My career in research started with a newspaper job ad and a part-time position as a telephone interviewer — at a time when people actually picked up the phone and talked to you. We dialed by hand, recorded answers on paper, and sent surveys out to be keypunched. I had no idea what market research was. I was a college student who just needed a job.

That job became a career. Thirty years of it.

The habits from those early days never left. To this day, any time I make something resembling an official phone call, I’m back in interviewer mode — I note the date and time, get the name of the person I’m speaking with, and take notes throughout. Some things stay with you.

One of my favorite expressions is I just want to know. It’s how I’m wired. Every new project has taught me something I didn’t know before. Every client has introduced me to a world I hadn’t fully understood. I am genuinely, enduringly curious about why people think, feel, and do what they do — and I’ve never found a better professional home for that curiosity than research.

In my client work it means I have worked on projects to explore what women know about heart disease (not enough), how stress impacts our lives (highlighting the mind-body connection), access to care and the challenges in navigating our healthcare system.

In my day-to-day life it means spending as much time reading comments to news stories as the stories themselves. It’s a useful, daily reminder of the range of experiences and beliefs and how different (and the same) humans are. I ask a lot of questions.

Along the way I met my husband, Arnaud. He’s on the operational side of the research business — one of the best programmers I’ve ever worked with, a creative problem-solver who has never met a technical challenge he couldn’t figure out. We are both firmly in the “I can figure it out” camp, which makes us a good team in work and in life. We’ve been married 27 years and counting and have two adult children, age 24 and 22.

We’re in the same industry, which means we talk about work constantly. At some point that conversation turned into: why don’t we do something together? M&A Consulting was born — M&A as in Michele and Arnaud.

Then his business took off in its own direction, and I found myself at a crossroads. I left what I hope will be my last corporate job, have a ton of ideas and decided to see what I can build by and for myself. I like this work and I’m good at it. I realize I’ve been consulting for a long time – I’ve been the most senior person on my projects for many years. And I’ve finally embraced my inner salesperson.

M&A took on a new meaning. Making meaning. Driving action.