Founders and Entrepreneurs Perspective on Analytics
Created on 2020-07-23 07:39
Published on 2020-07-23 09:49
Analytics is frequently used by different stakeholder in different context and means differently.
The core of entrepreneurship is solving the problems of society and leadership has a lot of role in it. So while claiming that analytics have evolved to solve most of the problems, an attempt is made to solve each and every problem of entrepreneurship. This has created toughest questions for example how much poverty is reduced by using analytics? how many NPAs are eliminated or converted in viable businesses? Why 90-95% failure is happening in startups? Why fortune 500 companies' age has come down to 20 years from 60 years when almost every leading analytics service provider claim them as their client whose problems are solved by analytics? So while there is no denial about ability of analytics to solve problems, we all know it cannot solve all problems. This article is an attempt to help CEO, CFO , CIO, Business Planners, data science players to understand the perspectives of the core problem solvers i.e. founders and entrepreneurs.
Founders found a startup which is yet to start or yet to prove commercial success, generally 1000 days is a startup's maximum age. Entrepreneurs are those founders who have passed the phase of startup. Both has different challenges and hence both have different perspectives. The age of big data, cloud, analytics has solved problems but circumstances created more problems and is continuously creating more problems. Founders and entrepreneurs need to understand what their perspective is and how to take the best out of analytics. All data science players as well need to understand these perspectives to ensure that knowledge is power that can drive businesses. Analytics is both solving a problem now as well as creating process that can build on earlier solutions e.g AI, Ml, DL.
The Analytics flow from Data to information then to intelligence. Let us see perspectives of major stakeholders
- Founders Perspectives: Founders try to solve a problem from which a sustainable venture can be created. The biggest challenge here is getting data and second biggest challenge is filtering right data from it. Most startups fail at this stage because they skip the data and jump to information available online which is always biased by content writer. Removing the bias from information is bigger challenge as most of the time people creating online/print content comes from organized sectors. Founders who try to find opportunities in unorganized or less organized sector, are fascinated by such information without sanitizing the information based on reasonable factual sample data. For example get rich in 5 days.., master sales in 60 minutes , this industry sector growing at 15% CAGR, such products market is growing at 20% etc. Tip to Founders: Get hard facts from right people from relevant target market. Take one hour consultation of CFO Services to define the assumptions for your business model then consult good data analytics.
- Entrepreneurs Perspective: For them driver for analytics is internal challenges or external challenges and are constrained by size of business and quality of entrepreneurship. While data is available here the completeness and quality is great challenge.
a. Companies having CEO and staff size of less than 10 have data in unorganized and unstructured, the problems too are not well defined. Most of CEOs here are founders and owners, business models appear simple but execution is complicated by quality of entrepreneur as well as by size of business to hire quality analytics. Majority of MSMEs fall in this category in India. Problems are mostly focused on sales, lead generation and conversion, finding joint promotion opportunities etc.
b. Companies with CEO and staff size above 10 but less than 100 have some structured data mostly from accounting software and rest mostly from mobile, emails, social media, word, excel files etc. Here analytics is expected to solve internal as well as external problems. Unstructured data can be organized. Analytics may start slow but can become regular feature .
c. Companies with CEO and staff size above 100 may have their team of CFO, IT, Sales etc. High availability of structured data, possibility to bring unstructured data, teams are more familiar with information, analysis but want to either improve it or automate it. Functional teams are stakeholders.
Tip: For a type companies, it is better to consult CFO services having analytics background to optimize cost, time and benefit of solution. For b type companies take consultation of CFO services to define problem and formulate plan to prepare data set and then hire data analytics provider. For c type companies, entrepreneurs have their internal team to implement analytics but may not have sufficient skill set or entrepreneurs want to bring fresh insight on the possibilities or want to outsource analytics for strategic reasons. Here hiring CFO services with analytics background to support CEOs on strategic initiatives can add a lot of value.
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