Turning Your Data Into Decision-Ready Info: A New Hire Can’t Do This (& Why)

Quick crash course: Our Core Command Center is a comprehensive dashboard that visualizes a business’s financials, identifies the drivers of those financials, and shows leaders the levers they can pull to effect positive change. 

That is, we build you the BI dashboard you need to make better data-backed decisions. Here’s why hiring a data whiz, or even a data whiz + an ops/finance expert, won’t work in comparison. 

First, you’ll either need to hire a single poet quant, or a team of at least three people. 

1. The Poet Quant 

Wow – you’ve found someone who understands data architecture, query language, business analytics, AND data visualization? That’s rare – and now you’re sitting on a single point of failure. If you’re a cup half full person, then we would ask “What happens when that person hits the lottery, gets an inheritance, or more likely gets offered double to work elsewhere?” If you’re glass half empty, then we ask “What happens when that person gets hit by the beer truck?” 

The point is simple, one rare guru who does all of this is a risk for your business. Not to mention the downsides of having a team-of-1 when it comes to creative problem solving or morale, to name a few. 

2. The Dream Team 

To effectively do what our Core Command Center (C3) does in-house, you’ll need a team of at least three people: the Data Architect/Query Whiz, the Business Analyst, and the Data Visualization Specialist. That means you’ll need to spend time recruiting (including coming up with the job description – What makes a great data architect? What experience should the Data Viz person have?). Next, you’ll need to onboard. Cue payroll, insurance, benefits, and PTO. Next, time to train them up: what is your business designed to do, why should they care, what tools do you have for them that will help? 

Up next, of course, is that a team of 3 experts on 1 project will need some sort of manager – not just a PM, but someone who understands, can help everyone communicate effectively, and keep the project moving forward. Let’s go ahead and assume you have that person in house already, but now they’ll have to dedicate about 50% of their time to this team (they’ll have to set up the working cadence, rules of engagement, dev environment, project management platform; set goals, review performance, conduct check ins, give them a forecast of how much work they’ll have, make sure that they have the tools and equipment they need; ensure they feel like they have a future at your company, have an org chart that can support their growth, have a pipeline of projects for them which has enough work for them to feel challenged but not overwhelmed. Because… you know… they’re people and they deserve to have an environment that supports them, lest they go elsewhere). 

Lastly, the Business Analyst specifically will need to be as versed in sales and marketing as they are in finance and ops. It would be a boost if they were skilled in HR metrics, too. And forecasting. 

So let’s say you’re the best business ever, especially when it comes to hiring the right people and creating a force of happy, productive humans… 

Actionable Business Intelligence still won’t be your core competency. 

Your business will still be primarily designed to do something else: 

• If you’re an Accounting company, then you are experts in GAAP, Sarbox, SEC filings, Tax, and all manner of things that we are not experts in. 

• If you’re a Chemicals/Additives company, then C₆H₁₂O₆ means something to you and people would expect that you can explain it; all we know is that it tastes good. 

Being great at something means that you’re choosing not to be great at billions of other things. That’s smart; that’s “specializing” and when you figure out what you’re good at in life, there are few feelings better. You can compete on your core competency and win. It’s a good day. 

But as we all know, success in one domain doesn’t translate to another. No one would expect Serena Williams to be great at archeology or boxing, or for Toni Morrison to have been great at skiing or physics. You wouldn’t hire your heart surgeon to perform your dentistry, or vice versa. 

Domain expertise is what people in the domain see as common sense: 

I used to work at a Christmas tree farm in rural Pennsylvania. My common sense as part of that team involved: 

• You must walk through the farm quietly first before a shearing day to listen for wasp nests. 
• When in the field, you can use one set of snips to clean and sharpen the other set of snips. 
• WD40 is the best for getting sap off the shears. 
• October is best for pulling pest casings. 
• Blue Spruce is the worst for forearm rash. 
• Plastic bags in your shoes keep your feet warm when it’s sleeting.

… All of this was common sense for us. All of this was the most basic of domain expertise for us on the farm. 

We, as humans, underappreciate the complexities of things we don’t do. 

“Run the numbers and put it in a graph” might as well be “Build a treehouse” — it sounds super simple, but in practice and in the hours upon hours following, it’s not. 

So whether you’re planning to make that single amazing hire, or a dream team to rehaul, optimize, and visualize your entire data ecosystem, these still aren’t THE pros. And it’ll cost you more to do it. 

Don’t make the mistake of trying to do this yourself if you’re not versed in it. Enlist pros, even if it’s not us; just please don’t try to hire your way into this because the punchline is here at the end: 

You’ll spend every penny of $500k/year+ to do this poorly.