I had the opportunity to speak with Tim Waldron, a Senior Growth Strategy & Execution Executive, who worked with his internal developers to create a dashboard to connect not only the arms of the business, but the company as a whole. The result was a massive increase in company value.
Here is Tim’s story:
“The ‘Dashboard’. That’s what we ended up calling it. Other names were considered. I personally advocated for ‘TUNA’ because the backbone of the portal is Asana for project management, Harvest for time management and Insightly for sales management (or A.H.I.). In the end though, it was simply known as The Dashboard and it serves as the nerve center to a 200M global Google partner.
“The Dashboard was born of necessity. When I first joined the struggling startup of Analytics Pros, it was apparent that there was no central clearinghouse of information. Everything was contained in Google Docs and spread across the organization, ultimately, stored and prioritized in the mind of a brilliant founder, but not a leader. Having come from the very structured environment of claims management and knowing the importance of having an open written record of events, I immediately began to work on a corporate solution on a shoestring budget. As Director of Client Services, the founders were taken aback with my focus on developing a central clearinghouse of information. It took a lot of time and patience for me to help them realize that no client could be well served if team members couldn’t have visibility into the client, and the company would never scale as long as it was run within the borders of the founder’s mind.
“The breakthrough occurred when I visited the ‘Dev Cave’ after hours one day to check in on how the team was doing. There I was exposed to a Kanban board. So Simple. So Elegant. I got it immediately. But this Kanban board was on a wall in a room where 4 people worked within a company that wanted to grow exponentially and was hiring remote workers across the globe. ‘Why’, I asked, ‘Aren’t we using a Kanban board digitally so that sales, account management, finance and remote ops could see where a client stood and what we needed to do next to engage additional services?’ Well, the data geeks in the ‘Dev Cave’ didn’t have an answer, because it wasn’t their problem, it was mine…so I got to work.
“Over the course of the next six months, I worked with our internal developers during their downtime to create an interactive portal that accessed KPI’s to bring in data from our time tracking, sales and operations platforms. Using a consistent naming convention, we automated the creation of projects across platforms when first engaging a client and then aggregated the data within the portal to provide real time information on the profitability of a client, utilization of consultants and timely identification of the next sales opportunity by triggering an alert to sales staff when a current project neared 75% completion. Over the next few years, we were able to add other functionalities to scale the business such as: consistent contract templates; predictive revenue recognition; integration with finance to automate billing at project milestones; resource management in anticipation of opportunities in sales pipeline; historical repository for client communications, deliverables and profitability; and overarching management reporting across departments that allowed me to address inefficiencies, as well as opportunities, in real time and adjust accordingly.
“My biggest frustration though is that we never got the name right. The ‘Dashboard’ simply did not provide the gravitas for what it was. The Hub? The Nerve Center? The Doorway into Understanding? No matter the name, in looking back at what was key to transforming Analytics Pros from a company valued at 1M to a company sold for 24M three years later, I know it could not have happened without The Dashboard. Not only did it connect all the parts of the business together, it connected us. It opened the way for any person within the company to access the status of a client, compare their hours with their peers, celebrate wins within the organization and transform what was innately exclusionary when I began at Analytics Pros and all the ‘important’ information was in the founder’s brain to something that was truly like a hive mind where everyone contributed their relevant position’s data, but also had access to the information that came from the aggregation of multiple data sets. Ultimately, even though it has been adopted and is being used by the company who acquired Analytics Pros to this day, The Dashboard came to represent/reflect the core values that made Analytics Pros the success that it became: Collaboration, Trustworthy, Action-Oriented and, above all, Accessible and Open.
“I’m sure glad that I took the time to visit the Dev Cave that night.”
Watch full video interview below.
Contact Tim Waldron via LinkedIn or his Career WebFolio.
Fred Coon, CEO
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