Welcome to The Dashboard Effect podcast. I'm Brick Thompson.
Caleb Ochs:I'm Caleb Ochs.
Brick Thompson:Caleb, today we wanted to talk about doing BI and analytics in the mid market and some of the things we've learned over approximately 300 customers. And I mean, I don't know how many- 1000 projects? A lot, at least 1000. A lot. A lot, many more than that likely. And some of the things we've learned about how to do this well and cost effectively. Some of this may be kind of obvious, but some of it's not really.
Caleb Ochs:Yeah, I think I think it's gonna be a good topic to talk about, because there's not, it's, it's specific to the middle market, right? You know, when you're talking about data and analytics, it's, it's usually geared towards a lots of data, like, that's what people are really interested in is big data, you know, those big companies are doing crazy, cool stuff on all these, you know, terabytes and terabytes of data. You know, it's not done not really applicable for the mid market. And there are some specific things when you're trying to do data and analytics in a mid market company that we've learned. And, you know, we think we've got a pretty good way of doing it now. Yeah, we should we should share.
Brick Thompson:Yeah, well, I think we definitely do. I mean, our customers seem to think we do too, I, you know, we can start with was sort of where we started in the middle market many years ago. Middle market typically is characterized by doing significant revenues. I mean, it's a real company, it's growing, it's, it's, it's not a startup, but very often doesn't have a mature data BI analytics department. So that's sort of a first characteristic that you have to overcome. And we've been hired many times to come in, as consultants for a period of time, come in for a few months, sometimes a few years, providing that service instead of trying to hire that and mature that internally. And that can work. For sure. You know, when you're trying to build an internal team, to start with, you're sort of hiring, I don't know, you probably take out $4-500,000 of payroll, you need three or four people of a certain technical level to come in and start doing it. And so by hiring someone to do it, like we have for these projects, you can't avoid that payroll cost. And get, hopefully, if you hire the right organization, someone who's already mature, knows, knows how to do mature, data ise, knows how to do and so on. But there are some problems with that, too.
Caleb Ochs:Yeah. Yeah, I mean, if you think about kind of that journey for that mid market company, let's say you're the CIO, you know, and you start to realize, oh, we need we really need better business intelligence, we need better data, we need to get good stuff to the business, that if you if you're not well versed in BI and data and analytics, which a lot of CIOs just really aren't, you know, it's not kind of their, their bread and butter. Hiring a team can be daunting, like you don't know what you're looking for, like, what tech stack Do you want to go with? What skills do you need to look for when you're even doing an interview? Like how do you know the person's good versus not? You know, it's, and you have to justify all the payroll cost on top of that. So it's not quite as simple as Oh, yeah, let's just build a team, right, it becomes becomes more challenging than that.
Brick Thompson:Yeah, it definitely does. So. So you go outside, you hire a consulting firm, they bring in a bunch of engineers, they do the project, it's a lot more cost effective than going out and hiring that team and sort of having that cost ongoing. Maybe you can even capitalize this cost. So there's advantages there. One of the big disadvantages, though, is when you want to stop having that outside consultancy do work. Now, one who picks up the care and feeding of this data warehouse or these days data lake house system. So now you do need to start thinking about, okay, I guess I hiring a team.
Caleb Ochs:Right. And how many times have we seen after a project is done that the momentum at that company just grinds to a halt? Right, right? They maybe hire somebody, or they don't. Maybe the person they hired decides to leave? Or just isn't able to do it the way that they want it done or continue what we've what we've been able to do form and yeah, so just stops like, and that's not good. And you just wasted a bunch of money on a BI project that's putt on hold.
Brick Thompson:Yeah. So you're, you're sort of going back doing projects here and there. It's challenging and if you want to hire internally, when you're hiring one or two or three people to manage something that a consulting firm of, say 30, 50, or 100 people were doing, you're sort of looking for or Batman a little bit, you know, that full utility player that can do it all, and is seeing all the different types of technologies and so on. And so where we've ended up actually, after doing years of these big projects, and then handing them off to teams, and helping companies try to hire those teams and get them trained, and so on, is providing instead, almost a product as a service. So for a lower monthly cost much lower than, you know, hiring that team, providing just that service ongoing, building the data pipelines and maintaining those. So if they break in the middle of the night, you know, we get the alert and fix and we make sure we're washing the performance of the data lake house, we're building and improving the, the data models and so on. And on top of that, having a sort of bite sized amount of report writing to just always going. And the reason we do that, as we've learned that just delivering even delivering a perfect report that was perfectly designed, perfectly researched, you very often don't end up with something that goes for very long before it needs changes.
Caleb Ochs:Yeah, it's perfect for that exact situation and circumstance. And then tomorrow, everything's different. And it's like, okay, this is still kind of good, but like, we need to do this, and we need to do that, you know, change it. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's a really good point. And I think another point is, you know, how many times have you or us gone into a company and things are not documented, people don't really know what the data means, because they had somebody put something together at one point in time, and they never documented anything. And so now nobody really knows what's going on. So you kinda have to start over. And that's such a hassle in such a pain, and you really need that like, data continuity. You need to know it. Yeah. Yeah, you need to keep that that organizational knowledge, you know, alive as you build this thing out. If you're having churn on paper with people in your department.
Brick Thompson:It's a nightmare. Yeah, we've ridden along for that watching people tried to build their teams and getting pulled back in over and over to fill that gap when someone doesn't cut it. Right. Well, he has a better job and leaves or whatever.
Caleb Ochs:Yeah. And there's even scenarios where we get brought in, because the two guys that built their whole system decided to quit, right? And now it's like, we have no idea what's going on in there. Right, exactly.
Brick Thompson:I was thinking this. That's all true. I was thinking also just about the need to just continually iterate reports over and we've learned that internally, like, you know, we're good at building reports, we have really good report writers, we can get them built anytime we want. We define them well. We do perfect wireframes we make sure we do good discovery stakeholders are all bought in signed off, we launched the report, and invariably, we're tweaking it within a month, sometimes within two weeks. Certainly within many weeks, we are and when you bring in an outside vendor to help with this, you do have that disadvantage of okay, you did the project, they delivered it, you ran it through user acceptance, testing, everything looks good, great. You cut that vendor loose. And then in six weeks, you realize, oh, we have these tweaks? It's a pain to spin up the vendor again.
Caleb Ochs:Yeah, right. Yeah, right, exactly.
Brick Thompson:And so we've moved to a design, I guess, sort of product as a service where it's just continual. Every month, there's a small number of hours devoted to building reports, and improving data models and fixing KPIs and so on. So that as the company, you're not feeling like, we have to spin up a big project, we just have this built in for you know, for a reasonable monthly cost that stays the same, we're just able to do that we can get training, if we need to tweak the reports, you know, blue Margin's, taking care of the data pipelines, and making sure those are working, you know, taking care of the cybersecurity and, and disaster recovery and all that stuff. And we think this is the right way to do it now. And we're finding with our clients, this is what they want. They don't want to have to build a perfect team. Generally, you get to a certain size, or actually certain organization personalities. They just want it in house. But there's a lot where this just solves a problem so they can work on their main business.
Caleb Ochs:Yeah, right. Exactly. I mean, I think that that's the biggest benefit that I see of doing it that way with some sort of like almost department as a service really is that you've got first of all, you know who to go to, you know, if you have a question. You can get the tweaks you need when you need them, no matter how small or big they might be. You have a team of experts that you can rely on and you're not wondering like, I hope this person that I hired off the street is not leading us down a bad path. Like it's all kind of handled. So I think that that's a huge benefit to doing it that way. And and yeah, you're right. I mean, all of those things that you mentioned are, are we see as huge benefits, and especially in that middle market space? Yeah, until you get to a certain size where it starts to make a lot of sense to have your own team.
Brick Thompson:And there may still be times where you need a project like that the service is great for ongoing, but hey, we've got, you know, we just bought for companies, and we have a whole bunch of reporting, we need to get done for the board for our value creation plan to be functioning well to be able to monitor it to be able to drive it well. Great. Okay. So you bring in that, that outside consultant to do that. But we're talking about sort of the ongoing okay, you're in, you're in more of a steady state. Yeah. So I guess we're, we're, what we've learned, what we're trying to communicate is, probably don't, if you're in the middle market, probably don't think, Okay, I'm gonna hire a consultancy, to do a big project, and then leave it with me and I'll figure it out. The best results that we're seeing is find a partner that can actually provide some some kind of ongoing service that takes care of all those things. So you don't have to go out and hire those four people, right? And you can keep iterating and doing the little things you need to do. You'll know when it's the time to hire those people. And maybe you'll start doing that soon and start building that. But you don't have to get it right, right out of the box to sort of catch this big project that someone's built for you.
Caleb Ochs:Right, exactly. And if you find the right partner, they're going to help you, you know, make that call on when it's time to hire a team, if it becomes appropriate. Typically just put a fine point on it. Typically, we see that doesn't make sense until you're at a billion in revenue. Yeah. You know, and once you're there, then maybe it starts to be compelling to have that person cost effective. Yeah, right. But But until then, like, do it do it this way, it's going to be cheaper, and you're gonna get better outcomes. And then it's not going to add an extra layer of like management burden to somebody. Yeah. CEO or CFO or wherever you decide to put it.
Brick Thompson:True. Good point. All right. I think we covered all we wanted to. Alright, cool. Thanks.
Caleb Ochs:Thanks.