About PROOF.
History
PROOF was started in 2013 by Grant Gooding after leaving the mergers and acquisitions industry. After valuing and analyzing hundreds of businesses he had a hypothesis as to why failure rates in acquisitions were so high (inside 3 years, failure rates are between 40-70%). The numbers always work – A deal won’t get done if the numbers don’t work. So the answer was likely non-finance related.
Eventually, Grant discovered a question that he found virtually every business owner he talked to couldn’t confidently answer: “Why do your customers do business with you?” The inability of a business owner to answer this seemingly simple question led to the development of several techniques that PROOF now uses to understand emotions, motivations and preferences of customers.
As soon as he could afford her, Grant brought on Courtney Windholz who he had known as the Director of Operations at an M&A firm he worked at previously and Courtney has been instrumental in creating business processes for PROOF and developing a strong culture of community involvement in Kansas City. The PROOF team of creative and math hybrid minds continues to grow as the company eclipsed their 200th study in 2017.
What We’re About
In business we believe that to be truly great you have to pick a fight. The fight that we pick at PROOF is with guessing. Business owners guess – especially with their marketing communications and advertising. It isn’t necessarily that they like guessing it’s that most lack the insights on how to make more informed decisions regarding who they are, who their customers are and how to communicate them in the most effective way.
Most businesses have adequate behavioral data (or big data). These are metrics like demographic data, purchasing history, clicks, conversions, impressions, etc. but they only tell you who, what, when, where and how a customer did something. The only thing that you MUST understand is WHY a customer did something. If you know why, you can predict your customers behavior.
By helping companies understand the emotions, motivations and preferences – the why – of their customers we have help empower over 100 companies and organizations to stop guessing an move forward.
