Down to Business: Turn your data into insights

Why data analytics matter for small and medium-sized businesses

As a business owner, you’re likely sitting on a goldmine of data.

To break it down, data is a collection of information, statistics, and facts. Your business likely already has started collecting data through sales, interactions with your customers, and your operations. The challenge lies in turning this raw information into insights you can learn from.

For businesses like yours, where time and budgets are often stretched thin, the ability to make informed decisions quickly can be transformational.

Data analytics can help you:

Optimize operations: Identify inefficiencies, reduce your costs, and help you simplify and modernize your workflow.

Improve customer experience: Understand what customers want and tailor products, services, and marketing initiatives to meet those needs.

Support growth: Set measurable goals, track and report on your progress, and identify opportunities for expansion.

Many small and medium-sized businesses have untapped potential sitting in their data. The question isn’t whether the data is there, but how to maximize its value.

Common challenges of using data effectively

Despite its potential, data analytics isn’t always straightforward. Many business owners know that data can drive efficiency, help them make more informed decisions, and can improve their customer experiences — yet they struggle to bridge the gap between raw information and actionable insights.

Here are three of the most common hurdles you may encounter:

Disorganized data: Information spread across spreadsheets, outdated systems, or physical ledgers can be difficult to track and examine. Without a single source of truth, you may find yourself making decisions based on incomplete or unreliable information.

Limited resources: Many small and medium-sized businesses lack the budget and/or in-house expertise needed to implement modern tools or to hire data specialists. This leaves them relying on gut instinct, instead of clear, data-enabled insights.

Overwhelming options: There are countless tools and technologies available, which makes choosing the right ones a difficult process.

So, why does this matter? Because for small and medium-sized business owners, every decision counts. There’s little room for trial and error with limited time, expertise, and budgets. Without clean, organized data, it’s harder to identify inefficiencies, understand the behaviour of your customers, or recognize opportunities for growth.

However, even businesses with limited resources can start small and see results quickly. With the right approach — prioritizing organization, integrating the right tools, and focusing on small, quick wins — analytics can become an advantage.

Five steps to implement data analytics

So, where do you begin when it comes to data analytics? With a clear, step-by-step approach. Here are five action steps you can take to help turn your raw data into meaningful insights:

Step 1: Assess your current state

Start by taking inventory. Where is your data stored? What systems are you currently using? Identify any gaps or inefficiencies in how your data is collected and organized. For instance, a bakery tracks its inventory manually across multiple spreadsheets, leading to errors and wasted time. By consolidating this information, the bakery owner has gained clarity on what’s selling and what’s not selling.

Step 2: Organize and clean your data

Clean data is critical. A business is better off with a small amount of reliable data than mountains of unclean, disorganized information. Tools like enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems can help structure and optimize your data, which develops a solid foundation for analysis.

Step 3: Define your goals

To be most useful, analytics need to align with your business goals. Are you trying to reduce costs? Improve customer retention? Clarity on these goals helps to make sure your efforts stay focused. From there, you should measurably weave analytics into your broader data strategy that feed up into achieving these goals.

Step 4: Start small with quick wins

Look for areas in your business where data analytics could make a quick impact, like improving efficiency or targeted marketing. For instance, by using customer data to refine ad targeting, a small retail business could increase their sales within a matter of weeks.

Step 5. Scale gradually

As you rack up quick wins and gain confidence, consider tools like Microsoft Power BI to help grow your efforts. These platforms offer user-friendly, scalable analytics solutions for business of all sizes. Additionally, continue to add to your analytics as your organization (and data captured) becomes more mature, providing insight into more areas of your business, and can accelerate some of your longer-term efforts.

In this clip, Colin and Soumya dive deeper into how to start building your data foundation:

Are you ready to get ‘Down to Business?’

At MNP, our team helps small and medium-sized business owners wade through the complexities of data analytics, so they can align their technology solutions with their unique needs and goals.

Interested in more insights on this topic? Watch the full interview between Colin Wenngatz and Soumya Ghosh below.