When in the start-up phase, a company has limited time and resources to get things right. When they go off half-cocked pursuing a variety of projects in an unfocused manner, the total resources of the new business are poorly utilised.
Depending on how much funding is available to the start-up, the clock is ticking. It can poorly afford to waste money or other resources due to a lack of market research, business intelligence (BI), or the use of data science.
Handling Condensed Timelines
With start-ups, a year can seem like an eternity. When running the business at a fair clip, it’s all too easy to be spread too thin or go off on too many tangents that have little chance of success. A lack of focus and inattention to data analytics are two of the reasons why many start-ups, unfortunately, fail within a year or two (or when their funding runs out).
Due to the condensed timeline to establish themselves in the marketplace, a start-up must be keenly aware of what’s been working or what may work better in the future. To do this, it’s necessary to use BI to look backward at what’s been doing well and see how it may be tweaked to get even better results in the coming months and years ahead.
Use the Recent Past as an Indicator
For start-ups, they don’t need to go back far to see the results they’ve been achieving. For companies that have done a poor job of keeping detailed records on all aspects of their business, they may need help deciphering what’s happened. This is where a service such as datawrk.com can be beneficial, as they can help pull information from databases by using sophisticated filtering and smart data engineering to build a practical record of what’s been happening. From there, it’s also possible to create better real-time monitoring systems that feed into data dashboards to let managers know exactly how the business is progressing.
More Informed Decision-making Ability
Making smart decisions for a business relies on having the best data available. As the saying goes, “If I knew then what I know now, I would have made different decisions”.
The trick is to get into a position where you do know now. Then the decisions can be better as long as the management is talented enough to use the data appropriately. However, the better the data indicators, the easier the right decisions are to make because they leave far less ambiguity to “gum up the works”.
With improved data analytics, business managers can lead companies or departments without making grave errors of judgement. Course correcting is also possible as the data indicates that changes must be made due to market variances, lack of demand, or poor availability of what’s needed to compete at the right level. Both business intelligence and data science are necessary in combination to steer start-ups in the right direction. BI provides a clearer perspective on progress by indicating actionable information in the useful nuggets of information discovered. Data science tracks what’s happening now and assists start-ups in responding faster to market changes (or poor project ideas) to avoid going down a blind alley.