[EO Minnesota] Harnessing the Power of Data To Drive Business Growth With Luke Komiskey

Luke Komiskey is the Founder and CEO of DataDrive, a data consulting firm specializing in managed analytic services. With over a decade of experience in data analytics, Luke has played a pivotal role in making data analytics more accessible to a diverse range of businesses. Under his leadership, DataDrive has evolved into a global team of professionals, supporting over 150 organizations across various sectors, including healthcare, public education, manufacturing, and software. Luke’s approach emphasizes transforming data into actionable insights, aiding organizations in making faster and more informed decisions. His passion for navigating the tech revolution and simplifying complex data challenges has been central to DataDrive’s mission of fostering a data-informed society.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

Luke Komiskey shares what they do at DataDrive
How to use data analytics for marketing and sales insights
Why self-service analytics is important for agencies
Use cases of how people are using data to create a dashboard or generate insights
How DataDrive helps school districts
Luke talks about the evolution of DataDrive’s client base and services
How COVID-19 changed DataDrive’s scope engagements
The value of technology partnerships and remote work in attracting top talent
What Luke does to maintain a positive remote work culture
Why Luke decided to take a six-month trip around the world

In this episode…

In an age where data is abundant, the challenge lies in harnessing its true power to drive business growth. How can organizations transform raw data into actionable insights that propel them forward? This pivotal question lies at the heart of today’s data-driven business landscape.

According to Luke Komiskey, a seasoned expert in data analytics, the answer lies in skillfully navigating the complexities of data. He highlights the importance of not just collecting data but analyzing and utilizing it effectively to make informed decisions. By weaving stories out of numbers, Luke illustrates how data can lead to more efficient processes, informed decision-making, and significant business growth. His approach demonstrates the transformational impact of data analytics across various industries, from healthcare to education, underscoring its role as a cornerstone of modern business success.

In this episode of the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz is joined by Luke Komiskey, Founder and CEO of DataDrive, to delve into the role of data in driving business success. They explore how DataDrive’s analytics solutions aid organizations in different sectors, Luke’s personal journey from global traveler to data analytics leader, and the impact of remote work culture on modern business operations.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Sponsor for this episode…

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Episode Transcript

Intro 0:03

Welcome to the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast where we feature top founders and entrepreneurs and their journey. Now let’s get started with the show.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 0:13

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here founder of inspiredinsider.com where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs leaders today is no different. I’ve Luke Komiskey of godatadrive.com. Luke, before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes people should check out of the podcast. Since Luke is actually in EO Minnesota. If you don’t know what it is, Entrepreneurs Organization is a great group of entrepreneurs founders getting together help each other. I had Mat Zalk, who is on EO Tulsa, and he talked about growing his company and a Keyrenter. And EO Nashville, Robert Hartline. He talked about growing a chain of actually cell phone stores, from scratch to over $100 million. And also he has a software company as well talked about that journey. And EO Chicago member, Rafi Arbel of Market JD talked about how he grew his agency. He was a lawyer, he actually went on to get his MBA and how he grew his agency that helps lawyers. So those are all interesting, check them out on inspiredinsider.com. This episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25, we help businesses give to and connect their dream 100 relationships. And how do we do that? We actually do that by helping you run your podcast or an easy button for a company to launch run a podcast, we do the strategy, the accountability and the full execution. Around the podcast Luke, we call ourselves the magic elves that work in the background to make it look easy for the host and the company so that they can create great content and amazing relationships. You know, for me, the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships. And I found no better way over the past decade to profile the people in companies I most admire and share with the world what they’re working on. And I met Luke at one of the conferences actually in Entrepreneurs Organization. I’m like, Luke, you must come on our podcast to talk about what you’re doing. He’s got a really interesting, crazy story even from traveling around the world to how he started his company. So we’re gonna get into that. But if you’ve thought about podcasting, you should if you have questions, go to rise25.com to learn more. And I was saying I’m excited to introduce Luke Komiskey. He’s the Founder and CEO of DataDrive, you can find them at godatadrive.com. And DataDrive is a data consulting firm providing managed analytic services. Well, we’ll talk about what that means. And DataDrive helps growing midsize organizations transform their data into insights, which is the most important. What do you do with your data? How do you make decisions with your data, right? Because it’s all there. But we need to provide action and insights. So that’s what they help people do. And organizations do they have an ongoing partnership with companies to provide both the data platform and the team are delivering the faster and informed decisions. And over the last seven years, Luke’s grown DataDrive into a worldwide team of highly skilled professionals serving over 150 organizations. They’ve worked with organizations, from healthcare to public school systems, to manufacturing to software companies, and more. Luke, thanks for joining me.

Luke Komiskey 3:18

Thanks for having me. Fantastic introduction.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 3:20

So just talk for a little bit, we’ll dig into what you do a little bit, but just tell people a little bit more about DataDrive. And what you do.

Luke Komiskey 3:30

Yeah, DataDrive, like you mentioned, we are a data analytics consultancy, but really specialized around that whole concept of managed analytic services. And the whole idea of that as organizations are very, very familiar with collecting data, entering data, bringing on new applications within their business to bring bring that data and have their people input data into everything about their business process. But what most companies struggle with is what are we doing with all of this data? And how is it actually driving informed insights and faster decision making for how we’re going to go to market? And so what what we really help organizations with is business leaders who are trying to figure out how to make sense of what they’ve been collecting over the year, can it be brought together, we are the easy button for being able to bring on an experienced data team that already has experienced setting up these end to end systems and how to analyze and pull interesting insights out of your data. That we bring all of that through a managed service that provides that ongoing support to help grow the internal skill sets, but also manage all of the data moving around between these disparate systems within companies.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 4:37

Let’s talk about an example. So we can kind of just get some clarity for people. Because you know, we all have data and we all want to have more insights and action. You help the media agency, um, talk about some of the things you did there. Yeah, so for a lot of agencies on the podcast, but we’ll be interested to hear what you did with his media agency.

Luke Komiskey 4:58

Yeah, yeah. Media Marketing Agency. These are definitely great examples of companies that have a lot of disparate data that’s sitting out in various systems. If you think about how the operations run of digital media that sits and things like Facebook, and LinkedIn, and Google ads, all the way to traditional media about how radio and TV spots are bought, or how a billboard is actually has any kind of advertising on it, all of that is data that sits in very different systems, either because the vendor is running running that system, or, or your team is having to devise in the end the real results and outcomes of that data. And for a media company, a big media marketing agencies, a big part of that is being able to share that story of when I spend $1, of marketing with with your organization that I get, hopefully more than $1 of value back from it. And so media marketing agencies, leverage us to piece together all of these disparate data sources, take all the plan data, all the actual spend all the impressions that are gained from it, and being able to tell a story of the marketing value that their clients are getting from their services. But even more specifically for leaders that are running their own agency is think about all the time that your team is having to spend stuck within Excel spreadsheets and Google Sheets trying to manually create this on a monthly, weekly ongoing basis. Imagine if you could automate that story and be able to share that almost real time with your customers. That’s where the value of our service comes.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 6:32

So a lot of times, and if you’re watching, if you’re listening to audio, there is a video piece and we’re looking at godatadrive.com. You can see, here’s their website, but the case study is one of them is a media company. I know you helped a lot of media companies, but they can actually use it as a way like from a sales perspective and a marketing perspective, because they may not know exactly, you know, they go we know we’re getting results, we know we’re getting a certain times whatever row ours or certain return on spam, but we don’t know exactly what that is. And you help them figure that out. That’s one example, I guess, of how have you how they they figure it out. And they use that in their marketing and sales?

Luke Komiskey 7:14

Yeah, so you know two different ways, right? You can either gain the efficiencies of not having to have a team manually pull all this data and piece together for weekly monthly presentations. There’s a time savings element of it.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 7:24

So they may use it with their current clients also, yeah, absolutely not just so at from a sales and marketing, hey, this is what we get. But maybe they have a monthly meeting with their clients. And they don’t want to have to pull all the data and you you basically do it, give them a nice presentation. And they’re off to the races. And they just focus on the client.

Luke Komiskey 7:45

Yeah, and it’s an incredibly self service that these teams can actually pull presentations at any given time without anyone from our side having to support that the data is constantly being flowing in that it removes all of that manual intervention of data that so many organizations kind of build entire teams around the copy and pasting of data. And I think the second piece that we’ve actually seen a lot more particularly over the last two years is this concept of data monetization. So organizations are recognizing that they’re sitting on a goldmine of insights of, you know, whatever their business model may be, but there’s value for their community, whether it’s vendors, partners, external customers, that you can even create value add services of, you know, let me provide interesting insights to you to make better decisions. And there’s new revenue streams within that type of data monetization that, you know, particularly media agencies and marketing agencies can absolutely take advantage of.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 8:40

So an example of that may be if someone agency serves like an E commerce niche or something like that, and they can then pull their data and maybe do a white paper of some sort of here’s what we have found the best. I’m making this up, but the best actual terms to advertise for if you’re an E commerce company, or something like that.

Luke Komiskey 9:04

Yep. Yeah. And that that both touches on something you could sell to an existing customer, or even use as a sales tool during new prospect conversations of look at the percent lift that we were able to give to this other customer. And you can experience that same thing, and see real time updates of that through our reporting offering.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 9:24

So you’ll you’ll also, it sounds like you’ll set up a platform for them that they can constantly use. So it’s not like they have to call you every time they need to pull report.

Luke Komiskey 9:34

Yeah, that’s that’s the beauty of what we provide is is this concept of self service analytics. So we are as you can think of us as like data Sherpas behind the scenes that are helping data move from point A to point B and providing that data cleansing and data transformation, the injecting a little bit of your business logic into how you you and your organization look at data. But at the end of the day, we aren’t we aren’t, position ourselves to be a report factory. We want to provide have unlimited access to the data that you have been collecting, but in a more digestible format, so that your your business users, your customers will never have to write a line of SQL to try to access their data. They can use click and drag tools to instantly build charts, dashboards, reports that they can they can self serve without having to necessarily scale up a bunch of headcount to support all of these new data capabilities.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 10:25

Yeah, um, I could see as a leader, as a team, how dashboards can be super powerful. What are some other use cases that people use? So that’s one where they can use it to, you know, present to their clients? What are some other use cases of how their people are using the data to create a dashboard or insights?

Luke Komiskey 10:45

Yeah, I mean, it. It’s a very, like dependent on each organization. And like the type of insights they’re looking at.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 10:52

Like, Are there any others from an agency perspective? How they’re using data?

Luke Komiskey 10:57

Yeah, yeah. So like outside of just externally reporting how advertising is creating the lift within the customer’s business? There’s also the internal analysis piece that often isn’t done as an agency that says, Are we making the are we making the best decision for our customers on how we’re allocating their spend, right? We think about just the media mix, and how they’re deciding on which channels to use, which markets to go into, there is a ton of data that is historically sitting out there about what has worked the seasonality of that the year over year performance of that, that unless you have somebody that is going into all of these individual systems and pulling multiple years of data, you’ll never be able to see those insights really easily. And so I think there’s a ton, especially for agencies to be able to look internally and say are, are we doing the best spin that we possibly can be? Are there ways that we can negotiate with whatever vendor to say we can we can achieve better? Just even internal efficiency by knowing what works and what doesn’t from a channel perspective?

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 12:03

So look, I could see how it would work in an agency. I know you also work with school districts. So how would a school district actually use this?

Luke Komiskey 12:13

Yeah. What I love about data is that it really transcends like any industry that everyone has data that I could go on and on about, you know, different different ways that organizations can take advantage of their data. But I personally found the school district use case incredibly interesting, because if you think about a school district, they’ve got in a typical district, they’ve got district staff, they’ve got individual schools that are like principals and school staff. And then if you think about the frontline employees, the frontline workers are the teachers that are day in and day out, educating the future of our country. And all of them have very different goals and what they’re trying to achieve like a district staff, a superintendent is making promises and presenting to the public about what are the outcomes, we’re going to drive, whether increased testing scores, you know, better just delivery of educational outcomes, there’s a lot of different ways that districts are having to measure them. And then if you go to the flipside of that with a teacher, you’ve got teachers that have already incredibly, you know, busy schedules, limited time. But imagine that right before a class is about to start, they’re able to go in and view insights about how this class of 2030 people that are about to enter this room are performing in math in reading and being able to easily see, are they showing up on time? Are they having disciplinary actions? Is there a trend? And how these like testing scores to figure out? Are there particular students that I can pay closer attention to? Or is there a kind of a broader way that I could approach this class differently? Because I’ve got real time insights that I can look at five minutes before class is about to start?

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[EO Minnesota] Harnessing the Power of Data To Drive Business Growth With Luke Komiskey

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

In this episode…

Resources mentioned in this episode:

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