[00:00:02] Sebastian: You're listening to the Insightful Connections podcast. Our guest today is Wes Michael. Wes is the founder and president of Rare Patient Voice. Founded in 2013, Rare Patient Voice is a trusted partner in patient and caregiver research, committed to bringing the opinions and experiences of rare and non-rare patients and family caregivers to the forefront. They help clients find rare and non-rare disease patients and caregivers for studies and connect patients and caregivers with paid research opportunities. Prior to founding RPV, Wes worked for Kantar in the healthcare space, was a brand manager and market research manager at McCormick, and worked in insights at General Mills. Wes, thanks so much for being on the show today.

[00:01:04] So I like to start with this sort of general contextual question, which is how did you initially get into the insights and market research industry and how does that help account for where you've gone since?

[00:01:14] Wes: Yeah, yeah. It's like how many kids are like, when I grew up, I want to be in market research. But you know, I even remember as a kid, one Christmas I got a stopwatch and I was out there counting the number of cars that went by in a certain period of time. So maybe there was always something about measuring. But I was an English major in college. So what do you do with that? I didn't know what I was going to do. And somebody in my last semester said, you should take a computer programming course, which I did. And it was a language I never heard of since and I never used it. But it helped me get my first job, which led into market research. My first job was for a guy. He had a computer consulting company and I didn't know anything about that, but he had newsletters and he wanted somebody to edit, write little articles, edit these newsletters. And the fact that I had taken one programming course, he liked that, it showed something about computers. Well, little did he know and nothing. So I started with that. And then what we did at that company, in addition to just these articles, was he would do little surveys of, again, this was many years ago, I graduated in 79. So there were computers in those days, but, you know, word processing programs, accounting programs, computers. And he would do surveys of users of that. And that would be an issue because, you know, it was kind of like a consumer reports things. People would want to read about it before they did it. So I started doing that. I did it by hand, tabulating these things. I didn't even know I was doing crosstabs. I was doing it manually. I said, I wonder if people answered this question, how do they answer this question? I did that. And then it's funny. They said, well, you're doing this market research. What title do you want? I didn't know anything about titles and I didn't know a difference between a manager or director. And I just said, I don't know, director of market research. So I was this director and years later, people said, you were director. I said, I know I was making $5,000 a year. I didn't, you know, it meant nothing titles. What did it mean? But anyway, I did that and it was kind of neat and it was interesting. And then I went back to school. I went back for an MBA and actually learned marketing and statistics and market research and stuff. And I said this, I really got into it then. And I took my first job out of there at General Mills and what a great training ground for market research. They had a lot of proprietary techniques. It was all about real life. You don't just do a taste test and see if this Coke tastes better than that. You put it in people's home for a week, real life situation and really try to see what things are like. So great training ground for market research. And then though the winters are quite cold there, you've probably got cold winters too, but a Minneapolis 40 below, you know, it's like what? And I was a small fish in a big pond, which was probably a good place to be. But I decided to be a bigger fish in a smaller pond and came east to McCormick, closer to home and slightly warmer look spice company. And that was kind of neat. So I pretend that I knew what I was doing then and applied everything I'd learned and then did that for many years. I didn't even got into brand management, their gourmet spices and produce partners and things like that. But what got me into healthcare was simply I'd been there 12 years or something, McCormick and there wasn't really more opportunity there. My boss was terrific and he went off to Coke and then I wasn't going to get his job apparently. So I said, well, I should look around. And I didn't even know about healthcare market research. And somebody mentioned, in those days there were headhunters, you know, they actually helped you find a job. And somebody mentioned a local firm in the Baltimore area, Migliera Kaplan. I didn't even know what did healthcare market research. Well, anyway, I ended up going there and it was perfect timing. Late nineties. That's when the ads became legal in the U.S. for drugs. Before that, you weren't allowed to mention the name of the drug and its use. So all these companies wanted to know how to advertise. And think of the Pfizer's and Merck's, they know everything about sending a sales rep in and convincing a doctor, right? They'd never heard of TV advertising. Every meeting I'd get into, I said, they're going to ask what a GRP is. And they always did. But anyway, so it was great. It was kind of applying consumer research principles, right, into a whole new field. So that's how I got into the healthcare thing, which again, eventually I could tell you how I got into this business, but.

[00:05:02] Sebastian: Yeah, Wes, might be a bit of a digression, but I'm just curious. What was the programming language, if you remember?

[00:05:07] Wes: APL, which stood for A Programming Language.

[00:05:10] Sebastian: Okay.

[00:05:11] Wes: So I haven't Googled it, but I probably had a short life in the late seventies, early eighties. And I'm sure all these languages have a lot of things in common, right? Yeah. APL, I remember it was like a red, red, orange textbook. It's funny, the things you remember.

[00:05:23] Sebastian: There's probably some ancient like bank or airline mainframe that runs on it that, you know, you could make millions of dollars by.

[00:05:31] Wes: Just knowing APL. Usually coursework, you know, this was days before personal computers. So you'd go to the computing center and best time to go was in the middle of the night because A, it ran faster, B, it wasn't crowded. So I remember for the big end of the term assignment, I don't remember where it was, but getting it because, you know, computing is all about doing it wrong and fixing it. Nothing's ever right. And still, right. It's like writing an online survey. Oh, we've got it. Perfect. No, you don't. It's never perfect. So I was spending all night there and I wasn't an all nighter type of person, but I was like, spend all night and got it done. And it worked. Oh, it ran. It ran. It's a 412th iteration. It ran.

[00:06:08] Sebastian: Nice. So I'm curious, how did this eventually, the story that you've sketched out so far, how did this eventually lead to Kantar Health and then Rare Patient Voice shortly after that?

[00:06:17] Wes: The company I went to, Migliar Tap, we got bought and sold many times, eventually became part of Kantar. And even though I came as a consumer person with consumer experience, right off the bat, I was doing big physician studies. So it's all about the physician. So I was doing all sorts of work there. And eventually the company got bought and sold one too many times and they didn't have room for me. I even said, I had this interesting job there, key account director for, what did they recall me, for certain key accounts, but I wasn't really selling to, I'm like, you know, if this were my company, I wouldn't pay me to do what I'm doing. Well, they finally figured that out. And well, then I went to another small firm that also did similar stuff, you know, working in the healthcare and other fields. And that company had a really good methodology. However, they had some cashflow issues. And at one point they came to me after a couple of years and said, Hey, I bet we don't pay you for the next few months. And then we'll see what you've sold and done, and then we'll figure it out. And I thought, wait a minute, I had this idea for a company. Maybe it's a good time. If I'm not being paid, maybe there's something else I'd rather do. And to take a step back, as soon as I got into the patient business, late nineties, I got the idea for what became Rare Patient Voice. We had a client that came to us in a hemophilia space. Hemophilia is a rare disease. And it was even rarer then because a whole generation had been wiped out because of the AIDS. You know, they were using blood products and infusions, and they didn't know enough early on to screen out AIDS stuff. So anyway, a whole generation of patients had been passed away from that. Wes, just for the benefit of the audience, what is hemophilia? Oh, good point. Yeah, everybody's not a healthcare expert. Hemophilia is a bleeding disorder. If you just heard a little bit about it, you know, the kings of Europe, the royalty, you think, oh, they cut themselves and they bleed to death. No, that's not really what it is. It's generally internal bleeding issues. And I remember seeing folks in the old days like that, joints would be the problem, huge elbows or knees, because internal bleeding there, over time, it just causes a horrible problem with that. And the treatment for it, which has really evolved tremendously over the years, would be taking infusion of blood that has the right clotting factor, because they're missing a certain clotting factor, it's genetic disease. And it's a genetic disease, the key types, hemophilia A and B, it's like 99 point whatever percent male, because it's on the Y chromosome, you know, a female gets two Xs, a male gets an X and a Y. So a guy gets this from his mother. So a girl gets two Xs, the odds are very small she'd get two like that, but it can happen. A guy gets an Y from his dad, an X from his mom, and that X of it has it. So your grandfather would have it, or your uncle would have it, you know, you can look at the genetic pattern, and it's a great genetic teaching lesson. So anyway, these poor guys have hemophilia, generally males, and at that point, generally boys, because the older guys had been given AIDS inadvertently. But a client came to us and said, hey, they're very, very valuable to us. And I didn't realize at the time, maybe at the time, $50,000 a year, each one, and they had a small share of the market. But they said, we need to understand these people to build the business. We want to get a leg up on our competition. We'd love to create a panel of patients and caregivers, and do lots of research with them. I was new there. We didn't know what we would do, but we bid on it, we won it, and then we had to figure out what to do, right? So we said, we're going to go to the National Hemophilia Foundation Conference, we're going to have a table, we're going to have giveaways, and we're going to ask people to sign up. And we had all the clipboards. It wasn't even online. It was paper and pencil, and it worked. People signed up. I remember saying, oh, boy, let's have little glider airplanes, and we had silly putty. We had things to appeal to the patients and their families. And we did all this work for them. We did surveys. We did interviews. We did a lot about their patient. And every year, we'd go back to the hemophilia conference and recruit more people. So two or three years later, I'm back at the conference. It moved around from city to city every year. And somebody from a different client company came up to me and said, I hear you have this hemophilia panel. Can we access it? Well, the answer is no. I mean, client A paid for it. I can't give it to client B. But when they're like, no, we can't do that. But that gave me the idea. Why not create a panel that's not beholden to one company? So I had that idea. Over the years, I tell people, and they go, yeah, that's nice. But I had that, and it wasn't until that moment years later, 2013, so over 12 years later, when I was working for the companies that ran out of money to pay me, I said, I've had this idea. I was working in the hemophilia space for many years. I knew there was interest in hemophilia at the very least. I said, I'm going to start this thing. And it was personal, professional. So I always had that idea. I wasn't making money. My wife had been out of the workforce raising our kids. They were like, say, 11 or 12 at the time. She was looking for a job. And in those days, prior to in the US Obamacare, it was all about having the health care. Wait a minute. If I don't have a job, you... So she found a local job with health care. And I said, perfect timing. It was summer. Kids will be around here. I don't have to watch them every second. They're old enough. I won't be traveling. So I set the thing up. I got the name and figured everything out and got a website. And guess where I went to first? That fall? The Hemophilia Conference. Right? I had been there before. I knew it worked, and I knew there was interest. And our first project was right before I went to that conference, because you don't want to start promoting when you don't have anything, because all the remembers, they don't have anything. So the word got out a little bit, and a guy called me and said, we've been trying to find hemophilia patients for a month. Do you have any? And I said, no, but by the end of the weekend, I will, because it was right before I was going to Disneyland in California. So we went out there and recruited 150 folks, and we got a bunch for a study, and that was our first project. So it was me with my spreadsheet doing it. And so that was the beginning of Rare Patient Voice. So thank God for me doing that project and all the detail that, and to now, we've got 40-some people, and they do all these projects and go out to the events and everything.

[00:11:42] Sebastian: I'm wondering if you can tell me a little bit about some of the initial challenges you face in setting up Rare Patient Voice and a bit of the reception within the industry to what you guys were doing.

[00:11:51] Wes: The very first, it was, wait a minute, we're appealing to two different audiences here. We've got the patients and their caregivers, their moms and dads in general, or spouses, depending on the disease. And we've got the clients, two different ones, and people even said, and some companies have done this, they have different names for each, because it's hard, what can you do to appeal for both? And I said, I'd really rather not do that. And so I said, well, if I appeal to the patients, I think the client will get it. If I do it the other way around, the patients will be confused. And I remember doing little online surveys, in effect, with friends and family-type things about names, and then looking over the internet, what name's available, what's not, what can I get? That's where I came up with Rare Patient Voice, because my thought was, it's just going to be rare, because if they're not rare, they can already find people with diabetes. Now, again, I turned out to be wrong, but anyway, I said rare, and then voice, I forget all the different names, the opinion thing, I arrived on that, I said, I like that. Okay, nobody seems to be using that. Rare Patient Voice, they should kind of get what we're doing, if they're in the field. And patients is a terrible word, too, because patients are like, I'm not a patient, I'm a person, but it's like, nobody has a better word. Nobody's come up with a better word. If you say rare person voice, that's silly. So I had the name, and I decided one website, and people have different tabs that do it. That was probably the first thing. The other thing is just doing projects. I didn't know how to do anything. I just knew it was possible. I knew I could put things in a spreadsheet, I knew someday it would be a proper database. But I had worked with a woman who had a previous company, and she said, look, I'll help you out. So I split. For the first year or so, I would split the revenue on these projects, because she knew how a link worked. But I learned. And then she got a full-time job, and I'm like, this doesn't work, because she can't get back to the clients until after five, and they're not waiting that long. Ignorance is bliss. If you knew all the problems, you'd say no. But I didn't know any problems. I remember when I first started, then I saw this company, and for years, it's been a very good client of ours. But I saw this company. They had all this, a huge patient panel, and I'm like, oh my God, they don't need me. It's already out there. And I called the guy there, and he goes, oh, we don't really have anything. We'd be happy to come to you. I'm like, oh, good. So what people say does not always exactly what they mean. So then it was like a stair-step thing. As I say, you don't want to say, we have everything, and then they come and say, do you have lupus? And I'm like, oh, no. Did you ever see the cheese skit from Monty Python? He keeps asking for cheeses, and they kept saying, well, no, we're fresh out of that. Oh, yes, so the cat ate it, and it turns out they don't have any cheese. So I didn't want to be the cheese shop for Monty Python. So Hemophilia, we started to have that, and I would go to MS walks, and so we had MS. And so I would go to these, and then the biggest thing that happened, I would get requests all the time for cancer, right? Cancer is a huge category. I mean, so much, all the work that's been done there, well, they have a lot to talk to patients. I didn't want to recruit cancer patients. I didn't want to spend all this time. I might get them, and they'd be gone. Horrible. I mean, it's a lot better now. So I would get requests, and I was introduced to this guy that had a wonderful website, David Wasilewski. It was called Whatnext. It's still there. It's been bought by other companies and since, and it was more just an inspirational one. People would give comments and opinions and stuff, but he collected very good information. What cancer do you have? What subtype? What's the stage? All this information. So I kept getting these requests, and I said, oh, I'll just hand them to this guy. Let me pass these to you. And he said, hold on. I was thinking about research, and I'm thinking, well, neither was, but I'm doing it anyway. So we partnered. So for years, when cancer, we'd split it. I split the revenue. And over the years, we got a million dollars and a business we wouldn't have had. All of a sudden, I had something to sell beyond hemophilia and MS that was very important. So we got all this cancer business because he had this wonderful website. So it was like, if I had gone into it knowing I didn't have anything, but it's just like, you know, these things kind of happen. You'll go down this path and things happen. So it was kind of building up. And then the more we had, the more I could get the word out. At first, we were promoting that we had hemophilia. And then we could promote that we had these other, then we could promote that they had cancer. And then over time, we got it. The other big thing is, so I start this, right? I go to these walks, you know, MS walk in Albuquerque. So great. I take my Southwest miles. I would take one of my kids. We go for a weekend and do this walk in the morning and then do touristy stuff and then fly back. And then I put them in the spreadsheet. I said, well, I can't go everywhere. How am I going to build this thing? With that actual Albuquerque one, I specifically remember a woman came up to me because a lot of people were great and they were signing up, but she goes, I get this. I get that. She says, I know everybody. I know because people have Facebook page. She knew everybody around the country. So she starts promoting it. So all of a sudden I can say, it's not just in Baltimore and Albuquerque and she goes, I got MS people all around the country. So we develop all this seems so logical retrospect, but I hadn't thought of it. Referral programs have people refer others and we gave them a prize for that. And now we give people a $10 gift card for a referral that gets vetted. Some people make it a part-time job to find you that they're out there. They're extroverted. They're in a support group, whatever it might be. Some people are very big online. So I didn't have to go everywhere, filled in the gaps. And that was really important once COVID hit because there's events all shut down, you know? So now we still go to events. I love to go in person and see folks, but the referral program, we have over 5,000 people that are official refer partners. That's a bigger part of finding people and it's much more cost-effective, you know, than flying somewhere and paying for a booth and giving out gift cards. So those are some of the challenges that they kind of solve themselves.

[00:17:00] Sebastian: Wes, I just have to say, this is more of an observation than a question. So it might be difficult to respond to, but hearing your story, I think it's for me in many ways, like emblematic of what panel construction and panel health should be in the industry. You built this by going to places in person, finding people that weren't necessarily engaged with market research at all, persuading them of the merits of the process and of being involved and getting them into a panel. And further beyond that, you kind of touched on a bit of discomfort with using the language of patients, but I would argue that that is a little more human than using the language of respondents, you know, in a sense. And lastly, I'm struck by the fact that you ultimately made the decision, despite maybe the commercial advantages of focusing on your clients, to actually focus your marketing on the people that you were intending to have participate in research and let the clients sort of figure themselves out. Given how panel health, data quality, fraud is all kind of on the forefront of what we're discussing as an industry right now, this story kind of stands out for me as, in theory, what we all should be doing, right? The platonic form of like, you know, the market research panel, right? So kudos.

[00:18:19] Wes: I'm really impressed by everything you've described. And I don't claim to know all 180,000 people in the panel. And at the beginning, I felt like I did. I would get calls from a couple of hemophilia moms and I love them to death and they help refer people, but I'd see it on my phone and I'm like, I knew it would be an hour. And it's like, when it was just me and I have a project to fill, I would pick it up and I would talk to them and they were competitive. They knew each other. And like, I can find you more people than she can. We know these folks in so many ways because either we've met them or we're one step removed through the referral partners. And then once they do a project, you know, they're dealing with a real life project manager. Yeah, there's more happens over email and stuff, but still there's a real person that they're dealing with or they can call. And when somebody has a complaint, sometimes people will call and they assume it's going into a black hole, right? Or they'll send an email and it's got every F word in the, you know, that's just horrible. And now we have people handle this. I get some. I write back and say, I would like castigate them. Like, Hey, we're here to help you. Don't use that. And people write off a message. Oh, I'm sorry. And one 80, I love those one eighties when people complain because we're all about getting people paid. I mean, that was one of our challenges too. I said from the beginning, I'm going to pay people as soon as the project's done, which guess what is before we get paid by our clients for most cases. So it's a bit of a cashflow issue, but it's like, I want these people to know they're doing it. It's not when I get that months, like, where are you? So whenever there's a complaint about that, we want to make sure you didn't get it. Wait, we'll make sure you get it. Okay. You gave us the wrong address. Okay. Well, or whatever you tore the check. We'll get you a new check, whatever it might be. But you do that stuff over time and it is, it's like a relationship. And that's important because one point we were using this company to send out checks and it was based in Canada, no offense, but guess what? The Mounties and the U S treasury department got this company. Apparently they weren't doing anything wrong for us, but they were doing this deal where you would, um, Hey, you've won the Irish sweepstakes, send us $50 and we'll, you know, so they were shut down. We had all this money at the time. We're a lot smaller, probably $10,000 in honor area out. And they couldn't tell us what was going to go through and what was it. So we couldn't warn people. But by then most of the people working with us, they gave us the benefit of the doubt. As soon as they said there was a problem, we said, no problem. And we paid them another way. But what a disaster that what are the fraud fraud? They're not, no, no, no, no, no, no. We'll make sure we treated you on the past. We're not going to give up on unit. You know, it's all about building up their trust with you. So when I see about these companies that say, Oh, we, we've got them through the river and we got them. And if someone client wants to see him again, good luck. It's like, no, we have them. We have, they have their code. We're happy to reach out to them again. We know who they are. We know that they, if they only were $600, they have to pay in the U S they got to pay. We have to send them a 10 99. I don't know how to do it in every other industry, but it's about real people, right? They're real people. And we want a client. We want the patients that we're real people and we can handle any problems and we can help you out. And that's what the industry needs, right? We don't want fake people.

[00:21:11] Sebastian: We want real people during our surveys, despite your check processor being convicted of mail fraud. Yeah, that's a funny story. So I guess another question for you, Wes, is where are we as an industry or even maybe more broadly as a society still struggling to represent the patient voice?

[00:21:28] Wes: Well, we've come a long way. I mean, now every company, at least in the healthcare space touts patient centricity. Now that doesn't mean they're all doing it, but the first step is at least saying it right. And that's where our business has grown. I think we hit it at the right time. Companies were more and more interested. It used to be, well, the doctor prescribed, we just need to go into the doctor, make sure he or she understands this boom. And then guess what? The patient has more and more power. The patient can go online. There's ads to the patient. They need to convince both the patient and the physician as well as the insurance companies. That's another story, what to do. So they have done that and we've seen the growth of that. And every conference I go to, they say, we not only need to talk to the patient earlier, we need to talk to them before we set up a clinical trial. Because I was at one conference where they thought, oh, the patients will want short trips for their clinical trials, short visits. But then the patient says, no, if I'm going in, it's a big deal for me to go in. I'd rather go in less often. And while I'm there, I don't mind spending four hours instead of one hour. So it's like, you got to find out what works for the patient. We have seen that grow to a very large extent, and not just in research, but in other areas where companies are reaching out to patients. So we have seen that, but there's still a long way to go because people feel like they're not being taken seriously. We ask people how they're treated in the healthcare system or why they like telehealth during the COVID thing. And it's like, finally, I don't have to scrounge around for a parking spot and then get in and then all the stuff that people go through everyday life, especially you have got a rare disease nobody understands, or you got a debilitating disease that makes life tough, or you're caring for a kid, and you've got other things that people go through. So the burden is incredible. So it has gotten better. And I feel like we keep giving people a chance because sometimes people say, well, I don't want to support that industry. I'm like, we're not supporting any industry. This is your chance. If you don't like something, this is your chance to tell. So please, I'm not going to twist anybody's arms to take part, but say whatever's on your mind. You're the boss.

[00:23:21] Sebastian: RPV is now, from what I understand, has sort of a more global span. Originally US-focused, maybe even Albuquerque-focused, based on your story earlier.

[00:23:32] Wes: We found that wasn't a great business model. It's as wonderful as New Mexicans are. How has that changed things for you? Two key areas where we grew. One was geographically, you mentioned, and the other is disease-wise. So we started with hemophilia and a couple of diseases. Now we got 1,500 diseases and actually more of your subtypes, depending on how you classify things. So I just assumed people could all find the non-rare diseases. But then patients, guess what? This is an obvious thing I didn't realize. They don't have one disease. You have hemophilia, maybe you have asthma too. So should I put my asthma down? Or my friend here is high blood pressure. Can he sign up? And it's like, I hate to tell people no. And we were giving gift cards. I'm like, I hate to give out all these gift cards for diseases that I don't need. Well, then all of a sudden, the client said, by the way, do you have asthma patients? Do you have anxiety? I said, okay, wait a minute. I'm saying no to nobody. So we changed that. We didn't change the name because we still, the focus is on the rare, the hard to find. And we established the name, but we added a tagline. So it's rare patient voice, also non-rare. That's like everybody. And two things about it. I didn't think people would pay the price. We come up with a very simple system. We charge the same price no matter each disease. I know it doesn't make sense. I know rare diseases you should charge more, but it's very efficient for us. People know what they're going to pay. We have it. It's on our website. We charge the same for this. And people do. Over time, it gets back to what you're saying. They know they can get them. They know what we promised them. We don't overpromise. They know they're real. So some companies come to us every week, no matter what the disease or the condition is. We actually do more that's not technically rare. And the US has a definition of rare, 200,000 or fewer patients. And some of the diseases you think are rare really technically are not, MS or lupus. So I call those medium rare. They're like a steak with a little pink. So we do actually more work in the medium rare than the rare. So that's been huge growth because no matter what, whenever we have people want more of them or they always, whenever we find out about a new condition, we say, oh, where's, is there an advocacy group? Is there an event we can go to? Is there people we know? We love finding out about new ones and growing it that way. And then geographically. So when we started, we had US and kind of Canada, as one guy says, it's our 51st state, right? Anyway, I get it. No, it's not. But the first thing, expansion we did was Canada. I had a wonderful partner up there said, let me see what I can do up in Canada. And we created Rare Patient Voice Canada, but it didn't really pan out at the time. Even though there's pharma research in Canada, because of the whole system, people aren't as interested and the coverage of the drugs, et cetera, et cetera. So that didn't go anywhere. But then years later, people kept asking us, please, please, please, we need to find patients, especially in Europe and such. So we expanded to the big five countries, what they call the big five, you know, UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, as well as Canada still, we never wanted to lose to Canada. And then over time, Australia, New Zealand, mainly because we didn't have to do another language website for them. And so geographically spread out. Though that hasn't panned out as well as I thought. The UK has been the most promising, even though we have all the things in all the languages, it's a different thing. There's not quite the same universe of events to recruit from. There's a little bit more, in the US we'll do anything for money and we don't do that in Europe. Canada likes to pretend they're a little bit more like Europe in that regard. Oh, we're not money grubbing American. Maybe underneath people are, but not on the surface. But anyway, there's still a lot of potential there in the other countries. And the other area that's been big for us is I started market research. That was my background, right? I knew market research and it's been a very nice business. There's a lot of other needs for patients and their voice. An obvious one is clinical trials, the people actually doing the trial. And so we've gotten more involved in that. We have people that want to participate in research where we send an email. We don't conduct a clinical trial, but we can introduce them to the firms that do. And that's a bigger business than the market research. Someday I say, we'll say, remember when market research was the biggest part? And then before they do a clinical trial, they need to interview people. And there's other patient liaison groups. Pharma has all these groups within them, a lot of which need patients that we weren't even aware of. So that's another interesting area for growing. So geographically, there's always more diseases and more client departments that need patients. Wes, a couple of last questions. What keeps you motivated? As I say, I still like to go to patients. It's so great to see patients. I mean, it's amazing to me. I'll go to some event and some horrible disease, or the kids have this disease. And I'm like, geez, these people are so positive. And then I remember, I'm not seeing them on the day they were diagnosed, right? That was probably a bad day. And I'm not seeing everybody. I'm seeing the people that have said, I want to do something about this. But still, I'm so amazed at the people and their tenacity and what they're doing. A lot of people with the rare disease, they start their own advocacy group. And somebody said, I was terrible at science in high school. I wish I had studied more. And now they're an expert in that rare disease. And they find a researcher, and they promote, and they raise money. That is very motivating. You can't be in this category. It's one thing to have something yourself, but if you think about your kids. My kids are old now. I have a grandson that's five. It's like, you think of them getting something, you're like, oh, my God. So it's amazing to see what people do and to help people. The thing I love about this is nobody's losing in this deal. The patients love it, because the first thing they say isn't the money. It's like, somebody cares to talk about me. Nobody does a project, right? Unless they're working on some new product that might help them to some degree. And the money's nice on top. Hey, you made my holidays. We were able to help pay for things. But the patients love it, because they win. The clients love it. They don't wait forever. We already have these people. We've gone out and found them. Here's what we have. They can start within a couple of days and get some patients. And even so-called competitors, guess what? As you know in this industry, they're clients. As I say, they're out there. They're our sales force. They're out there saying they have everything, but then they come to us for these people. So there's nobody losing in this game. I love it. I don't feel like we're hurting anybody. We're helping everybody.

[00:29:00] Sebastian: Yeah, Wes, it occurred to me earlier, I'm not going to ask you who the company was that says they have everybody. And they're like, oh, no, we don't have any of those people. Last question for you. If folks want to learn more about Rare Patient Voice, where should they go?

[00:29:13] Wes: The website is great, rarepatientvoice.com. If anybody's a patient or knows a patient, they can sign up there. I've always encouraged folks. We love people. The people that want to do it, they can sign up. We pay people $120 an hour for work they do. And then the client stuff, we publish all about our panels and our pricing and everything. So the website is good. As a company, and personally, we're on LinkedIn. We're actually on all these social media. We have a wonderful group of people that help find patients. They're on Facebook, which I see them a lot, but Instagram, things I don't go on, Instagram and TikTok and all that other stuff. So they can find us anywhere, Rare Patient Voice. But LinkedIn, happy for anybody to connect with me on LinkedIn. Pam, my colleague and I, we've made a thing about growing our LinkedIn and we do a lot of things. And that's been very good for business because people say, what was that? And they'll finally, they'll give us a request over LinkedIn, you know, and then we'll connect or I go to a conference and the thing I do is like, good to meet you. Let's link in because I found if you just keep their email and they move companies, you lose track of them. But not that they're reading everything on LinkedIn, but every 10th thing they see, but at least it's following them wherever they go. I love those sites.

[00:30:15] Sebastian: Thanks, Wes. Appreciate having you on the show today.

[00:30:17] Wes: Great to talk to you, Sebastian.

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