Find the sources
Every place a number lives, who owns it, and how reliable it is.
Business data & reporting
Sound
Sound
familiar?
- Every Friday someone spends half a day building the same report.
- Sales, marketing and finance each have a different number for the same thing.
- You find out how last month went three weeks into this month.
- There's a dashboard. Nobody looks at it, because nobody trusts it.
- The answer to "how did March compare?" takes a day.
What I
actually do.
Specific jobs, done properly, with a person checking the output.
Connect and clean
Pull it together automatically, agree what each figure means, and fix the joins.
Reports that build themselves
The recurring ones, on a schedule, checked by a human before they go out.
Ask in plain English
A way for management to ask questions of the data and see where the answer came from.
Commercial intelligence
Margins by product, customer and channel, so decisions are made on the real picture.
What stays human
Deciding what the numbers mean and what to do about them. Data should start a conversation, not end one.
How it
starts.
1
You tell me what's broken
In your words. The thing that wastes time, loses money or drives you up the wall.
2
I find where the time goes
I sit with the people doing the work and map it as it really happens, not as the org chart says.
3
We split human from machine
Judgement, relationships and taste stay human. Copying, chasing and compiling don't.
4
Build it, then prove it
Built with a human checking the output, measured against the before, and handed over so your team can run it.
Related work.
All work →> visitor: dog-friendly lunch near the
waterfront, tomorrow?
< 3 places · open · 6 min walk
A tourism website that answers questions
Turned a tourism website into an intelligent visitor platform: ask it for a dog-friendly lunch near the waterfront tomorrow and it answers from what is actually open.
ask: how did March compare?
Management that asks instead of compiles
Connected marketing, commercial and operational data so management can ask questions rather than compile reports.
Questions
people ask.
We already have a dashboard. Why would we need this?
If people trust it and use it, you probably don't. Usually the problem is that it doesn't agree with finance, or that it needs a person to update it.
What systems can you connect?
Most accounting, CRM, e-commerce, marketing and booking systems have a way in. Where they don't, there's usually an export that can be automated.
Do we need a data warehouse?
Sometimes, often not. It depends on how much data you have and how many places it lives. I'll recommend the smallest thing that works.
Other services
Next step
Find out where
Find out where
your week goes.
Three minutes, no email needed to see the answer. The audit adds up the hours your team spends on jobs a machine could do, and shows what that costs.