Family-Owned Business: MicroDAQ Father/Daughter Duo Calibrate the Company’s Future

Philip and Cassandra Reeder. (Christine Carignan)

Cassandra Reeder was just 10 years old when her dad Philip Reeder, who spent years selling electronic test instrumentation and other equipment for companies, launched his own online business to sell NH products from a barn on the family’s property in 2000. One of his first products on the site happened to be a locally made data logger device. Orders began rolling in, and other data logger companies began calling to ask Philip to sell their products and his business morphed. 

Over the years, Philip grew the company, relocating to a ranch house and then a commercial building in Contoocook and hired employees. In the meantime, Cassandra, who helped her dad out in the business growing up, earned dual degrees in accounting and marketing. “There was an underlying rule. You cannot come here full time out of the gate,” says Cassandra, who valued the experience she gained working for the NH Banking Department and Granite State Credit Union before joining MicroDAQ full time in 2021 as the vice president of finance. 

In addition to selling a variety of data loggers—devices that measure data points such as temperature, humidity, shock absorption and voltage—MicroDAQ launched a calibration lab in 2006 and became ISO accredited—a stringent internationally recognized quality-control standard. 

Demand for data logger calibration services grew and MicroDAQ needed more space, which Cassandra found in a 9,000-square-foot building in Concord in 2021. The larger calibration lab also assembles and packages vaccine monitoring kits that include a fridge tag and probe to log temperature changes where vaccines are stored. “Vaccine monitoring has become a large part of our business,” Cassandra says.

Philip and Cassandra say their employees help customers find the right equipment, even unusual requests such as a waterproof data logger used to monitor turtles, data loggers that can fit on fish to track migration patterns or a farmer who wanted to know how much force a cow uses when it kicks back. A MicroDAQ customer even had a data logger launched into space on Space X. “We look at it as consultative sales,” Philip says.