Home Based Market Research Firm Prospers

From the Rhode Island News ( registration required)

J.P. Mark’s office window looks out on Ocean Drive and offers a framed view of waves lapping on the shore and reeds blowing in the wind.

Sometimes in the afternoons, Mark takes off his headset, grabs his wife and two children, and heads over to the beach for a romp in the sand.

For Mark, who left San Francisco’s financial district in 2001 for the quiet of coastal Rhode Island, hitting the beach in the middle of a workday isn’t playing hooky — it’s just a better way to do business. His perspective is not surprising, since the company he founded — Farmhouse Equity Research — is all about getting out of the office.

Farmhouse Equity Research is a financial research firm, checking the sales claims of public companies. From the fourth floor of Sea Beach, his stately 100-year-old oceanfront home, Mark, 46, marshals a team of 100 part-time employees across the country.

They make sure companies are actually doing as well as they tell investors they are. These investigators — recent graduate business students, lawyers and other finance and retail professionals — talk to suppliers, customers and buyers. Farmhouse employees go to restaurants and talk to servers, see if DVDs are selling and see how much shelf space certain products are given at stores.

They send the information back to Mark, who pulls the data into snapshots of the companies’ financial health and then sells that data to investment firms and mutual funds considering investing in those companies.

In the finance industry it’s known as “channel checking” — or independently investigating the financial health of a company by validating its business and not simply accepting its claims at face value. To Mark, it’s just “good, solid research.”

…San Francisco was a “crazy” life, he said. With housing prices out of control, Mark and his wife, Katie, lived in a two-bedroom apartment with 1 1/2 parking spaces — forced to move the neighbors’ cars in order to get their own car out of the driveway, he said.

And with Wall Street operating on East Coast time, Mark got up at 4 a.m. to get to work by 5 a.m. — 8 a.m. Eastern time — and worked until 6 p.m., with barely time to eat between conference calls and financial modeling. Bedtime was 8:30 p.m., leaving little time for anything but work, Mark said.

By 2001, his parents had moved to Rhode Island and with his wife pregnant with their first child, it was time to explore other options, he said.

“The more I thought about it, I thought ‘I could do research anywhere,’ ” said Mark.

With no plan other than to be his own boss, Mark and his wife moved into a farmhouse in Portsmouth.
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“Research can be done anywhere,” said Mark. “If I could, with the time change, I’d be in Hawaii.”