Your business is booming, great! 😀 What does this success have for you around the corner? Blindness.

Sorry to be a bit of Debby-downer, but I say it because I've lived it. What do I mean?

When I was 17, I was the office manager of a private school bus company. We hit our first million-dollar year. Things started to stall out. Why? Well, that was a very hard question to answer.

The finance data indicated that our costs were probably too high ... but why? ⁉️

Well, I can't say because our accounting software wasn't built to track costs bus by bus or route by route. 😡 

We just had to guess for a while. The owners ran around trying to put out the proverbial fires, but it wasn't working.

The owners hired their daughter, who had a track record for turning around businesses. Great! We fixed some data problems and gained some visual clarity on what the issues were.

We turned it around, right? Wrong 😔

Our recommendations based on the data didn't work because the owners refused to believe the reality of the numbers.

Fundamentally, there are 2 types of business blindness:

1. Nearsightedness: blindness because you're looking in the wrong place. 
2. Farsightedness: blindness because you refuse to believe what you're looking at. 

Small Business Data Issue #1: Nearsightedness

When a business turns the corner to its first few million in revenue or its first dozen employees, inevitably, the leader(s) of the business suddenly can't be micro managers anymore.

They can't do the actual hands-on work for the customers anymore because it doesn't scale. As a result, they shift from being individual contributors to managers. Don't believe me? Just ask Alex Hormozi.

They must shift their vision. They used to stare at trees all day, perfecting each product or job. Now, they have to look at a forest.

You can no longer understand what's going on job by job or unit by unit. The thing describing your company's output isn't adjectives: awesome, beautiful, green, long, etc.

Now, the thing describing your output needs to be described by numbers. That's how we understand the forest. Big, beautiful numbers! 💯

Everything at this stage starts to become about numbers, but you can't find the numbers because your system wasn't built for it.

Small Business Data Solution #1: Data Engineering

Your first solution is going to be sending your personal assistant, middle managers, accountant, or an intern to figure out all of your numbers. Let me save you some time: it's not going to work ...

Oh, it might work for a small thing here or there within a particular domain, but pretty soon you'll run into the following problems:

1. Domain-specific tools (the analytics tab in your favorite app) won't let you see the bigger picture. These are still "micro" solutions, and you, again, are at the "macro" level already.
2. You can't marry the data from different sources.
3. It takes a lot of time and effort to maintain your spreadsheet analyses.
4. You want to tackle more advanced analytics projects: machine learning, predictions, AI, etc., but your tools can't handle it.
5. No one knows what the data "means." For example, there are half a dozen ways everyone starts calculating their Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC).
   
6. This list goes on ...

Trust me when I say, this gets complex very fast.

Over the years, I have built several data platforms from scratch with all of the most modern data tools. I've built them for small companies and for large enterprises. I can do this quickly.  Your assistant or intern, on the other hand, might find this a bit tricky.

Even if they manage to correctly find tools like Matillion, Fivetran, Mode, etc., they are going to make some pretty classic data engineering blunders.

... But let's say you get past this barrier and you're starting to get some useful metrics.

Small Business Data Issue #2: Farsightedness

You've hacked together a solution. Nice! Are people using it? 👀

Not likely ...

Here are a few reasons why:

1. They don't understand the numbers they are looking at. Data definitions can be difficult to communicate.
2. Just because they understand it doesn't mean they know what action it's telling them to take.
3. They don't trust the data. Its source and the means used to create it were questionable.
4. They do need no stinkin' numbers! They have a gut instinct that has never steered them wrong! ... 🙄 
5. No one is expecting them to use it ... good ol' accountability failures!
6. and the list goes on ...

In short, as you grow your business, you will have 1) technical problems with your data and 2) people problems with your data.

I've run into each and every one of these scenarios.

Small Business Data Solution #2: Data Literacy & Coaching

Good data requires good training and good practices. Just like a good football team has a coach, a playbook, and personal trainers, a good business will have a data professional who can look at the data playbook and keep your team disciplined in their practices.

Through this series of articles, I will show you how to get past these barriers. (more to come)

... or you can just hit the easy button ... this one right here: Schedule a time to chat with me.

P.S. What Data thinks about your data.