Data Is Your Soil
In my view, data is the soil of a company. You can work with weaker soil and grow various things, but weak soil produces weak results.
A strong data foundation is like great soil — the perfect farmland. When your soil is healthy, meaning you actually use your available data to improve your results and decision making, it produces a lot more. And like with soil, you can't just toss seeds randomly and hope things grow. You have to take care of your soil, just like your data.
If you don't do it, your competitor who does will grow, keep improving, and eventually take you out of business.
Every company has data, and every company needs to use their data to grow. Here is what that looks like in practice.
Selling tools with 10 000 items in stock
You can be a company that sells tools. If you have 10 000 items in stock and you don't know which ones haven't been sold for a year, you are losing shelf space from more profitable items.
You probably have some sort of inventory tracking tool — the problem is that it is not giving answers, or not giving them easily enough. I can download the data from the system and analyze it myself to give you a clear report: what sells, and more importantly, what hasn't been sold in a long time and should be removed from the inventory, so you are not losing shelf space anymore. If you want this report regularly, let's build a small automated solution to give you the answers you need.
We used the data the client had ignored.
A sports team that sponsors see as charity
You can be a sports team trying to convince your sponsors to pay more, but you have no data about your audience, their segments, their habits, and you don't track social media views. When the sponsor doesn't see the value they would receive, you get charity support at best.
Here I guide you towards the next step that best fits your situation. For example, you can do questionnaires to learn more about your audience, have loyalty cards with registration questions, post all kinds of posts and videos and then track the views. You are now collecting the data you had ignored, and as a result you have a deliverable: a report to your sponsor with concrete numbers showing what exposure and audience they are buying — and whether they are getting more value than they expected.
We used the data the client had ignored.
Retail stores you can't compare
If you run retail stores and don't know how your stores compare between themselves, how can you see what works and what needs improvement?
I have connected to a client's POS system and visualized the key data points for easy comparison. What sells, what doesn't sell, how the stores compare — and if there are registered customers, then let's see how their purchases compare and who the biggest spenders are.
We used the data the client had ignored.
200 000 IoT devices sitting in S3
If you have thousands of IoT devices sending you data but you don't do anything with it, you are missing the chance to understand device usage and breakage situations, where you could improve your service and create happier customers.
I worked on a project where the company had data from 200 000 IoT devices sitting in S3, and the potential was totally ignored. By building one pipeline and a connection to a dashboard, the maintenance team was able to see device statuses live and react before clients came calling angrily.
We used the data the client had ignored.
Every company produces data
The fact is that these days, all companies produce data. You could be a cafe owner or a retail company — you are producing sales data. It might be easy enough to manage in your head or on a simple tracker, but if you don't use that data to see what products are selling better and possibly why, you are missing a chance to improve. It really doesn't matter if you are a small local operator or a major global company, using data is critical for your growth.
None of these companies lacked soil. They just weren't cultivating it.
So take care of your soil — your data — and use it. It might seem complicated to start, but like many things, it is actually a lot simpler than it looks. I'm the guy who helps you get started, so you can make better business decisions and grow your company.
If you see yourself in this text, give me a call and let's talk. The first call is free.
