Insightly_Ep21
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Alyssa: [00:00:00] So, we weren't going to acknowledge this, but I'm going to now that we

said the wrong episode number. If you listened to two episodes ago, or three episodes ago, we said the wrong number. So please, if you're listening, actually, if you're paying attention that closely,

Jordan: You tell us what number of episodes we're on now because we don't know.

Alyssa: Our editor and producer told us this is 21. So now we're set the record straight and won't

Jordan: I hope it's 21 or else Bryan's [00:01:00] gonna have to do some more creative editing

Alyssa: Oh gosh.

Jordan: Thank you, Bryan at Forge Podcast Co.

Alyssa: Yeah. shout out to him dealing with all of us. Okay, no, welcome back to the Insightly podcast. We like to say that we started this podcast to bring our conversations that we were already having behind closed doors to people that dare listen and like to talk about data. where it's headed in the future and the impact it has on businesses.

So if that's something that you enjoy, then you're in the right place. We just spent our last episode talking about the trends and the future of data. And basically what it's come down to is there's no longer data people and not data people. It's. Data is mission critical, as Jordan said. It's becoming table stakes for businesses to be able to operate competitively, honestly.

Or to even maybe dramatically to survive because it's just becoming that integral to a business. So, we're going to continue that [00:02:00] conversation. It's going to be kind of like trends part two, also. What we've appreciated or seen as happening in 2024. So like kind of our key takeaways for this year, any stories that we have, we're just going to roll with the punches on this one.

But I want to start with, do you want to start? You, yours is, you should start.

So

Jordan's going to take, do her key takeaways from this year, or just what she's been enjoying. And then we're going to totally shift gears on mine because

Jordan sees everything through like a marketing lens, and I don't see it through that way.

So you're gonna get two totally different concepts,

Jordan: I like it. I mean, that's why we also paired up to do this because we can come at it from different

angles

as well. So when you asked me the other day if we could talk about our key takeaways, I think I joked with you where I was like, all of a sudden I forgot about anything and everything that I've done over this past year.

But I will say something that has really stood [00:03:00] out to me is when I started Bondfire, Now almost three and a half years ago or so, one of my main driving forces for that is that I was very interested in helping companies not only develop customer centric marketing strategies, but to be able to measure and optimize those marketing strategies.

And when I first started, a lot of the kind of customer or client inquiries that I would get would be things like, Can you help us with our SEO? Can you help us with an advertising campaign? Like, very tactical focused. And that was fine because like, that was kind of a way for me to start to introduce myself.

Customer centricity and the importance of really understanding who our most valuable customers are and How we should engage them more effectively and I wanted to start to kind of take that conversation away from The bells and whistles of marketing like when you think about it a [00:04:00] lot of people like I said They go straight to like, okay Can you help me with my SEO or my social or my website like the tactics and the channels but not the customer Right?

And so when I started, that's what I, I wanted to start helping companies with is let's put the customer at the center of everything. And this year was the year where I feel like All of that has really come together, I mean, part of that's been an evolution of how I talk about it with clients and how, I help educate and introduce concepts, but this year what the, flip of the switch became is that clients started asking me things like, I want to learn more about my customers motivations.

I want to understand their journey with our brand. And these were, concepts that I had not really heard from teams before, but it was like starting to now become more of an interest, and so, when I think about this year, One of the most fun things that I've gotten to do [00:05:00] with nearly every client in our portfolio now is customer journey mapping.

And for those that don't know what customer journey mapping is yet, what it essentially is is a visualization of the interactions and the actions that a customer might take with your brand, your product, your service, whatever. Typically speaking, you'd probably come at it from the perspective of, okay, I have a business scenario or an objective that I want to achieve.

You would identify the right customer segment for that business objective, which takes a little bit of like analyzing data and understanding who are our customer profiles. Who's most valuable to us? Who's the more likely customer segment to engage within this scenario? And then you start to map out what that journey looks like from what is the customer needing, what actions are they taking to identify those needs or to seek out those needs, whether it's with you and or [00:06:00] elsewhere.

What messages or questions or obstacles or challenges are they experiencing? So like, what's the good, what's the bad as a part of that experience? And then as you start to map that out, you can actually start to identify, okay, if these are the steps that they're taking and the ways that they are seeking out these needs, here's where we align.

Here's where we do not align, and so then you can start to identify, what do I need to optimize? What are some new actual tactics that we should put into play? What are pain points that we need to alleviate? What are messages that we should use? When should we use those messages? And it essentially creates kind of that marketing strategy roadmap with measurables.

Along that process, we've also been able to, like, benchmark against their historical data, or if they don't have it, pulling in, more relevant industry level data through competitive analysis, and what I've loved the most about this is that it's blending a lot of [00:07:00] different data sets, Even though like the core focus is still sales and marketing, it's helping the marketing teams bridge that gap between business objectives and being able to say, if this is our objective, here's how we know we can tackle that.

Here are the actions that we can go ahead and create now to optimize that for success. Here's what we anticipate those outcomes to be. And then as you continue to optimize, if you have other objectives that are very similar with a similar profile, now you've also kind of got a formula. of how you can just stand up a new campaign or a new initiative fairly quickly.

I love everything about this, because, like I said, it blends a lot of different data sets that I get to play in. It's Very collaborative, a lot of it is, like, in the beginning I'm doing a lot of workshops with these teams and we're, like, pulling together, like, multidisciplinary teams, not just the marketing team.

To, like, even start from the base level of, okay, here's our [00:08:00] objective, what are we trying to accomplish? Who is going to help us get there? Which customers will help us get there? So then I'm getting, what they internally believe. And then we go and test that against, okay, well now let's go and analyze.

If we believe this customer segment is the best one, let's start to analyze and see, okay, well who's actually most profitable?

Alyssa: Do they, have you gotten to pull in financials to look at, the ICP in terms of like revenue concentration.

Jordan: Yeah and it kind of depends on how quickly the client needs to get a roadmap it kind of depends on what their objective is in some cases we're purely just looking at it from how our brand interacts with our customers to more specific and the more specific that we get the more that the Revenue and the transactional side of the business has to come into play because if you're trying to figure out we've got this service that's kind of like a DIY [00:09:00] service, who are the customer segments that, are more likely to take on that service, but then if you're like, okay, well, what's the nurture and the retention piece of it?

Who's most likely to continue forward with maybe some like customized experiences or services with you? And you'd have to go the financial route to understand what that looks like from a longevity perspective, but also what services are those? What's like the starting point? What's the journey from there?

What product or service do they begin with before they get to that

Alyssa: Yeah, that's super

Jordan: And I think it's what I love about it is that it's helping the marketing teams or the development teams kind of go back to the executive level and have like a concrete plan of if they don't have the budget to execute.

It gives them kind of that background of this is why I'm asking for the budget or this is what we're trying to achieve but, you know, our website is not conducive [00:10:00] for this kind of lead generation or for this experience that our customers are actually looking for. Like, this is why we have to update it.

Alyssa: This is like,

data first marketing.

Jordan: hmm.

Alyssa: I mean, I know that's always been kind of your shtick, anyway. But that's kind of like what comes to mind, is like, you've said typically people start with the tactics, right?

It's like, help us with our website! Or just have these ideas, like, it's going to give them some kind of instant gratification or also like their pipeline is going to

Jordan: well I think the marketing advertising industry did it to marketers.

Like, we are so inundated with like, here's the latest TikTok thing, or here's a new social media channel that just came out. Like, the number of businesses that I'm seeing hop on Blue Sky now because that's like becoming all the rage again.

I don't even know what that is.

So it's another social media platform that like, has been around for a while, but people are leaving X.

And wanting a different place to go for like a Twitter like experience and Blue Sky is, it's like a [00:11:00] thread, it's like everything that's already friggin out there. But but the point that I'm trying to make is that's a prime example of a lot of companies are like, okay, well Twitter or X or whatever is not the brand environment that we want to be on anymore.

So we're going to hop on Blue Sky. But then my question becomes, like, well, are your customers there? Like, if your customers are already on Facebook and Instagram, just be there and just do it really, really well, instead of fragmenting yourself in so many places. Yeah.

Yeah, and the industry has done that to us and like customer journey mapping is another way to kind of say like You don't have to be in all of the places and spaces like typically speaking Yeah, you're gonna need some good SEO so that you're found, you know Which goes back to your website or your app and your content marketing.

Yes, but if You only have limited capacity if through the journey you [00:12:00] see I don't know. Website, search, video, and Facebook are like the top four areas that people are leaning in. Do those things really, really well and expand beyond that from there. Fragmentation is such a problem in marketing because there's so many different places and spaces that we're all in as consumers that the industry almost makes us feel like we have to be in all of those places, but the journey mapping process helps us identify like what's kind of a passive space for this customer segment versus what is an engagement space like that they're actually like leaning into and that they're actually like taking action from rather than a space that might just be like a drive by billboard for them.

Alyssa: Right. I just appreciate that, like, data first, tactics second,

because if you're, you know, everyone's asked the question, like, oh, what's gonna be the ROI on,

[00:13:00] like,

marketing spend, you know?

It's like, that's the ultimate thing. It's like, you know, what are we getting for these ads? I'm like, if you're so concerned about that, like, why are you not doing something like a customer journey mapping prior to spending all your money on maybe these channels that they're not even, they're passively in?

Jordan: Well, and I think even to that point, I mean, marketing ROI, that's, unless you can measure an activity against a direct conversion. You're probably not like, I mean, that's very hard to do when marketing and advertising is behavioral. And this is something that I also talk about a lot in customer journey mapping is that this is how we make sure that empathy doesn't get taken out of marketing.

Because sometimes if you're only purely going after like the tactical side, then you're just trying to hop on whatever trend exists, right? The other side of it is if you're so focused on the data, you can forget about the customer being a human, and messaging and creative [00:14:00] is important in that realm of things.

And so, in the customer journey map, you can actually benchmark, okay, what is more of an awareness tactic are we getting them top of funnel to where they're at least in our network now? What is an engagement result that we expect? What do we expect from these engagements? Cool, we're getting followers and likes and views, but then from there, what are we hoping to capture and, you know, help them?

How are we using those platforms to get them to the next step for a purchase or a retention or, you know, something like that? In the last episode we talked about media mix modeling. This is a perfect example where media mix modeling next to your benchmarks and your KPIs like journey mapping gives you those benchmarks and those KPIs so that you can measure is this moving in the direction that we need it to move like if these behaviors are happening which kind of goes to like the engagement point system like that we [00:15:00] might put together within.

You know, a data visualization, right? Like, if these behaviors are occurring, what of those behaviors start to show us that they're more likely to purchase? So, this is the snapshot in time right now as the campaign is going. Media mix modeling, then all of that funnels up to where then you can actually say, Is, you know, TV may not give you that direct, I got a sale off of a TV ad.

Very difficult to achieve or to measure, right? But within it, if you can show how that awareness has led into the behaviors, now you can forecast whether or not the immense amount of dollars that you've put into TV time or streaming video or streaming radio or something like that is valuable use of media spend or

not.

Alyssa: Yeah.

Jordan: That's the coolest thing

I've done this year.

Alyssa: Wow. Okay well one thing that I actually wanted to mention in the last episode but it goes into this, and I'll just mention briefly and then I'll do my favorite takeaway. Okay. So I was thinking [00:16:00] about how, speaking of like content marketing, I just feel like one of the things I'm gonna see in the future, and I've seen some this year, is focused, data driven.

Storytelling content.

Jordan: Mm-Hmm.

Alyssa: And what I mean by that, it's not necessarily from a company perspective. It's from like a personal brand representing a company perspective.

So, you know, most small businesses small to medium sized businesses, like

everyone will tell you, like the company page on LinkedIn is really just for awareness.

Like no one

Jordan: Yeah, your personal posts are going to get so

much

more

Alyssa: And LinkedIn,

I think. So it's like kind of made for that. So there's always gonna be like kind of a person or people representing the organization that's trying to put out, thought leadership content and just be

someone that is attracting people to the company, stuff like that.

And I like, I scroll through there and I can see like, that was written with AI,

that was written with AI. like,

where's the organic [00:17:00] content that is actually

Jordan: I

Alyssa: And then I started to think about, like, data actually plays a key role in that because when you're telling stories and you can talk about your customers, you can talk about case studies or use cases or scenarios or whatever it may be and it's like data or like what happened. They went from this to this.

Typically in the industry, we see this and this, and then this, you know, happens. Like, if you can integrate data into that, that's going to be the content that's going to cut through the

noise.

~Yeah. So that's like one thing that's kind of like trend and future, or ~

Jordan: ~like one thing that's kind of like trend and future, or?~

That puts it in the perspective of, I've been there, I've experienced this, I work alongside people just like you, here's a scenario of how that happened.

When we're customer journey mapping, we're identifying what are the motivations that the customer needs at that point in time. And so let's say that we identified that LinkedIn is a really good channel for that interest to consideration.

portion of the funnel and they have these specific motivations, then [00:18:00] beyond that in some of the messaging analysis that I do in competitive analysis, I pull like, how are the different, competitors speaking to their clients? How are their clients responding to it in the chatter? Then what, how do they want, like, what's the tone of voice that they want to be spoken to in?

And so I'll give an example of. And sometimes like B2B arenas, we try to be very professional and kind of stagnant in the way that we explain things. And that's where the AI social media content is kind of feeling. It's just like robotic you're just telling me things, but you're not giving me the emotion that I'm looking for.

Like I need to be inspired, I need to be motivated, I need to think critically, When we're performing our messaging like analysis within competitive analysis, that's what we're looking for is what is that emotional state that the customer might be in, in that stage. [00:19:00] So then when you create content or you work with the sales team to say, okay, I'm going to build you a calendar of like what to talk about and when, and I'll give you some guidance, but, or if you want me to write it ghost, write it or whatever for you, I can, but this is the tone of voice that we're going to use.

Then you're now like a lot more relevant to who you're targeting.

Alyssa: I've only seen that in like anecdotally, so like my own content. I just see the engagement. Well, I write all my own, my own content. So I don't use AI because I'm like, it also just uses such, like,

Jordan: it never sounds like me. ~And so I don't ~

~want ~

Alyssa: ~it. ~

Yeah. Like I'm trying to like put myself out there authentically,

you know? Mm-Hmm.

But anyway, I have seen even. Like the, the content that is more personal and even on LinkedIn, like more personal, but it's still like business y gets so much more engagement. Like anything that's just like a story or straight from like me, myself and my experiences gets like, and then something that I think is like interesting, but it's [00:20:00] maybe more like professional is like, okay, 10

people liked that, you know?

So that's not date, like that's anecdotal. I'm just my own, like.

Jordan: I see that quite a bit though, and then like you start getting into like, okay well how long of a story do you tell on each of the platforms? And so that's when like it starts to become a little, the scientific angle of it almost kind of takes the fun out of it a little bit when you feel like you have like guardrails.

But that's why Influencer marketing works so well because it's another person who tried this thing or did this thing or learned this thing is now telling me about it. I'd much rather hear it from a peer. Or, you know, somebody like that, then I want to hear from a company.

And so, that messaging sentiment and messaging analysis, like, is super important in order to know, like, Okay, well, what kind of story should I be telling? How should I be telling it? What are the key factors that might [00:21:00] be necessary, like, so I don't write a novel? Because that's what I'm

Alyssa: what I'm guilty of. Yeah, yeah, or a rant on my case. Sometimes I get on there and I'm just like, oh that was a huge rant. Okay~ okay, I ~

~don't think What's your ~

Well, I don't know if we have time to go into it, but I'll give a, a teaser and then maybe we can do like a more in depth episode about it.

Okay. So my thing is totally, you know, different, but we started recently, or the past, I guess, year or two, working with a lot more businesses and people within the M& A space, so mergers and acquisitions, which basically means buying and selling companies, for the layman's terms. But at M& A, I'm like, no one really does mergers anymore, but it's fine.

So we kind of figured this out because the companies we were working with, like just owner operated middle market companies, started getting interested in either growing through acquisition or being prepared to or having the option to sell.

[00:22:00] But then what we found was that data plays such a pivotal role in that process, or at least having the options to pursue what an acquisition or sale, giving you flexibility and like leverage, honestly.

So the way that a lot of times when you sell a company, it works is that in different industries, there's different multiples.

So you have like EBITDA, which is like earnings. Times a multiple, which is how you get the value of the sale.

So,

You can increase your value by increasing EBITDA. The multiple, and you can have a higher multiple if certain factors are true. Some of it's limited to industry, but we started seeing that data was, on the front end, allowing companies to strategically grow revenue or reduce cost.

Growing Evita, right? And that just could affect their multiple and actually directly affect their valuation. And so then on the flip side too, like there's a whole due diligence process. You have to go through, basically like a huge audit. [00:23:00] They look at everything in your business.

But normally what happens is that the company provides just like raw data from the past, like three to five years. It gives it over to either their broker that provides to the buyers,

but what happens is that you lose control over like how it's presented, what story it's telling.

There's just some maybe lack of confidence that comes when it's just like, they don't really know anything about their data. Their data is a mess. And like, what else are we going to find

when we get into the company? So the buyers go through this huge, long due diligence

process.

~Sometimes just to say.~

~It's almost~

Jordan: it's almost like if your curb appeal is off and you're trying to sell your house, then you don't actually want to see like, okay, if this is what we're dealing with outside, what am I gonna find

inside? Yeah.

Alyssa: ~It's ~

~literally like~

~that. crazy. ~

~I like ~

Jordan: ~it.~

So

Alyssa: we have a client that we worked with them for a couple of years, and they started contemplating a sale, and the owner was very proactive and very forward thinking, and he started putting together what we're kind of I'm coining this term of [00:24:00] quality of revenue, so you have this revenue number, like what's under the covers, right?

It's the things we talk about, it's products, it's customer base, it's customer lifetime value, it's churn, it's your customer product mix, it's seasonality, and so some of those things, Could be easily say like great you have 10 million in revenue, but like your revenue quality actually sucks

Jordan: Yeah.

Alyssa: Because it's based on these two huge customers

Jordan: it's not sustainable, it's not, yeah.

Alyssa: And they're only buying this one product that's a huge risk for the buyer

Jordan: Yeah, and I mean I think of like scenarios where, you hear about company acquisitions, and then you start uncovering layers of the onion, and you find this was not at all what they said it was, or, like, I had no idea, I mean, in some cases, all you're looking at is, trying to make sure, there isn't a lien on anything, or, you're not being sued currently for anything, but to have, that data [00:25:00] package to also be able to see how sustainable is this, how efficient is this, what upgrades are we gonna have to make, you're now evaluating not only their value but also planning like what further investments are you going to have to make to either improve some

Alyssa: yeah which in this space there when they see something they're going to have to pay for they start asking for what i think legally is called discounts. which so like the discounts would come off the sale price where they're like Hey, like, your data quality sucks.

Or like, you know, your tech stack is old and we're gonna have to do a data migration to a new tech

stack. You know, you start discounting, hun, I mean, that's hundreds of thousands of dollars that they would have to invest into that, that they're taking off of your top line sale. And so presenting the data to say, our revenue's diversified, it's recurring in this format.

We're not heavily dependent or concentrated in this industry or this product or this Type of customer or this cohort [00:26:00] It just it's a it's a one page or multiple page report to say here you go buyer

Jordan: Yeah.

Alyssa: Imagine being the buyer and say oh

You know, like I don't feel like I have you know that many more questions like I could

Jordan: It's like a Carfax report,

Alyssa: Right.

Yeah,

you're like, you feel confident. So it's like a win win on the seller side. They get a higher valuation. They get less stressful sale process.

You know, they get what they want and then the buyer also, you know, not only do they get confidence at the sale, but they can also start to see opportunity and a future for how to optimize and grow and oh, we're gonna press the gas on

this piece.

And so we've started kind of Playing in that space like a lot more and I just feel like Just like data is the future of the operating business and how they're gonna grow It's the undergirding future of The M& A community in a lot of different ways too But it's for the [00:27:00] same

Jordan: Yeah, I love that and it goes back to what we were talking about in our last episode on the trends as well of like this is a great case scenario for why Your data infrastructure, your data cleanliness. Data accessibility and democracy, like this is all mission critical, like whether you're wanting to grow your business, whether you're wanting to make certain things more efficient or more strategic internally, or whether you're looking at your 3 to 5 to 10 year plan on maybe it's part of your exit strategy that you want to sell the business or whatever.

Err. at some point, now is the right time to start evaluating, like, okay, what data do you have? If you're in kind of that, exploration mode, do people call you and, you guys audit, like, here's what you've got, here's what to plan for, or, like, what would that step look like?

Alyssa: That's kind of where we

start, is, like, Let's look at your tech stack, let's look at your data, let's look [00:28:00] at, you know, what opportunities you have, and again, what's the first

bite?

What's

the

biggest win for you right now? And if they're, I mean, it's different if they're like, hey, we want to, we know we want to sell in two years. That's a totally different conversation than, you know, Hey, we want the optionality and the freedom

if we want to sell in five or ten

years.

Jordan: Yeah.

Alyssa: Whereas most people are like, well, we're never going to sell.

~I'm ~

Jordan: ~Yeah. But you don't ~

never say never, honestly.

Alyssa: You don't know what's going to happen. ~Yeah. And ~

~you could just need it. ~And that's the thing. People get to a point like, oh, I just want the money. Like I just want a payday and I want to leave and quit and do my own thing. But you're getting significantly less because you're rushing that.

And you just made the decision just because it's the same thing with planning for retirement or planning for

your financial future. All of us want freedom and options, right? And I think that data is a huge piece of the business side of that, that gives you freedom and options for the future of your business.

Jordan: Something that also makes me think of, and this could be maybe a silly. Thought, but okay. If this is [00:29:00] really what you're seeing, like trend a lot higher in the M& A space. Okay. Well, maybe you are that kind of company that's like, well, I don't think I'm ever going to sell or whatever. However, maybe you're looking at, business loans or other things, like, if you're going to, a bank for a loan because you're wanting to expand maybe you're building on a new expansion to your company or you want to invest in a new product and service, a lot of this information, could also be very valuable to go and pitch to, the business bank to say, this is why we're good for.

That return

on

Alyssa: it's like,

to

a banker, to a private investor,

to anyone that's going to give you any kind of money.

I mean, it's

a good thing to have. But also I think about this scenario where, let's say that you're a target, Ford Acquisition, let's say a bigger strategic company comes and says hey, you know, we want to buy you and The price is right and you're just like, you know, you [00:30:00] don't know what that day's gonna

Jordan: Yeah.

Alyssa: I'm not saying that you have to have all the quality

Jordan: Price may be right, but if you already had all this, like, infrastructure in place as well, to where you could also evaluate it, like, maybe the price looks good, but then based on, like, your data quality, or quality of revenue, I think is what you called it, like, maybe based on that, you can actually go and negotiate and say, if you really want us, it's gonna be another 30 million or whatever on top of that because of X, Y, and

Z.

I mean of

course everybody wants to like pitch the, the rate that they're just, yeah. What about this

number?

Alyssa: number? That

Jordan: number is never the first or the last number though.

Alyssa: last number, though. Has, like, you know the numbers, and you also know the opportunities. You can come to the table and say, Hey, we know, because we've done predictive analytics, and, or forecasting, like, we know that our revenue is trending to this.

We know that there's opportunity for this new segment, this new product, this new whatever. [00:31:00] Because that's the case,

now we have leverage to say, We see these opportunities in our own business, and we're going to capitalize on them, but if you want to buy us We need a premium price for what the, we see the future of this company being.

Yeah. But if you don't know your own numbers and you don't have that data, like you don't have, you're not army yourself with that. Yeah. There's no way to be able to clearly communicate or past that to someone

Jordan: Yeah.

Alyssa: I mean, you go into meetings every day, you don't know what's gonna be behind that door.

Jordan: You know, you just struck another thought, too. Like, I mean, this is incredibly valuable when you're going and trying to find, like, partnerships or even trying to win big deals with companies. So, like, an example that I'm thinking of, and this actually happened a few years ago, but there was a aircraft manufacturing company that focuses on very specific parts for commercial aircraft.

And for those that don't know, we're based in Wichita, Kansas, affectionately called the air capital of the world. So we make a lot of [00:32:00] planes here. You're welcome. But anyway, this company made parts, very specific parts for commercial aircraft, and they were starting to evaluate because it was around like the pandemic time frame, and of course, like, everything got wonky during that time frame.

But they were trying to evaluate, okay, we've got this huge manufacturing space, and I don't remember the numbers, but let's just say 60 percent of it is being utilized to manufacture these core parts as a part of our product portfolio. We've got 40 percent space available. What are we going to do with it?

And so the owner was starting to explore and like really kind of analyze like what could we do that would be a really, you know, good opportunity for us. But using like some forecasting and also like some environmental like trends that are going on in other industries, something that they identified is, well, microchips are a big deal. They're all pretty much manufactured [00:33:00] overseas. What if we could use our space to actually start doing some research and development on, could we be a microchip, like, manufacturer? Not really an aviation focus, really. I mean, there's microchips in literally everything now, so yes, it could be applicable to the industry still.

But, when you're, making bolts and panels and things and all of a sudden it's like microchips. That could be a really nerdy, interesting hunch if you don't have the data to show like, okay, based on where we're at right now, can we weather the expense for research and development? Does this help us maximize

our,

Manufacturing plant?

Like when would we get a return? What does that process look like? All of those kinds of things. And so where I'm going with this is. Take that kind of scenario, you've run the numbers, now you have forecasts, you have the customer, you know, database and the metrics to kind of prove. If you're going to go to a company and say we want to be your microchip [00:34:00] manufacturer when there's all these other big dogs already out there, that, it's not like, if you're going to go in and pitch the work, all of this background research and analysis that you've just done can help you show why you're the better pick

to

make that happen.

Alyssa: Well, what that like, the underlying lesson to me in that is it enables agility.

Jordan: Yeah.

Alyssa: Is like, we have this hudge, or this idea, or you know, we are, we could just. Data enables agility. Like, I'm just gonna utilize that phrase because you can quickly

pivot. You can quickly suss out whether or not an idea is good or not.

You can start to build scenarios. You can do, we call it like, what if modeling. So, like, basically overlay

a

what

if

scenario

on top of what's currently existing. So, like, you can do that with the

expenses. Like,

here's

our current expense load. Can we weather an R& D, you know, type of initiative? You start to what if scenario build.

You [00:35:00] start to forecast like, if we did this, I mean, you have, you'd have to look at current financials, current utilization, you know, forecasting that out. Is it going to be worth it? You know, like, is there going to be a potential, like major upside for us? that just gives you so much flexibility and so much agility,

but like what I think sometimes people get stuck in like the here and now.

So it's like, I need to just make my business work here and now. I need to think about my expenses here and now, and my investment and my time. And they're just so

focused in on that instead of thinking long term, big picture you know, what could I do if I had all of this, these numbers and analysis at my fingertips to know that I'm no longer going to make these, you know, my, my decisions.

Not all of them, even data backed, are going to be perfect, but at least I have, you know, very substantial information to go off of.

Jordan: go

Alyssa: so I mean, if that's not a competitive advantage, I don't

Jordan: mean, if [00:36:00] that's not a competitive advantage, I don't know what is.

In front of you. And so again, like it doesn't matter if you're, you know, looking at a potential acquisition or selling at some point, it doesn't matter if you're purely in business growth stage, it doesn't really matter if you're just, I've got to keep eye on the prize right now. It makes sense to make sure that you have like the data dashboards that you need to be able to forecast, to be able to predict. I love the what if modeling. Like, I mean, we could probably do a whole. Scenario episode sometime because my brain started turning on like, well, if I had that kind of information, this is how you would know, like, how to market or what like products and services you needed to ramp up to help, like, maybe weather some of that storm or, you know, there's a lot of opportunity that takes it from just like that forecasting and the what if down to, well, how does that now affect every department and the objectives that we [00:37:00] all need to achieve to help make this.

Alyssa: possible.

Yeah. So what I'm taking from this is what we kind of land on every episode. Which is it's not too late to start and it's in your best, in the business's best interest to start now just One bite at a time. because you're gonna be at a point where you're like so you know innovative and flexible and agile and it took, you know, a little bit of time and a little bit of money to get to the point where your data was, you know, accessible and ready to use.

And

then you have all this freedom

to do whatever, you know, the business

Jordan: You can start dreaming. start dreaming. Stop dreaming.

Yes. There we

go. Insightly

hot

take of the day. Yeah.

Alyssa: Yeah. Alright, we'll wrap up there. If you liked this content and you want to hear more of it, please subscribe.

That's going to be the most helpful thing to get our name and our podcast out there. Share with friends and as soon as you hit the subscribe button, then you'll get notifications when we have new [00:38:00] episodes. And we'd also love to hear from you. So please comment or reach out to us if you, anything comes to mind.

You can also find us on LinkedIn and us personally on LinkedIn, which our links will be in the show notes. All that to say connect with us, follow along. We'll be doing a lot more fun data episodes in 2025.

And this is our last episode of

2025.

Jordan: so we'll see you after the new year, everyone.

Alyssa: Yeah,

Jordan: well,

Alyssa: you in

2025.

Jordan: ha