ve launched a full Market Intelligence service to effectively cover those 5,000+ earbuds.

We added a new “card” to our digital dashboard with advertisements. The Advertisement Images Tool is just the coolest way to sort through retail circular advertisements and banner ads. If I want to see what TVs were advertised by Best Buy during Black Friday 2018: BOOM!!!

This card is fun to play around with.

We got super smart in our software developing including upgrading our Rails systems, and running queries on Arel. We got even better at working with our clients, launched a company wide initiative called “Treat ‘em Like a gapper” that inspired every gapper to treat a client with the same personal care as we treat ourselves. We hope that you feel the love.

Our data made headlines when it was featured in the University of Chicago’s economic study into the impact of tariffs on the home appliance industry.

gap intelligence also launched a series of reports called “Retail Execution Scorecards” that combine retail shelf space with promotional discounts and advertising. The culminated “score” is then compared across manufacturers to determine who “won” that particular quarter. Our Retail Execution Scorecard was actually pretty good indicator of stock performance as iRobot’s score significantly improved during Q4 2018 that resulted in improved earnings in Q1 2019 and a much improved stock price in Q2 2019.

Nostradamous got nothing on us.

We also wrote some analysis on Amazon, Prime Day, and about our favorite Excel spreadsheet formulas.

Do Great for Our Community:

Giving back to the community is our third mission at gap intelligence as we recognize that it is the role of business to serve the public good. To execute on our mission in 2019, we continued some traditions and started some new ones.

We hosted our 007th Annual Drives for Rides Golf Tournament to benefit the Emilio Nares Foundation, a San Diego non-profit that navigates families through their child’s journey with cancer. As part of their mission, ENF gives families free transportation to every therapy treatment, check up and doctors appointment. Supported by our over 130 golfers, sponsors, and donors, we exceeded our goal to raise enough funds to sponsor 1,240 rides, which is enough to provide free rides for three kids during the entirety of their cancer journey (3 years).

We also hosted our annual blood drive for the San Diego Blood Bank, donated 1,755 meals of food to the San Diego Food Bank, and donated dozens of toys to Rady’s Children’s Hospital (I was Santa).

In addition to our yearly charitable outreach, we tried a new mode of giving through our “Values-Led Day Off” program, which gives every gapper a paid day off to spend at a charity of their choice. Our gappers took their days to spend at the San Diego Food Bank and with Defy Ventures, a national nonprofit that teach entrepreneurism to inmates (Entrepreneurs in Training). Through our Values-Led Day the gapper team contributes to something bigger than ourselves through our time, talents, and treasure. My day at Donovan State Prison was one of the most meaningful of my life. Here I am with Louie.

The Trail Ahead:

We accomplished a lot in 2019 and are stronger, wiser, and geared up for what awaits us in 2020. We have a vision and have set our sites on a number of goals to achieve in the next twelve months.

Soon, you’ll see us expand our reach across the Atlantic to Germany and improve our services and data delivery here in the USA. We have a dedicated team who will lead the charge to deliver new data points (using our Lookout technology) that helps our clients better measure the rapidly changing marketplace – both in-store and online. We’ll have a new Retail Collection App that will allow us to capture even more data while in stores.

We’ll learn more as a team. We’ll grow personally and professionally and we’ll spend another 12-months doing even more for our community. Our next Drives for Rides is May 1, 2020 and we’ll see you there.

Onward!

Do you have what it takes to be a gapper? Head over the careers section at gapintelligence.com to learn more about open positions. Find more info the bottom of our about page.