A Belated Introduction to Gibson Research Consultancy (GRC)

I write this article to introduce our new website, blog and video space. It feels strange doing this because we have never done much marketing or promotion before. Just look at the name of our company: Gibson Research Consultancy. I’m the ‘Gibson’ and we do ‘research’ as ‘consultancy’. Not exactly one of the great branding stories of the 21st century!  

So, who are we then? We specialise in multilingual, multi-country ‘Patient Voice’ research. We are based in Leeds, United Kingdom, and have an office in Central America. We work with thousands of professional researchers and clinicians around the world to deliver projects in over 190 countries and territories. We are a small company with a big reach.

I started this company in the early part of the last decade just as something to do while I was a stay-at-home dad. This was intended as temporary, sole consultancy. I really just set out a ‘stall of things I could do’, the purpose was to bring in some income and when the children got older, I would look for a job. However, I had a rapid and steep demand for certain services. Operations grew and I was running it all for a long time on my own - for longer than I should have, in fact. Then we built a solid team, and in time we became scalable.

It really is true that you should hire people that are better than you and that is exactly what I did.  The expertise within the company has gone far beyond the ‘Gibson’, i.e. the expertise in my own head, to something that everybody in the company has ownership of and adds to. On that point I want to acknowledge and honour our team, past and present, simply for being consistently excellent.

We will be publishing regular short and long-form videos, articles and white papers on topics that are of interest to us. In some cases, they cover big themes with international depth, such as:

1.       A critique of the state of health communication

2.       The cultural dimension in health provision, particularly understudied and neglected areas, things that we take for granted or don’t think about but that have a significant impact on health outcomes.

3.       Health inequalities and health promotion in the context of public and global health.

4.       Health ‘futures’ and health ‘presents’, that is to say, what was presented as future landscapes has now become the present. We want to talk about the challenges and opportunities that these bring.

5.       Business lessons. Companies that present their history as a trajectory of unbroken growth is most likely a lie. Most companies go through a repeat cycle of growth and contraction. The fact that you survive means that there has been a little more growth in relation to the contraction. We cherish the ‘ups’ but we learn our bitterest lessons from the ‘downs’. Advice, as a concept, is often just the residual stings of nostalgia and regret, repackaged and repurposed for someone else to learn from. We have plenty of these lessons to impart that could be useful for freelancers and small companies, established and new. We want to provide an honest account of some of our small victories and setbacks, failures and successes that I am sure will resonate.

We are not motivated by using this as a tool for selling. We want to talk about the issues interest us, not necessarily related to our services. We want to generate discussion of substance, beyond bandwagons and slogans. Also, we simply want to share a little bit of ourselves, what makes us tick, and who we are.

Thank you very much for reading!