The Home Improvement Research Institute Pleased to Have Dave King Serving as New Executive Director

HIRI, the lead­ing non-prof­it research orga­ni­za­tion in the home improve­ment indus­try, is pleased to announce the addi­tion of Dave King as Exec­u­tive Direc­tor. HIRI’s pri­ma­ry role is to assist home improve­ment orga­ni­za­tions across the US and Cana­da in their sec­ondary mar­ket research needs. 

HIRI is man­aged by The Farnsworth Group, the lead­ing cus­tom mar­ket research firm serv­ing exclu­sive­ly the build­ing, home improve­ment, and lawn & ranch indus­tries. The Farnsworth Group is proud to announce that Dave King has joined The Farnsworth Group to serve as the VP of Insights and as the Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of HIRI.

HIRI Welcomes Dave King as Executive Director

Dave’s intro­duc­tion to HIRI came when he first attend­ed HIRI’s annu­al Home Improve­ment Insights Sum­mit in 2020. Dave saw the strong impact that HIRI had across the indus­try and decid­ed to get involved by serv­ing as a Board mem­ber from 2021 through his appoint­ment as Exec­u­tive Direc­tor. Dave’s pri­ma­ry ambi­tion with HIRI is to grow the val­ue deliv­ered to its mem­bers through pro­vid­ing action­able and time­ly data-dri­ven insights to meet the var­ied needs of HIR­I’s mem­bers. Dave hopes to do this through increas­ing the quan­ti­ty and qual­i­ty of HIRI’s research and bet­ter lever­ag­ing the exper­tise that HIRI mem­bers bring to the table. 

Dave has spent the past two decades in the strat­e­gy, research and advanced ana­lyt­ics space. Nine of those years were focused direct­ly in the home improve­ment space as VP of Strat­e­gy, Research & Ana­lyt­ics for Ener­Bank USA (now Regions Bank), a home improve­ment lender. 

“I am thrilled to serve as Exec­u­tive Direc­tor of HIRI. I’ve loved the mis­sion and vision of HIRI from the very begin­ning and believe we can build upon the cur­rent foun­da­tion.” remarks Dave. 

HIRI Continues Serving the Home Improvement Industry

Accord­ing to Grant Farnsworth, ​“Over the past sev­er­al years, the HIRI board and The Farnsworth Group rec­og­nized that HIRI, as an orga­ni­za­tion, has a wealth of knowl­edge that deserves to be shared and pro­mot­ed more broad­ly to sup­port the home improve­ment indus­try and com­pa­nies invest­ed in it.” 

Grant points out that, ​“Every stake­hold­er in HIRI wants to reap the ben­e­fits of access to high vol­ume, high qual­i­ty, high impact research, and we are com­mit­ted to adding val­ue to the orga­ni­za­tion in any way we can. Hence bring­ing on Dave King to The Farnsworth Group to serve as the HIRI Exec­u­tive Director.”

“HIRI can be under­stood like a co-op. Mem­ber dues are pooled to fund the breadth and depth of mar­ket research stud­ies that are com­mis­sioned on behalf of all the mem­bers,” explains Pam Hei­del, the Oper­a­tions Direc­tor of HIRI. ​“If each indi­vid­ual mem­ber com­mis­sioned all this research on their own, we’ve cal­cu­lat­ed that they would be spend­ing just shy of one mil­lion dol­lars annu­al­ly on mar­ket research rather than a tiny frac­tion of that cost as a HIRI member.”

“We, as HIRI, don’t want to be a data pub­lish­er; we want to influ­ence the strate­gies orga­ni­za­tions are tak­ing because of the qual­i­ty of insights, not just the data pro­vid­ed to mem­bers. With over 50 stud­ies con­duct­ed on behalf of our mem­bers in 2022, we hope to see this num­ber con­tin­ue to grow. The beau­ty of HIRI lies in the fact that mem­ber dues are re-invest­ed back into con­duct­ing even more research. With each new class of mem­bers, we are able to increase the val­ue cre­at­ed for all mem­bers.” says Dave. ​“Con­sid­er join­ing us in improv­ing the col­lec­tive knowl­edge of the home improve­ment space.”

Learn more about the role of HIRI and the role of The Farnsworth Group in pro­vid­ing mar­ket research for the home improve­ment sector.