THE DATA CHALLENGE FOR TECH FOUNDERS

How to wrangle your data into one place and make sense of it for your Board

Founding, launching & running an SME business is unbelievably hard. It takes long hours, huge commitment, the humility to make tons of mistakes yet keep going and requires you to be a confident and comfortable risk-taker. As well as keeping sane, healthy, and motivated, no matter what. You simply don’t have the resources, budget, cashflow or support to do what big businesses can do with little thought. Running an SME business is super hard at the best of times. And it was soooooo much harder during COVID. The world of business can feel uncertain and unpredictable anytime…during a pandemic, ‘uncertainty’ and ‘unpredictable’ are understatements. I get it…I was in the trenches with you too.

I launched Data³ in 2017. I’ve always been a grafter but getting from 2017 to 2021 has been so much harder than I ever could have possibly imagined. A rollercoaster ride. A battle of my own wills. A test of all my personal characteristics. A never-ending series of learnings and lessons. Big mistakes. Yet, in the last 4.5 years, my amazing team have delivered 70+ projects for 50+ SMEs in the UK. And I’m lucky enough to be able to trust, respect, count on, and have beers with my awesome team of data engineers, data architects, developers, BI experts, product gurus, marketers and sales types. As well as my, up until recently, unpaid gang of advisors giving me humble, generous and valuable counsel.

In this time, I’ve spoken to hundreds of SME business leaders. And EVERY single business has exactly the same problem – disconnected data, spread across multiple data sources, platforms and tools. And it’s all in a muddle requiring huge amounts of manual effort to untangle things and bring it together in a sensible way. So, EVERY business leader says the same thing – they are missing a single source of truth, or a single view of the customer. This means they are not confident that they are tracking their historical business performance well enough…which makes them concerned that they’re making future decisions without the right information. And they also know they’re missing out on data-driven sales opportunities. Imagine if you had a single source of truth…

This could be performance-based:

What’s working well? In other words, what should you continue or double down on
What’s not working well? In other words, what should you review, critique, test and stop or change
What’s likely to happen in future? So, what do you need to focus on

This could be trend-based:

How has our business performance changed over time?
How does our business performance vary by location?
How does our business performance vary by product or feature?

This could be channel-based:

Which channels are delivering the highest returns?
Which channels have the highest engagement?
Which channels are not making an impact?

This could be cost or ROI-based:

Where are we getting the biggest bang for our buck?
Which activity delivers the most leads, conversions or sales?
Where is our profit coming from?

The right questions will depend on your business objectives.

It could come from multiple sources, think about…

Financial data
Customer data
Operations data
Production data
Marketing data
Social media data
Ecommerce data
All the spreadsheets and documents in an organisation

And more…businesses, of all shapes, sizes and sectors, have high volumes of data.

Depending on your business model, and sector, you could consider different metrics.

They could be financial:

Monthly recurring revenue
Profit
Cost
Revenue vs target

They could be customer-orientated:

Registrations
Customer satisfaction
Willingness to recommend or Net Promoter Score (NPS)
Survey responses

They could be marketing:

Website visitors
Email response rates
Social media reach
Video views

Or they could be combined metrics:

Cost per acquisition
Lifetime customer value
Cost/revenue/profit per customer
Cost/revenue/profit per employee

The right metrics will depend on your business objectives too.

What I’ve seen is there’s a huge untapped opportunity for data, both in the UK and globally. I’ve seen that smaller SMEs, of say less than 20 employees, have exactly the same problems as larger SMEs, but they can’t afford data consultancy fees to sort it all out for them in a bespoke project. So, smaller SMEs are unsupported and just have to muddle through with spreadsheets, or ignore the data, and go on gut feel. Today, small businesses don’t have the time/money/skills to become data-driven, so they miss out on the business benefits of becoming data-driven.

This is a problem, as savvy start-up founders know that data-driven businesses make more money. Here are just a few facts but there are tons more out there…

According to Forrester in 2020, data-driven businesses saw revenues 162% higher than non-data-driven businesses – 162%! And 30% higher business growth too.
According to McKinsey in 2020, data-driven businesses acquired 23 times more customers. 23 times!
And, according to BARC in 2020, data-driven businesses increased their profit by 8% compared to non-data-driven businesses.
Yet, according to Garner in 2019, 97% of business data was unused…97%! Unused!

That’s what I’m passionate about – the days of making business decisions, on guesstimates and gut feel, should be over. I want to empower smaller businesses to make data-driven decisions, just like the big businesses.

Your Board will expect you to be able to answer all questions about your business performance easily and quickly…otherwise you risk losing their confidence. They’ll expect a simple, clear Board pack showing the key trends. They’ll fire questions at you. They’ll expect immediate answers. So, you’ll probably hours wrangling with Excel spreadsheets to get that perfect picture for them.

But we all know the world of business is unfair. Big businesses have all the data and artificial intelligence (AI) toys to play with, as well as the budgets and the people. Small businesses don’t. They’re not operating on a level playing field. So, how can we level the field? How can we enable SMEs to grow using big business data toys? How can we enable smaller businesses to get a single source of truth and make data-driven decisions too? How can we make Board reporting easy?

There must be a better way. A way to automatically bring business data together into one place. Within seconds. A way to check on business performance, just like you’d check on the weather. Now there is. myDATA³. That’s why I designed myDATA³ for founders like me. I feel your pain. Data should be simple for non-technical founders. It is now.

Check out myDATA³ at mydata3.com – it’s FAST & FREE and takes 2 mins max to register, connect and view your dashboards…so what have you got to lose?