...in a previous 9-5, I was presenting on a call, displaying the diagram of a data model when a member of senior leadership took a moment and laughed before referring to me as “the Tom Brady of data analytics.” Being newer in the data game (professionally), I paused, mulling over the potential for references to scandalous events like “Deflategate” and “Spygate,” both darker clouds cast upon an otherwise sensational run in the New England Patriots football era.Admittedly, there was a temporary boost of anxiety but when taken in context, it was obvious that the intent was praise for a job well done.
The company, a smaller, publicly traded organization in the Home Improvement space had no shortage of systems, software, and data warehouses where information was stored. For a smaller organization, the number of disparate resources and information was extensive, and from the perspective of an analyst served as evidence of a disconnected leadership at the highest level. Cross-company breakdowns in communication meant poor collaboration and with departments functioning in silos, teams purchased whatever was “cheapest” or most beneficial to them without regard for the larger and longer-term corporate strategy. In the end, the lack of consideration for how decision-making in one corner would impact another meant that with every dollar spent, the company was creating more confusion.
Imagine spending more money to make things more complicated.
To their credit, in the most obvious display of "too little, too late", the company began to make investments in CRM to bring it all together, but by the time those changes were in play, sales faltered, frustrations mounted, and the rent was due when Salesforce came to collect roughly $7 million in the wake of a bankruptcy.
In this example, I crafted a larger report that compared key sales driving behaviors. It sourced data from multiple places, cleaned it, and the end product told a story with visuals, drilling all the way down to the store level. Having a field-level report built with a data model was a first for the company, but with an array of tools and languages at my disposal, it demonstrated how data derived from chaos could be assembled in a meaningful way. The report became a game changer, saving field leadership hours of preparation time on weekends, and gave better visibility to store performance around KPI's.
Admittedly, as the freshly ordained G.O.A.T. (Thanks Tom) of the dataverse I took a moment to celebrate the recognition, but moreso for what I had learned in building the report, than from the public praise offered up on a corporate call.Already deep in Power Query and Visual Basic for Applications, and having a growing knowledge of modeling and DAX to build off of, I managed to bring together data from SAP front end, SAP BEX using the Analysis for Office add-on, Vonage for phone data, Medallia for NPS data, Salesforce for the Pro and Installation customer data, and SAP HANA with SQL.
Since that time, I have built reporting using these systems, while growing my knowledge of automation, Python and Artificial Intelligence. I have always loved data and where I have a keen ability to marry numbers with behaviors, the whole of my background is in Sales leadership, mostly in a retail setting with six of my 20+ years as a multi-unit leader. I have led teams in big-box, small-box, specialty retail, finance, sports marketing, and apparel and in every capacity, my territories and store units have made the transition from underperforming to overperforming in short time.
My experience has given me a broad understanding of business function and when married with my passion for numbers, it equates to a well-rounded business professional to partner with. I'm interested in working with businesses or organizations in search of someone on a fractional level, that can unleash the power of data to grow sales, increase profitability, improve operational efficiency or any combination of these.
