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New Feature: Business Case Studies
LET ME SET THE STAGE FOR THIS ARTICLE: THERE IS NOTHING FOR YOU TO BUY HERE! BUT YOU DO WANT TO READ ON BECAUSE IT WILL LIKELY BENEFIT YOUR BUSINESS!
Are you a small- to medium-sized business (SMB) owner who is getting pressured to upgrade your data systems from Excel to some higher-end solution (like Power BI or Tableau, or some other cloud-based service)? If this hasn’t happened yet, it will likely soon. Maybe a salesperson hasn’t hit you up directly, but you’ve already seen ads for loftier business intelligence (BI) platforms.
How Would You Like to Have Your Business Become one of the First Case Studies?
If This Seems Exciting for Your Business, Read On!
The trouble is, you may not yet need these sophisticated BI tools. You have used Excel for most of the years your business has been operating. If you took the bait to implement a new system, you could run into all kinds of situations, irrespective of what any salesperson peddles to you.
High-end solutions have their place, and you may one day be faced with the decision to implement one of these solutions. But if the only motivation to do so is a pushy salesperson, let’s talk first.
Unknown But Powerful Features in Excel
I want to show a select number of small business owners about powerful features in Excel that many SMBs don’t know exist. I propose for free (limited time) to create a dashboard in Excel using these unknown tools that Excel has. I’ll analyze your data, use these features to clean it, and make it ready for analysis. The good news is that, in most cases, you can continue working the way you do. The processes I am proposing are only for the dashboard.
After I set up this spreadsheet for optimal use, I will write a case study that shows how you, the SMB, were able to continue using Excel the way you’ve always been, while this enhanced process within Excel streamlined your analysis.
Do you need to see sales by region? Good to go. Maybe you need to see which salespeople are ahead in a given quarter. Or perhaps you need to compare sales with previous periods.
All these functions can be accomplished in Excel now without any suped-up processes. But what usually takes to get reports like that set up? And even worse, what happens when new regions or new salespeople are added? It can result in extra work that, let’s face it, gets put on the back burner. You’ll get to it on the weekend, you tell yourself. That is, until your spouse hands you the honey-do list. It’s not much different in my house either, just so you know!
AI Can Help, But Doesn’t Know Your Business
AI can help here, to some extent. I just saw the new version of Claude do some amazing things in Excel. But AI engines are not yet sophisticated enough to truly understand your business and its nuances. And these engines don’t really remember what you did last month as well as you’d want them to. You’ll still have to do a fair amount of work to get your data into the proper format.
Don’t get me wrong. These AI engines and Copilots can help when asking questions of your data. They provide sophisticated answers, but often unnecessary ones, too! Keep things simple. You have enough on your plate without adding more to your to-do list.
Next Steps…
If you still have an interest in being one of the first businesses to be profiled as a case study, here’s how it will work.
Proposal:
- You will send me your spreadsheet(s) containing the actual transactions you use in your day-to-day activities, or the data you usually need to piece together at the end of the month (or both). Whatever is needed to put together your reports.
- I will analyze the data and then transform it into a reporting process. This process is recorded almost like a macro, so that each month, as long as there aren’t changes to the data structure, the transformation is automatic.
- I will construct a one to two-page dashboard (the main dashboard and one report). We will work together to find the most relevant assets to include in this dashboard.
- At the end of this process, you will evaluate what I’ve done to see whether it works for your business. If so, we document this (I do most of the work – you just answer my questions and tell me aspects of your business that you’d like to include – if it fits in with the theme of the case study.
What About the Cost to You?
Phase I of my initiative is offering this to a few businesses for free. Both the analysis and the case study. All I ask in return is that you allow me to use an anonymized version of the Excel project for my portfolio. The case study will be available to the general public on my website and a few other strategic placements. Any screenshots I use will be anonymized. In other words, we won’t show your real suppliers, customers, or even your true locations (we can switch them or use ones you don’t use).
We will need to limit the scope of this offering as our schedule is tight for creating the dashboard and the case study. If you’d like to expand the number of reports, we can put together a proposal and discuss the functions and costs with you. We are making this offer to a limited number of business owners, so again, the timeline is really tight on this.
You really have nothing to lose by participating in this. You’ll have a potential for more streamlined reporting, your business will be profiled in the case study, and you won’t pay a single dime for this. Again, all that would be needed is an agreement allowing me to use the anonymized version of the package as part of my outreach to other business owners. The value of this deal is about $4000.
If you like what you see here and feel it could benefit your business, please give me a call or email me (contact info below).
James Cochrane
Phone: (845) 598-5203
Email: case-studies@datasciencereview.com
P.S. This is a limited-time offer. After we receive acceptance from 10 businesses, we will start charging for this service.
About the Author James
James is a data science writer who has several years' experience in writing and technology. He helps others who are trying to break into the technology field like data science. If this is something you've been trying to do, you've come to the right place. You'll find resources to help you accomplish this.
