Data & Analytics
Your data has the answer. Most businesses can’t find it.
Most decisions in a growing business get made on gut feel, not because the data doesn’t exist, but because it’s scattered across spreadsheets nobody trusts. Gartner puts the industry split at close to 80% of reporting time spent preparing and reconciling data, 20% spent analysing it. That ratio should run the other way.
Data & analytics covers turning scattered numbers into something you can act on: one trusted source instead of five conflicting ones, dashboards people open because they help, and KPIs that match the size of the business asking the question.
What this looks like day to day
Data & analytics work is sized to what you need. Past work in this space has included:
- Building a single source of truth from data spread across separate systems and spreadsheets
- Setting up reporting dashboards a team opens because it helps
- Choosing the right KPIs for the stage a business is at, not a generic template of metrics
- Cleaning up messy, inconsistent data before it wrecks a decision or a project
- Setting up the reporting tooling behind it: Power BI, Tableau, Looker, or a custom build
- Advising on whether a data pipeline belongs in-house or with an outside partner
If the numbers running your business come from anywhere near a spreadsheet nobody’s confident in, it sits under this service.
Where it overlaps with our other work
Data & analytics is one piece of a bigger picture. It depends on Information Management, since a dashboard is limited by the records feeding it, and it surfaces problems that belong to Process Re-design, since a KPI trending the wrong way points to a process problem wearing a data costume. We’ll flag it if your problem sits across more than one of these.
How we approach it
We build a single source of truth before we build a dashboard. A dashboard built on bad or scattered data repeats the mistake with more confidence. We size the reporting to the business, not the software’s default templates.
Backed by someone who has handled data where getting it wrong matters
This work is led by Adam Marinovic, who came up through database administration and systems analysis before leading integration projects across financial services, health, and consumer businesses. He treats data in regulated, sensitive environments with the same care he brings to a small business dashboard.
Common questions
What’s the difference between business intelligence and data analytics? Business intelligence is the reporting layer, dashboards and scheduled reports that show what happened. Data analytics goes further and asks why it happened and what to do next. Most businesses need both, but few tools build them together.
How much data do you need before analytics is worth investing in? Less than most people think. Consistency matters more than volume: a year of clean, consistent sales data in a single spreadsheet is enough to find a real pattern.
Is data analytics worth it for a small business, or is it an enterprise-scale thing? It scales down fine. The tools and the questions are the same, dashboards, KPIs, a single source of truth, applied to a smaller number of customers and a shorter runway for waiting to find out something isn’t working. A five-person business gets more value from catching a bad trend before it compounds than a five-thousand-person business does, not less.
How do I choose the right KPIs for my business? Start from the decision you need to make, not the metric that looks impressive on a dashboard. If you can’t name the decision a number would change, it’s a vanity metric. The right KPIs shift as the business grows, so revisit them instead of setting them once and leaving them alone.
Should I build a data pipeline in-house or bring in outside help? Depends on whether data work is a permanent part of the business or a problem you need solved once with light upkeep after that. A business generating new data questions every month benefits from an in-house owner. A business that needs one clean system and quarterly upkeep does better bringing someone in for the build and a light ongoing arrangement.
Talk to someone who has fixed this before
If your business is making decisions on gut feel because the data’s scattered or nobody trusts the dashboard, book a call. We’ll tell you straight what’s worth building first.