Qualitative Research Contractor - Nigerian Car Dealership Industry at a Reputable Company

About the Project

I'm working on an early-stage project in Nigeria's automotive industry and am looking for a researcher to help me better understand how car dealerships/sellers operate. The specific focus of the research will be shared with the selected candidate during onboarding.

What I can say at this stage is that this is discovery research - open-ended, exploratory, and focused on understanding a specific aspect of dealership operations from the dealer's perspective. I'm looking for a sharp, self-directed researcher to conduct a series of in-depth interviews with car dealerships across Lagos, Abuja, Rivers, and Kano.

What You'll Do

This is an end-to-end research engagement. You'll own the full process from recruitment through to synthesis:

• Source and recruit dealership contacts from scratch across Lagos, Abuja and Kano (new and used car dealerships). Create participant profiles prior to inteviews
• Conduct a target of 3 - 4 recorded interviews per week(Week 3 onward) (voice or video) in English and/or Nigerian Pidgin
• Obtain participant consent for recording prior to each interview
• Upload recordings and transcripts to Google Cloud Storage after each interview
• Write a synthesis document for each interview, highlighting key insights and pain points - this should reflect your interpretation and a summary
• Join a daily 15-minute check-in call to share recruitment progress, scheduled interviews and any blockers
• Participate in a weekly 30-minute review meeting to discuss completed synthesis documents and overall project health.
• Submit synthesis documents at least 24 hours before each weekly review meeting

What We're Trying to Learn

The full research brief, including the specific questions you'll be exploring with dealerships, will be shared with the selected candidate at the start of the engagement. At this stage, what's important is that you're comfortable recruiting and interviewing car dealership owners and managers across Lagos, Abuja and Kano and that you can draw out honest, detailed accounts of how they run their operations.

What You Won't Be Doing

To keep this focused, the following are out of scope:

• Consumer or customer-side research -  this is dealer-facing only
• Competitive analysis
• Product recommendations
• Quantitative research or surveys

Who We're Looking For

You're a great fit for this if you:

• Have experience conducting qualitative research interviews, ideally in a business or product context
• Are proactive and comfortable with cold outreach and have the social "street smarts" to get dealership managers to open up.
• Are comfortable in English and Nigerian Pidgin - you can hold a natural, flowing conversation in both. 
• Are based in Nigeria or have strong existing networks within the Nigerian business community
• Are proactive and comfortable doing cold outreach to recruit participants independently
• Can write clear, insightful synthesis documents that go beyond summarizing - you extract meaning
• Are reliable, communicative and comfortable with daily & weekly check-ins

Experience in the Nigerian automotive industry or financial services is a bonus but not required.

Compensation

This is a fixed retainer of 150,000 paid bi-weekly (300,000/month), for a total engagement value of 600,000 over 8 weeks. Each bi-weekly payment is tied to clear milestones. 2 consecutively missed milestones will trigger a review of the contract.

Timeline & Milestones

The project runs for 8 weeks. Weeks 1–2 may be dedicated entirely to recruitment and building a pipeline of approved participants. Interviews begin in week 3, targeting 3–4 per week through to week 8, for a total of approximately 20.