#038: To Outsource or Not Outsource -- That Is the Question

The following is a straight-up machine translation. It has not been human-reviewed or human-corrected. However, we did replace the original transcription, produced in 2017, with an updated one produced using OpenAI’s WhisperX in 2025, which, trust us, is much, much better than the original. Still, we apologize on behalf of the machines for any text that winds up being incorrect, nonsensical, or offensive. We have asked the machine to do better, but it simply responds with, “I’m sorry, Dave. I’m afraid I can’t do that.”

00:00:04.00 [Announcer]: Welcome to the Digital Analytics Power Hour. Tim, Michael, and the occasional guest discussing digital analytics issues of the day. Find them on Facebook at facebook.com forward slash analytics hour. And now, the Digital Analytics Power Hour.

00:00:26.75 [Michael Helbling]: Hi everyone, welcome to the Digital Analytics Power Hour. This is Episode 38. You know, setting up and running a digital analytics practice at your company is certainly no small task. There are a lot of different aspects to getting a program up and off the ground. You know, you may be joining one in process, it just needs fixes, or you may be starting from scratch and rebuilding from the ground up. But what parts do you have to do yourself versus where can you go to get help from the outside? On this episode of the digital analytics power hour, here’s a one hour sales pitch for our services. No, I’m just kidding. We talk a little bit about this. Where can you outsource versus where can’t you? So, helping me along the way here is my co-host, Tim Wilson.

00:01:14.56 [Tim Wilson]: Hi, Michael. Tim actually couldn’t make it. This is Chippy Ladoo. He’s Tim Outsourced the episode this time. Is that OK?

00:01:22.23 [Michael Helbling]: Chippy Ladoo.

00:01:23.33 [Tim Wilson]: Welcome to the podcast. I put exactly no thought into that. Not sure where that came from.

00:01:31.47 [Michael Helbling]: I love that name. And we sure hope to hear more from Chippy Ladoo in the future. And obviously, I am Michael Helbling. All right. So let’s get started. But first, we’ll need everyone to sign this NDA. No, I’m just kidding. All right. So Tim, this is something that’s worth a lot of consideration. No one can just buy everything that has to do with their analytics practice and I think have a really great one. So where should people start? What could they outsource? What to the end source? How should they attack that problem?

00:02:02.72 [Tim Wilson]: Seems like some of the outsourcing happens because of the talent gap in the industry. I mean, I think there are companies that have that sort of a philosophy of we know what we do well and we’re going to do that. We’re going to stay just tight tight tight to our core and they don’t really see analytics as being. Core for them and so they say we’re going to outsource it now. I think that’s I think that’s generally wrong headed. I think other organizations wind up outsourcing because. They’ve had Rex open for months or they’ve gotten one person hired and they know they need five and like we can’t get them. So you know we’ll go outsource so I would love to think that there is a very deliberate approach and thought process into what does it make sense to outsource what should we grow and develop internally. I think it winds up being more often than not a reactive of, oh crap, we’ve got to get our Adobe Analytics implementation fixed. Or, oh crap, nobody’s able to pull the data that we need. So I don’t think it’s very deliberate. I think there are things that can be outsourced, but it just already took us down a tangent.

00:03:17.94 [Michael Helbling]: No, I’m an agreement sort of. You know, I mean, obviously I agree there are things that can be outsourced. I guess for me, I tend to separate sort of in, you know, really loosely sort of strategic versus tactical in terms of what it is you’re trying to do. And then start looking at for this organization, these things we could outsource, these things we need to keep in house. So what’s, what’s strategic? What’s, what are the examples of strategic versus tactical? Sure thing. So strategic is what skill sets do we hire? If I’ve got budget for a team of three people, what skill sets do I hire to get the most coverage or the best bang for my buck and then use consulting or outsourcing or something like that, to fill in blanks where I didn’t get talent to fill those.

00:04:10.58 [Tim Wilson]: So you’re saying be strategic on what you outsource, not saying that you outsource the tactical and new source, but also what’s our approach?

00:04:19.83 [Michael Helbling]: What’s our practice model? How do we serve the business? What are we? Are we a hub and spoke model? Are we a center of excellence? Are we decentralized? So those are the strategic questions.

00:04:34.21 [Tim Wilson]: But you’re saying you have to answer those strategic questions and then use that to inform what you’re going to outsource?

00:04:41.88 [Michael Helbling]: I mean, it all depends because you could… Well, look at me like I’m an idiot. No, I’m not saying that. I mean, I am looking at you like that, but I’m not saying that.

00:04:50.37 [Tim Wilson]: Your voice is saying I have a deep respect for you and everything you’re saying.

00:04:54.46 [Michael Helbling]: I think I’m making it confusing because I don’t mean to say that you can’t actually go outside and get help on either of those things. So you could go out and get strategic consulting help, right? You could go and hire people who could give you the strategy for your business to do that. You can also go hire people that could just come in and be your tactical day-to-day execution support. Right.

00:05:18.18 [Tim Wilson]: So I think a point number one is trying to decide what you’re going to outsource in a purely reactive who’s beating me down for what thing right now this report or this thing and racing to outsource. You may have to do it in some cases, but that that is not going to wind up with a. efficient and effective use of outsourcing. I mean, I think there is a great case for outsourcing. If there’s no one internally who’s been around the block a few times with analytics, it’s really hard to internally come up with an analytic strategy because they’re just all these rampant misperceptions and you’ll outline something that is completely not doable. at all. But it does seem like, well, gee, before you start figuring out what it makes sense to outsource, you better answer the question of what is our analytics strategy. And that could be something you develop internally, because you’ve got the experience and you can come up with it, or it’s something where you need some outsourced help to try to figure that out. Luckily, I don’t personally do much of that analytics strategy stuff. So this does not sound like a naked sales pitch. Although analyticsdomistified.com does offer such a service. Dammit, we wound up there.

00:06:28.29 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, you ended up there, which is fine because it’s a search discovery, so it’s all good. No, but no. So that’s the thing is, yeah, before you start putting your chess pieces on the board, you want to decide what chess pieces you need. And that’s the strategy, right? So that’s how I’m going to play this game. So you can go out and get help. And I think maybe that’s, that’s just it. It’s a recognition of what level of support or help do I need right now that I can’t create coverage for with my own team and my own skills. You know, we’d be hard pressed to go to a seasoned practitioner with many, many years of experience. If we went to our last guest, Dylan Lewis, from Intuit, and he’s been with his company for so long, I imagine that the strategy that they’ve got doesn’t need help. Right now today for them to be executing at a high level, right? So that’s not where he probably needs someone to come in from the outside. But perhaps you’re brand new in this role. You just got started and the whole analytics function at this business has cratered because of loss of talent or turnover. and you’re starting from scratch, again, that could be a good time to bring in outside strategic help. So I think it’s a time and place thing. It’s also kind of what your own capabilities and skills are, but that’s true of the tactical stuff as well.

00:08:01.81 [Tim Wilson]: So what would you say is that you’ve got to have a good example of a time where you were watching somebody, whether they’re a client or not, outsourcing, thinking that is the wrong thing to be outsourcing at the wrong time.

00:08:14.46 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, I mean a lot of times it comes out in that’s the wrong project to do right now. What you need to be doing right now is not that.

00:08:24.05 [Tim Wilson]: That actually reminds me of, I’ve got an example on that one from years ago. When I was a practitioner running a BI group, I keep getting glimmers that some of these people actually might listen to the podcast. So she’ll hit me up on Slack if she did. She’ll remember this. That the database marketing team was like, we want you to do a market basket analysis. We want you to do a market basket analysis. We’re like, that’s not what you need. That’s not going to help you right now. And they’re like, well, we found this, this company that can do a market basket analysis. You just need to pull the data for them to do the market basket analysis and. So we’re like, okay, fine. Like we don’t have the bandwidth. It’s not the, it’s not a priority. So we will, we’ll pull the data and let them do it. And of course they came back without inside business knowledge to go and do analysis on SKUs and what had been bought. They came back and presented something that everybody in the organization knew and could not act on, you know, one, one wit. So sorry, that just did bring up an example from when I was on the inside.

00:09:27.87 [Michael Helbling]: No, actually, I think that ties into something that’s a really key point in anybody’s decision making is can you outsource insight generation and the difficulty associated with doing that. I’d like to think that outside teams can generate very insightful analysis and make strong recommendations, but the actual, I don’t want to say cost of doing so, but like it’s not cheap to do because you have to have really strong engagement with the company to understand their objectives and what’s happening on the ground at that time so that the insights you generate have alignment and capability to move forward in the business.

00:10:08.02 [Tim Wilson]: Well, I think that’s, I mean, the ramp up, the ramp up to get to that point. And I’ve got cases where I started, and this is in multiple jobs, where I started saying, I just am gonna help you figure out, I’m just gonna build you a dashboard, which for me is I’m just gonna help make sure we’re really clear on what your KPIs are, and then I’m gonna give you something of value that you’ll be able to look to monitor how the business is going, and we’ll talk about it each week, but it could take six months or a year, Actually, to harken back to our conversation with Dylan, where Dylan was saying it takes you a year to figure out what the, how the company works. And I think I disagreed a little bit that if I, if I’m a full-time employee onsite at a company, I mean, there’s, there are varying degrees, but there’s a lot of things you can figure out in three months or four months or five months being if you’re outside, and you’re part-time, or even if you’re outside just contracted full-time, just the nature of that to really ramp up and kind of internally know what everybody in the business is focused on and how the organization works and how the competitors move. That is, it’s really expensive, and if you’re outsourcing, you’re paying them to do enough work that they are kind of internalizing that. So I think that’s a good point.

00:11:24.28 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, it’s a really tricky balance to strike. And especially if you have a team that’s already capable of doing those insights, then it makes it totally not worthwhile, I think, to go outside for that. If you have no capability, what I always try to recommend is get the analyst and let them work alongside another analyst that you’re paying for so that they’re getting that training and building the skill that you’ll keep if you want to really build out an effective and long-term growing team.

00:11:56.35 [Tim Wilson]: But that’s hard.

00:11:57.68 [Michael Helbling]: I know that. Yeah, that is not always easy. That is not always easy.

00:12:02.22 [Tim Wilson]: Well, it’s even hard as I mean, being outside to tell somebody that what you really need to do is kind of it’s a big it’s hard for it not to sound like you need to pay double. You need to pay you need to find someone and pay him internally and pay me to work along with them. And I’ve got cases where that’s what’s going on.

00:12:22.07 [Michael Helbling]: But yeah, well, I mean, obviously,

00:12:24.65 [Tim Wilson]: Expect throughput to be higher in those scenarios because you know you’re not working on the exact same things Well in some cases you’re actually saying I mean I’ve got cases where it’s we’re expecting you to help kind of accelerate the leveling up of The analyst so you’re gonna work alongside them you’re gonna have hopefully increase throughput. I can’t say that’s always the case. But along the way, we’re moving this person from a level one to a level two or a level two to a level three, because you’re taking the time. You know, it’s it’s hard to just like lecture giving. It’s great to go to conferences. We were fans of conferences. We’re fans of training. But there’s kind of a show versus tell versus do nature of things. And I think that there’s some some use in having analysts or having outside outsourcing some kind of more senior talent to do stuff in parallel, which again, man, it is going to be hard to not be sounding like we’re self-serving pitches here.

00:13:28.10 [Michael Helbling]: Well, I guess it goes back to sort of what expertise are you lacking and how do you go get that in ways that, you know, you either need it in a long-term way with somebody who’s there and is your employee, or you don’t need it in the long term so you can go get it for a short period of time and then you know you’re done with it. You know so a lot of companies outsource implementations right because that’s a discrete project and they can go hire an outside company to do the implementation. The challenging thing is implementations are never done they need continuous iteration and improvement You need new metrics being put into the implementation on an ongoing fashion. So really it’s challenging to even think about that as something you could purely outsource without thinking about how it will, you know, six months after the implementation, where will you be and who can support you and who’s ready to kind of go in and make the tweaks you need.

00:14:24.94 [Tim Wilson]: Well, and I think the implementation, I was kind of heading the exact same way. I do think because there’s more work at an initial implementation or a re-implementation, there is more work to be done than there is during the maintenance of it. Where it seems like it goes wrong is our PMO has assigned the resources and you’re getting it person X and we’re outsourcing the expertise to do the implementation. We’re going to do a solution design and we’re going to give you the code and you’re going to implement it and the project is done. And then you’re really in a world of hurt because two months later, no one internally, and you’re stuck perpetually outsourcing. And I’ve got a case right now where you watch four parties involved. We’ve got an outsourced analyst. We’ve got an outsourced implementation person. We have the in-house business user and the in-house owner of analytics and outsourced development. And guess what, just trying to track one little button click in a certain scenario, we’ve got these long email threads and guess what, it got fucked up because they’re just too many parties and no one is really deeply embedded in it. So when doing, I’ve got another case that I’m thinking of where it was the exact opposite. We knew who the one guy internally who was gonna ramp up and be the expert And he knew very little about the nuts and bolts of an Adobe Analytics implementation at the start. And now he’s pretty much, he’s hopping into DTM and he’s updating stuff and he can explain allocation and expiration and how things are integrated with Salesforce and you know, and 4C and all these other integrations. And so it is kind of the ideal and that he has ramped up his knowledge. His time commitment for analytics is still about the same as what it was, but he has gone up in his sophistication and capabilities, you know, dramatically, which means that they’re not perpetually paying kind of outsourced Support and he also is the owner of the development relationship. So he’s making sure their developers who kind of understand what this analytic stuff is and you know, you’re less likely to have. You know, the code drop from the order confirmation page during a release because the latest developer who rotated on is like, what is this code thing?

00:16:49.30 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah. So the one thing I’ve seen that I think has helped a lot of companies is to have specific product owners for the tools you’re using for analytics. So this person, they own this product, whether that’s Adobe analytics, Google analytics, even the tag management system, the testing system, who is the owner? And they own that for the company. Is that business person or IT person or it doesn’t matter?

00:17:14.97 [Tim Wilson]: It doesn’t matter.

00:17:15.71 [Michael Helbling]: It’s just some owner who’s representing that product to the rest of the company and keeps it front and center when it’s time to leverage it or have it interact with other things. I feel like when there’s no specific owner, that’s where those big problems crop up. is you know nobody is like oh yeah I don’t really know what to say about this S code so I’ll just take it off whereas if there’s a strong owner they’ll like well you need to go talk to Tim because he owns that and he knows what it’s for and he’ll tell you what to do with it. So that’s something that I’ve observed to save companies and make them better and better if you give specific ownership to each product. So if that’s something that you’re not doing at your company today, that’s a great small step.

00:18:04.19 [Tim Wilson]: So it goes without saying, the ownership is not outsourced. That’s generally a bad idea.

00:18:09.53 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah. Well, and I’ve seen that too, where people want to hand you the whole thing and be like, okay, you’re our people. And that’s okay up to a point. But you have to think about, well, what’s our continuity plan? All of our knowledge lives on the opposite side of the wall from us. And while that’s really great for me as a consultant, because now you’re pretty much stuck to me, that’s bad for you if our relationship goes south and we don’t work together anymore.

00:18:38.01 [Tim Wilson]: Well, or even if you’ve outsourced and say it is to church discovery, you’ve outsourced the ownership of the product, you’ve outsourced the implementation and management and ongoing management implementation, and you’ve outsourced some degree of the analyst support. So you’re like, well, that’s great because now if the analyst has some idea, they can collaborate because they’ve got kind of this external collaboration. And the one thing that is totally missing is the internal full-time focus on the company and the business and what’s going on. And that is. It almost seems like a guarantee of like you’re just tying yourself to an anchor that you’re going to drag around. You may still make progress, but it’s can’t take you all that far quickly, I guess, or cost effectively.

00:19:25.00 [Michael Helbling]: Right. Well, and that’s the other thing to balance is, yeah, your cost versus what you get from it. I mean, and I’m a huge believer in the ROI of analytics, but you have to get to a certain point with your analytics practice to start to see that ROI. And so you want to create a plan from day one of how I’m going to use resources, whether internal or external, to get to that ROI point.

00:19:48.93 [Tim Wilson]: Does it drive you at all nuts? I almost want to go back. If when I was taking my financial accounting class 15 years ago, if I could go back now, I would say spend a little more time on that whole thing, that whole reason that It’s cheaper to pay a gazillion dollars an hour to somebody outside than it is to hire an FTE because the fully loaded costs for this person, they’re completely separate parts of the finances. And that’s this other sort of weird thing where you’re like in absolute terms, There is no way that it is cheaper for you to pay this outside resource. But the fact is the way the accounting works and not and there’s also there’s there’s risk when you take on a full-time employee there a lot harder. You’ve now committed to something that with a contract. You haven’t. But it seems like it’s much more like, oh, times are really, really tough for us. We can’t hire anybody. We have almost no money. So therefore, we’re going to go spend twice as much on external contracts. And that’s just one of those things that I know it happens. I’ve seen it happen. Again, that benefits us. It just seems like, really? Is there not somebody sitting saying, wait a minute. This doesn’t make sense.

00:21:08.12 [Michael Helbling]: Well, sounds like a really good use case for a dome. No, I’m just kidding. Oh, you’re absolutely right. And I feel actually, as we’re talking more about this, we’re totally straying into management consulting land, which is basically designed to help figure out and solve these problems that are sort of more about shape, size, and scope of your company and what the people you hire need to be able to do. But it makes sense that you hire people to like fit certain things, but sometimes getting an outside consultant is way easier than making a full-time hire just because of the internal pieces around it. A lot of really large companies tend to do a massive amount of contractors so that they have basically a floating cushion of people at least in terms of their IT and operational things so that they don’t, as the business kind of goes up and down, they don’t have, well, this is my opinion of why they’re doing it. I don’t actually know why they’re doing it, but as the business goes up and down, they can shed those contractors without actually saying they’ve laid anyone off.

00:22:24.61 [Tim Wilson]: I think there are multiple reasons. I think it’s also, the perception is, it’s faster to get a contractor in because you don’t have to go through the HR hurdles of a job description and a wreck and getting it all open. And the reason that you don’t have to go through all those hurdles is because you’re telling yourself, we can cut this person anytime, like they’re they’re low risk. The downside is you’re not you’re not really investing in talent, you’re just trying to get something done right here and now. And I think I would argue that for analytics, unless you really have a plan to be, this is a attempt to hire, which I don’t think either of our firms really, you know, operate on that, that sort of model. I mean, I think if, you know, IQ workforce or somewhere, they’re, they’re more of those sorts of options, but I don’t know, I guess maybe it gets back to, I think that a lot of the outsourcing is reactive and desperation. There are companies in our industry that they’re like, we’re the low cost, you know, we can do stuff that is just annoying reporting that you don’t want to pay anybody internally and we can get you cheap resources and they can spit out your reports. And that to me always is like, Oh, when does non automated yet low skill required relatively speaking required reporting ever make sense for a company?

00:23:52.89 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, it’s not a good strategy because you yeah, you have people who are generating data without doing anything to turn that around into something meaningful.

00:24:04.88 [Tim Wilson]: So I had so very large CPG company back in the day when I worked in an agency doing work for them, they, we hit a point where they were paying their creative agency that I was working at to do some analytics. Cause everybody’s kind of, everybody, every executive at every company sees analytics as something else they can sell, whether they’ve got the capability to do it or not. And this large package goods company said, ah, we don’t want to pay your, American overhead on top of whatever rate is for analytics, our plan is we found this other firm, we’re gonna outsource the monthly pulling of the data from Google Analytics. This was pre-premium. We’re gonna have these offshore guys outsourced pull the data, and then we’re just gonna have them send the spreadsheet to your analysts, which was my team, to call through them and generate the insights for it. And I’m like, you’re actually spending, you’re going to spend more money and get absolutely nothing from it. And of course, there were no analysts involved in the discussion of whether that made any sense whatsoever. We just had account managers saying, Hey, here’s the, here’s the Excel file. Can you, can you look at this? I mean, it shows top pages, visits and bounce rate. You know, what, what are the insights from that? And I just shook my head and said, I don’t want to work with that company ever again.

00:25:29.65 [Michael Helbling]: Well, and, but actually, so that’s another sort of way that we can talk about this, which is what have we seen out there that sort of like been like, whoa, you know, warning, warning, like this is not right. Cause I think there’s plenty of those. Like, I’ll give you an example. You know, you go in to meet with a company, you’re going to start working together. And this one’s from a long time ago, so it doesn’t represent any current client of mine or ours. That will never happen. And you sit down, they’re like, we want to do buzzword bingo, predictive, AI, blah, blah, blah. You know, all the top shelf thing, this is what we want to do with our analytics program. This is what we want to start doing tomorrow. And you’re like, that’s great. Oh, wow. So let’s talk about how your baseline implementation is working. Oh, it’s, it’s a mess. But we want to start doing this up here. And you’re like, but you can’t really skip that. And the, and it was like, there’s always this cognitive dissonance of, we want to help us do this high level stuff. But, you know, pay no attention to the fact that no one trusts this underlying data set, because it’s completely broken and everyone knows it.

00:26:44.10 [Tim Wilson]: Yep, that’s a good example. I think I’ll give a corollary to my example that I just gave, and that is the who are we already working with? You know, giving your media agency additional money to do reporting and analysis on how the media is working. On the one hand, there’s a nice little story of, well, they’re experts on the media, and they want to do the best for the client so therefore they’re closest to it and therefore that’s efficient and this is really not a media bashing it’s more of a fox watching the hen house that I’ve watched cases where we’re gonna outsource this for whatever reason. That decision’s been made. Do we wanna outsource it to go look for another company that we can outsource it to? Or do we wanna look around at the outsource dev shop that we have, the outsource creative agency we have, the outsource media agency that we have, and just ask all of them, hey, can any of you guys do analytics for us? And that so often seems to turn around into you’ve got completely conflicting incentives because you’re paying somebody to essentially report on how well they’re doing. I mean, and that’s kind of the classic, we’ve covered that I think multiple times before, but it still happens all the time. And you can see how it, you can see why it happens. Cause every, the people running those companies are like, Hey, we can, we can do a new SOW, do some more work for you. And here’s the story of why it makes sense. But if you just step back a little bit, you’re like, yeah, that doesn’t generally make sense. Yeah. No, it’s always very tricky. I’ll hop with another example that could be good or could be bad, which is on the implementation. We talked about implementation and outsourcing that and I feel like plenty of companies outsource a lot of their IT and their development because they know they’ve got ebbs and flows. So some of the stuff we were just talking about, it rationally says, yeah, outsource that, and then you can kind of manage it on a project by project basis. You’ve got some of the same challenges of IT people rolling in and rolling out, but that’s another one where it’s, oh, our implementation. And if you ask the dev shop, hey, you know, can you do our analytics implementation? And they say, sure, because somewhere down the road, they dropped an S code or they dropped a you know GA tag or maybe they drop GTM but it’s been pretty rare for me to come across kind of pure IT shops that actually have enough of the analyst and kind of tool understanding and the data usage understanding for them to really be effective, they’ll do Adobe and say, hey, we got this idea. You’re cutting from GA to Adobe. Why don’t we just shove the URL into the s.page name? Because hey, everybody knows what the URL is. And that’s generally not the best way to make use of Adobe in an implementation.

00:29:53.94 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, totally. I mean, we see that all the time. We definitely do a fair few implementations. And the reality is, Yeah, people just shove it in there without even giving a chance to think about what it is they’re trying to go after. And the other thing we see sometimes, which is unfortunate, is that there can be this tendency to sort of take a product functionality matrix and say, Do you want this? Do you want that? Do you want this? And nobody knows. That’s why they hired you. They don’t know what they want out of the tool. So if you ask them, do you want this functionality out of the tool, you’re not helping them get to where they’re supposed to go. You’ve got to come out of the other way and ask, what are you trying to accomplish? Okay, we’re going to use this functionality of the tool to help you accomplish that. We’ll explain to you how that works. So it is a mindset shift that also has to happen. And so actually when you’re evaluating someone to do that, it’s a good set of questions to ask. Certainly by no means are we the only people who do this. There’s lots of great consulting firms that do that this way. Think about the business first, then bring in the tools functionality. If you see somebody doing it the other way around, challenge that for sure, so you get a better implementation.

00:31:12.41 [Tim Wilson]: Is it fair to say when there is no one internally, business or IT, senior management, mid-level, wherever, if there is no one who really has at least a few years of experience and hopefully exposure to kind of some best practices around analytics, outsourcing in that environment is just seems really, really challenging. I sort of feel for organizations that are, we don’t have an internal analytics, we don’t have staff, we know we have a lot of need, we know we’re way behind, we just need to outsource everything. I guess this gets back to where we started, which was, you know, the first thing, you feel like you’re horribly behind, and then if you spend a month or two months or three months trying to get an analytics strategy outlined, If you look at that as saying, now I’m going to be another three months behind everyone else, the reality is if you just start executing and outsourcing, you’re going to wind up falling farther behind because you can’t be effective.

00:32:15.95 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah. I mean, it happens where, yeah, you’re starting from zero and you’ve got to get somebody in there to just give you the time of day. That’s certainly okay. I just, you know what’s funny is I got in, you know, of course we all get recruiter emails all the time. Everybody in this industry does. And there’s a recruiter email for a very large company who’s looking for a very senior analytics person. And it’s partially challenging to just say to this company, OK, listen, I’ll come in and work with you for a year, and then I’m going to leave. And I’ll help you get this all set up. This is what you need. I know I can take you here and then we’ll get you a really nice team in that time period. And then they can take it from there and then I can walk away. I have no interest in working for this company long term, but I want to help. But at the same time, you know, obviously that’s not going to work. And no, I’m not going to talk to him about it.

00:33:09.08 [Tim Wilson]: Well, but I think there may be room for that. My mother’s cousin’s husband was a career sales guy, sales management at large at IBM and some other places. He semi-retired to be a interim VP of sales. You could see that being a You know what? We’re bringing you in with a recognition that you don’t want to do this. You’re not looking to be here forever, but we need somebody who we can temporarily maybe pay whatever premium that demands.

00:33:47.27 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, interim VP of analytics right here, $750,000 done deal.

00:33:58.32 [Tim Wilson]: So I actually did watch this is another, some of this stuff is just really bleak. So there’s a nationally known retailer that was starting effectively from having no one. And so they looked around and they brought somebody in to head up analytics and it took them, I don’t know, six to nine months to realize that she wasn’t actually going to be a fit now sometimes that could be that they weren’t ready for she might have been saying everything right and just they weren’t ready to hear it and I think that actually happens at times too somebody’s got to go in take a bunch of arrows in the back and basically soften them up and the next person comes in and all of a sudden they’re saying the exact same thing the last person said but nobody’s gonna say oh maybe we threw that person under the bus too fast. Not carrying any of the baggage. Hence the interim title. It’s perfect. But I think in this case, once she moved on, I mean, they had her, then they’re like, crap, like we’ve lost another year. Now the fact is, presumably she moved the ball forward somewhat. It is just, it is tough to start from scratch. I go back to hearing the Siren song of outsourcing of we can quickly mobilize a team, which is probably okay. It’s okay if you’re doing that and saying, but in parallel, we have got to actually figure out what our strategy is and where this makes sense. And if we’re working with the same company to do that, hopefully it’s not a company that’s incentivized to say, your strategy should be to buy more of our services. It’s the house of life scenario.

00:35:34.34 [Michael Helbling]: Or at least there’s transparency at those moments so that there’s an understanding on both sides. Hey, what we’re recommending is you continue to work with us at the same time, recognize that eventually you’ll want to think about how you take this in-house. And if that kind of conversation is happening, then you’re working with a true partner as opposed to a consultant who’s just trying to maximize the dollar value of that relationship. Yep. Well, Tim, this has been very interesting in a thinly veiled sales, I don’t know. It’s actually not meant to be that. And hopefully it’s not coming across that way. Please don’t hire analytics demystified. or even search discovery, no matter how much you might be feeling like it after this awesome conversation.

00:36:23.06 [Tim Wilson]: Is this the, is this the don’t drive like my brother, don’t drive like my brother, don’t hire, don’t hire search discovery. Don’t hire analytics. That’s right. I think we’re both so since this is, I think we’ve had one other episode where we were falling all over self awkward this much.

00:36:36.51 [Michael Helbling]: We’re trying to be sensitive to it. The reality is that you should hire probably both of our firms at the same time. And let us work with you on various things. Because we have a few things we can help.

00:36:46.92 [Tim Wilson]: I want to point out that let us work with each other because we actually really like to.

00:36:49.16 [Michael Helbling]: Oh, that would be so fun! Yes! How about a twofer for just $900,000? You could get an interim Tim and an interim Michael. We’d take a lower cut. It would be great.

00:37:04.19 [Tim Wilson]: That’d be there for that.

00:37:05.87 [Michael Helbling]: Just a one year contract. Yeah. We’d go in one year, fix a bunch of stuff, get a great team in place, and then walk away. Okay, so this is, I mean, it’s an important topic and, you know, because we both kind of occupy one side of the equation, I think that’s why there’s a discomfort when we talk about it. However, I will say that as you, if you’re out there as a practitioner and you’re thinking about your analytics practice and the program that you have, Do make that list think about what are the things I need to see happen? And do I have the resources and talent internally to accomplish that or do I need to go find that? Whether it’s at the strategic level to help us create a program that’s at the right structure and level or if it’s tactical I just don’t have this specific skill set and so I’m gonna go out and get it while I figure out how to train or get someone up to speed there and Those are the ways that you can do that. And I think this conversation shows, you know, a little pieces of that. I don’t know. Would you agree, Tim?

00:38:09.65 [Tim Wilson]: Yeah. And I would throw on there are plenty of people who are inside companies who are practitioners who are outsourcing and they are active in the community. So it’s a I guess a plug for the the DAA and the measure slack. If you say, I’m thinking about outsourcing, I’d love to talk to somebody and take that offline there because our industry is, you know, genuinely pretty helpful with each other. Not necessarily your direct competitors, not going to tell you how they outsource stuff. But if you’re thinking, should I head down this path? Is there somebody else who has done X? Somebody will raise their hand. And I think that would actually be a worthwhile discussion or two or three to have.

00:38:47.45 [Michael Helbling]: Yeah, absolutely. All right, we’re excited to try a new segment on the show. We’re calling Last Call. We want to go out and talk about something we’ve seen recently that just sort of popped up that we thought would be of use or interesting to our listeners. All right, Tim, why don’t you kick us off? What’s your last call this week?

00:39:06.50 [Tim Wilson]: So for a new segment, I figured why not alienate a good chunk of the crowd with something that is only applicable to part of the audience, and that would be Mac users. So I can’t even remember exactly where I stumbled across this, but having done some work with Leah Pika and Ben kind of had a lot of data visualization, effective communication pushed into me. I came across this little app. It’s a free app for macOS called Sim Daltonism, which we’ll have a link on the show notes. But it’s this insanely simple little thing. It’s a little tool. You launch it, it brings up a window, and then you can drag that window around anywhere on your computer and you can pick which form of color blindness you want to view through that window. And they’re a little hot keys. I can’t pronounce any of the color blindness things, but they’re like four types of red, green confusion. So I’ve started using it when I’ve, you know, if I use red, green in a dashboard, and this is a little bit of a nod to Leah because she found the kind of a blue orange, which may be not be quite as intuitive, but is much better from a visual distinction. So, when I’m working on something and I want to see what would this look like to, you know, the 9% of the US male population who has some form of red-green color blindness, this little window just pops up, you move it wherever you want and you see, oh, are those two colors, do they look identical? Can I distinguish between them? So, it’s a cool little free Mac app, Sim Daltonism. What’s your last call, Michael?

00:40:43.58 [Michael Helbling]: So the one I will throw out there for this time is one of my favorite analytics blogs, which I had forgotten about for a long time. But I just ran across it recently, so I thought I’d re-bring it up, which is by a guy by the name of John Foreman. who is a data scientist, also has a really great book on Amazon, so look up John Forman, Data Science on Amazon, you’ll find his book too. But his blog is called Analytics Made Skizzy, and it is hilarious because what he does is he does these cool exercises with data science. from the context of illegal drugs and breaking bad and that sort of thing. So really kind of a cool concept, really great reading. It’s actually fun reading and that’s very helpful for somebody like me who doesn’t have the mental fortitude to stick it out with, you know, data science unless it’s made into a funny comic or something. All right. So if you’re listening and you’ve got a cool ass call, we wouldn’t mind hearing about it. Or if you hired some analytics consultants and you really loved it, give them a shout out. Preferably not on our Facebook page. No, I’m just kidding. No, but no, we would love to hear from you on Facebook or Twitter or on the Measure Slack. So give us a shout out. We really enjoy hearing from listeners. How can we make the show better and more interesting for you? All right. Well, thank you everyone for my co-host, Tim Wilson. This is Michael Helbling saying, keep analyzing.

00:42:21.20 [Announcer]: Thanks for listening and don’t forget to join the conversation on Facebook, Twitter or Measure Slack Group. We welcome your comments and questions. Facebook.com forward slash analytics hour or at analytics hour on Twitter.

00:42:36.42 [Tim Wilson]: You might not have a ton of outtakes but that’s okay.

00:42:48.72 [Tim Wilson]: So too calm and too mellow. Energy, energy, energy. Actually, I did have my uncle, my uncle come and he was like, oh, you’re consulting now since like a year or two ago. He was like, that’s like great to come in and tell people what they’re doing. Are they doing anything wrong? And if you can’t help them, well, then you just leave and you move on to the next one. You know, Uncle John, I like to think that I am actually genuinely out there trying to help companies. But thanks for your cynical take on my career.

00:43:18.15 [Michael Helbling]: on the show and we’re excited to do it. You want to?

00:43:22.90 [Tim Wilson]: Yeah, I’ll do that. I’ll get some WD-40 for it. My tip is not going to be WD-40 for your hinges.

00:43:31.02 [Michael Helbling]: Just like going, oh yeah, the last call. I’m going to start looking at all my websites with rose colored glasses now. Rock flag and outsourcing.

Podcast: Download | Embed

Subscribe: RSS