Jet fuel or system failure

Within the first few minutes on the phone with a potential client, I usually land on some form of this question:

“Why are we talking today?”

That gets to the heart of things pretty quickly. Why are we talking today instead of 6 months ago or 6 months from now? What about your business or data has landed you here?

One theme pops up regularly.

Growth.

Prospect from two months ago: “We are going to grow 3-4x in the next 2 years”.

Prospect from three weeks ago: “Our assets under management are 10 times what they were a year ago”.

Prospect from last week: “We expect to grow 25-30% each year for the next 4-5 years”.

We always stop for a moment and just applaud that progress or trajectory.

Then I return to the same question. “Why are we talking today?” What does business growth have to do with this conversation?

Then we usually hit gold.

“Our data system is beginning to crack under our rapid growth. We are seeing more production failures”

“With the growth ahead we expect a large increase in data requests from new business units. Our team and processes aren’t ready for that”

“We are growing fast, and we have no idea how to leverage data to help us. We are reaching a breaking point”.

Growth is great. But growth has growing pains. And growth exposes weaknesses and flaws.

If you are on a rocket ship of growth, data can be jet fuel or a system failure.

If you are growing and need ideas

for making data into jet fuel

hit reply.

I’m here,

Sawyer