Jay Sachetti joined Jeff O’Brien, partner at Husch Blackwell and Dyanne Ross-Hanson, president of Exit Planning Strategies talked about the market for mergers and acquisitions, exit planning opportunities for companies that don’t end up for sale and how companies can maximize their eventual sale price during an early October panel at the first Upsize on Tap event at Summit Brewing Co. in St. Paul.
When the state Legislature passed a law requiring employers to provide paid leave and safe time for employees, Justin Bieganek started hearing differing details from friends, colleagues and peers.
When Richfield-based NearestYou was just starting out, Ryan Furness and his then-business partner decided they just wanted to help people figure out their local dining options.
“We wanted to build this great website so you could discover all these local products,” Furness says. “We were just building a directory. We wanted to build an app. We wanted to do something that would just support local food and beverage companies.”
But as they got into the business, they discovered that with the right data they could turn their idea into something considerably bigger.
“We needed the data for us to be able to thrive,” he says. “We needed to understand the data to better serve our customers. … As we started to grow we started to realize that data is where it’s at. We needed the data in order to thrive and we needed to understand the data in order to better serve our customers.”
In the time since, NearestYou has started evolving into a multi-purpose business serving multiple clients. First, it’s a traditional store locator software service. It creates and manages the maps for a client list that includes local breweries like Sociable Cider Werks, Burning Brothers Brewing, Lake Monster Brewing, Lakes & Legends Brewing Co. and others.
“If you want to find those companies’ products outside their taprooms and brewpubs, go to their websites and click on their locator map,” Furness says, adding that such pages are rarely updated and often out of date.
“You can go to their site and click on the map and find where they are in restaurants, liquor stores and bars. We’re the ones that create that and then we manage it for those companies. We take in their data from their wholesale account lists and make sure it’s up to date.”
Secondarily, NearestYou is aggregating the brewery, distillery and cider clients it works with onto a single directory website where consumers can go find local brands in their local area.
“You, as a consumer, can go and say ‘I want to find craft beer, I want to find craft spirits, near where I am right now. What brands are there in the area and where can I go to test them out?’” he says. “It’s a discovery platform for people who want to try craft beverages.”
Furness’s partner has moved on from the company. For the last year, NearestYou has worked with Dennis Still, founder of Bigfoot Analytics. Still reached out to Furness and helped him become more skilled in its handling of data
The move helped deepen the store locator information. Now, for example, when there are clicks on one of its client’s maps, there also is tracking information that allows NearestYou to provide real-time information back to them. It also can do more nuanced research for clients on a granular level.
For example, the company launched a beer finder for one local company’s seasonal beer. We will track how consumers are using that locator and provide that insight back to the client.
“You had 50 clicks on this liquor store in south Minneapolis, I bet your beer is sold out over there,” Furness says. “Sure enough, the following week they followed up and the beer was out of stock. So, they got their distributor over there and saved some sales. That’s a way the data went from ‘we don’t know exactly how people are using this to let’s track all this stuff, let’s make sure we know how people are using the locator and provide the insights back to the brands.’”
Still grew up in Montana and his grandmother had a local store. It showed him early the importance of understanding customers. To this day, he says, he likes working with small businesses to help them figure out their needs and the best strategies for getting there.
“Even if they are using free tools like Google Analytics, they are willing to listen,” he says, adding that they realize “if we are going to grow bigger, we have to look at what this is going to look like two years down the road.”
The technology has gotten fairly straightforward, at least at the low level. Google Analytics is on probably around 95 percent of websites to collect user data, he says.
Stepping it up a notch, some companies use different strategies for collecting customer information to help them analyze what their consumers are seeking.
A customer relationship management program like Salesforce is among the more sophisticated tools for capturing that data, but as long as the data is analyzed properly, simple old-school strategies like surveys can help.
Outside of information businesses create themselves, he adds, U.S. Census data centered around zip code research is readily available and can potentially be used to advance a company’s decision-making. Still and other industry experts say other data can be mined from social media interactions and many other sources.
“Anywhere you can find places to collect information about customers is really valuable,” Still says.
Still, he says, it doesn’t matter the size, businesses have been struggling with misusing or incorrectly collecting data as long as it has existed. He’s worked with sophisticated large companies that have had to virtually start over after years of mistakes.
“Their data has been so bad for so long,” he says, “Once it starts to compound, you lose the ability to make sense of data. You have a whole bunch of bad data versus small amounts of good data.”
Still cautions, however, against blindly collecting data just for the sake of doing so.
“The balance of this data and analytics is, it should be trying to help answer questions you have about your business, “If you are spending all your time running it, it’s hard to think about what those questions are.”
So, start small. Google Analytics or, Still recommends, Google Tag Manager as a good place to start. Figure out a handful of things you want to track that will help run the business. “Think about the metrics you need that would help the business grow,” he says. “The reality is a lot of businesses don’t need big data when they start.”
Digital marketing consultant Hilary LeBon suggests starting small.
When she first meets a client they typically talk about business objectives, opportunities and challenges. They’ll then start with a test campaign, aimed at making sure the proper tracking is taking place on a small scale. Then they’ll expand.
That’s a more calculated approach than that taken by firms who collect data for the sake of doing so or that they don’t know how to interpret.
“I think a lot of people have a lot of data they don’t know what to do with and don’t know how to look at it and don’t know how to use it or how to get insights from the data they already have,” she says.
They also have set up campaigns without carefully setting up objectives and tracking to measure the things that are important “you may get some data, but it may not be relevant to what you are trying to accomplish with a campaign,” she says.
When collected and used correctly, data can be hugely valuable. She worked with one restaurant chain to use sales data to identify 10 locations that were underperforming during the lunch rush. Using the data, the company bought banner and social media advertisements, timing them to reach a targeted market in the mid-morning before lunch. In the days ahead, those underperforming locations “saw a lift in business,” she says. There are countless examples like that one.
“The challenge is connecting the dots,” she says.
Dave Mathias, CEO and founder of Beyond the Data, is also a data fluency coach. He works with for-profits and nonprofits, large companies and small.
“Every business could be using data,” he says. “I don’t care if it’s business, nonprofit, government, small or large. The question becomes in what capacity to use the data.”
And most are, though they often need some coaching on how to do it right. Instead of thinking big right off the bat, he agrees they should focus on figuring out exactly what problem you are trying to solve. For restaurants, it could be optimizing their menu items. One nonprofit he works with narrowed it down to finding modern ways to use the data so it could better serve its constituents, from its board to its donors and volunteers.
“Understand the problem you’re trying to solve. What’s your pain point? And then say ‘how do I use data to make a better decision,’” he says. “That’s what data is for.”
Some businesses seem to find the concept intimidating. Often they’ll hire a consultant. There are times that might make sense, but Mathias says often it’s not necessary.
“The first instinct is ‘I can’t do this because I have no skills in this area,’” he says. “Often times, you know your business well. Some of these things aren’t as hard as they make them out to be.”
One caveat: If businesses are going to go to the work of collecting the data, they also need to trust their findings and realize practices they’ve employed for years might not be the best ones.
“They have so much experience in how it’s been done in the past,” he says. “Do you really want to use data to better inform your decisions. Are you willing to look at things differently?”
Mathias does less implementing of data strategies with companies than he does educating organizations on how they can better do the data research themselves. If a company is trying to create a complex pricing model, sure, he says. Hire a consultant. “But that doesn’t mean,” he says, “they wouldn’t want to do a lot of other things in house.”
A lot of times businesses have one or two younger, curious staff members who might be interested in exploring some of the data analytics research as part of their role. If not, Mathias says, there are a lot of networking groups in the Twin Cities where entrepreneurs can get in touch with people who can help them figure out how to work with data themselves.
“I see more small business owners doing this,” he says. “There are a lot of ways to get that knowledge.”
NearestYou’s future took off upon its realization that data was the key to its future. The company is still tweaking its product. It’s a self-funded entity with Furness and a handful of workers currently on contract. The company is still working to add as many craft beverage and food companies as clients, fine-tuning what analytics reports and services it will offer and how much to charge.
Over the long haul, he sees a huge market that spans the country’s 1,500 craft distilleries, 7,000 breweries and 600 cideries. If Furness and his team can convince a portion of them to give NearestYou a shot, he thinks there’s significant growth in the future.
“It’s an unsexy thing,” he says of what the majority of potential clients have right now. “It’s bland, it’s blah, it’s not informing their business decisions in any meaningful way. We’re trying to change that.”
CONTACTS
RYAN FURNESS, Nearest You: 612.314.6327;
ry**@********ou.com; www.nearestyou.com.
DAVE MATHIAS,Beyond the Data: 612.432.3789;
da**@***********ta.com; www.beyondthedata.com.
DENNIS STILL,Bigfoot Analytics: 651.333.9249;
de****@**************cs.com; www.bigfootanalytics.com.
HILARY LEBON, digital marketing consultant: 202.487.8509;
hi****@*********on.com; www.hilarylebon.com.
As the name suggests, Owatonna-based Kamp Automation looks for customers with a process they’d like to automate. It could be a small, inconvenient, tiny part that people can’t assemble. It could be a high-volume product so needed that the customer can’t find enough labor to produce it in the necessary quantities. “We’ll work anywhere from medical device companies to the seed industry for corn and soybeans,” says Kent Patterson, co-founder, president and CEO. “We just jump all over wherever there is custom automation.” The company started in his garage. Patterson and his partners built a machine. The company started to grow to the point where now it has 48 employees — and had a bunch of people and stuff in different locations. “We went from a garage to a shop to a shop and just kept moving to new places and signing leases,” he says. “We got to a point where it’s like, OK, this is getting big enough and sustainable — we felt that we wanted to look for our own space.’”
