Ep 21 - Dennis Still - Analytics for Startups and Small Business

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Episode Summary

“Big data, small data, medium size data. The real question is what you’re going to do with it once you have it.”
— Dennis Still

Dennis Still is a startup analytics expert. Where many analytics projects come from large $1B+ organizations, there are many startups and small businesses that need similar capabilities. How do small business compete and keep up? What kinds of challenges do these companies face, and how do they view their own relationship with data?

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Dennis has had a wide and varied career that didn’t necessarily start in data, but has taken him on a journey through various startups like When I Work, Gov Delivery, and his very own startup, Bigfoot Analytics.

Dennis has spent years working directly with entrepreneurs, figuring out what they need from their data, and delivering insights that drive exponential growth as they disrupt their various industries.

One of the biggest things he found through his time leading data and analytics, was that the questions that small companies are asking aren’t that different from what big companies are asking, just on a different scale. Revenue, costs, customer satisfaction. The key to his success was in being able to help his C-suite leaders identify their KPIs that would fuel rapid growth.

“Our CEO would throw out a number and 85% of the people in the room knew what that meant. It was the number that we used to drive the business forward”.

Despite being more nimble, Dennis feels like there’s a lot of opportunity still. "Who owns the data? How does it work? Who is going to look at it and do something with it?” A data-informed culture doesn’t just happen. It takes work from the analysts consistently pushing the metrics and getting the leaders to embed it into their communications.

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