What is Analytics Consulting? With John Ariansen | Alex The Analyst Show | Episode 9

Key Takeaways

hello i'm your host alex friedberg and this is the alex analyst show thank you so much for joining me today i am bringing on a very special guest it is john over at how to get an analytics job on youtube i am interviewing him on some really good topics and those topics include things like starting an analytics consulting company how he got clients how he networked his pricing we also talked about doing freelancing on fiverr and upwork and a little bit about the tools that he uses as you know an analytics professional doing consulting business as well as running his own business and so is a very good interview in my opinion and i hope you enjoy it without further ado let's get right into the interview i just want to kind of get an introduction of kind of who you are so why don't you share a little bit about yourself um and then we'll start going from there of course well first of all thank you for having me on so absolutely this is a great opportunity to kind of reach your audience and it sounds like they've got some questions about consulting so super excited to talk about that so a quick little rundown of who i am so my name is john david and i'm the founder of the consulting agency called silvertone analytics i also have nine courses published online and i also teach at high point university in greensboro college i teach excel at high point university and a case studies in business analytics at greensboro college which is kind of cool because i get to combine my students with my consulting clients and they get to work on actual real projects i think that pretty much sums it up awesome yeah and and you know your youtube channel is very good and you're always bringing on guests and i was a guest of yours that's true what was it like three four months ago it's one of the best performing videos what's that it's one of the best performing videos so the zero to 100 000 people love that topic right yeah i mean who doesn't love a good success story really um and that was um i had a lot of fun making that i had always planned to bring you on it's just our schedules are so different so super honored um to have you on here i'm gonna get started with the questions of um if that's all right absolutely um so the very first question um i wanna ask is you know how did you get into analytics you know was that always your plan or it just kind of happened um you know because i think a lot of people start in other careers and then somehow find their way into analytics um and so i'd love to hear a little bit more about about how you actually got into this field so i guess let me start this kind of topic or conversation around i think around 25 there was like an existential crisis that i had so i i started undergrad and i was kind of like in this daydream of like being really immature and i didn't work very hard and i wasn't very focused then i got out of undergrad and i worked and i sold insurance 100 commission door-to-door for three years and that just that was a come to jesus moment so to speak i was just like i am miserable i was living at home i was making hardly any money then i finally landed like my white whale of a client and then overnight they just went with another provider so that was man that was like six years ago and then what i did was i took three months off because i had some passive revenue coming in from the insurance i had sold already and i started doing some analysis and i found out that analytics analytics data you know data science all of that was just this hugely emerging space the future and and it just so happened that two blocks away from where i was living at the time uncg had just started an mba with the concentration analytics so then i applied got accepted and then i had two years to kind of kind of turn my whole life around so you kind of took a big leap forward or kind of a shot in the dark almost because it was a new program and you didn't really have an analytics background but you still went for the masters uh you still went for the masters even though you weren't sure if that was for you i guess well i knew that i needed to develop a skill and i probably could have done that much cheaper if i would have done kind of like the online learning route but that's it's kind of risky because you know you might find a course that is not very good you also don't have the mentorship or the community aspect that you do at the university setting right so i i would say the mba basically gave me the space to kind of collect myself and then the time and the energy to focus on on building a skill so that was kind of how i i turned that out and i would say the most valuable experience that i had during that mba was i had three internships two of which were flaming dumpster fires which i'm actually that those are the most probably the two most valuable experiences i had during my master's program because it gave me a very quick feedback so these were three month you know work projects that i realized i hate this i can't work this i don't like this person i don't like this company culture i don't like working for a big company so that gave me a lot of feedback to where that last semester i actually went with a much smaller company so i went i was interning at a 12 billion dollar company and then actually applied for a much smaller company and even this is kind of wild they were looking for someone who didn't have very much experience or skills basically i was at mba applying for like a sophomore or junior level position in undergrad right but what i did was i showed up with that to that interview saying hey look you need to do a line review i can implement tableau and we can scale this to your entire company so within that last three months i built out the analytics infrastructure for my first client so i turned that internship into my first client and this that was four years ago and i'm still managing that that system today that's awesome so you know i've talked about kind of a big company versus a small company based on your story are you saying you would recommend a smaller company to get started was was it more beneficial i think that i you have to it's probably really valuable to you because you have three kids you have a wife that just seems existentially just boring to me like i like i i want new novel things so like working as an analyst in one of these big companies you'd kind of be doing the same thing for a number of years i mean you might have some fires to put out here and there but like you're pretty set to where with this smaller company i was working directly with the president of the company and i got to define and carve out the work that i wanted to do so i basically had influence over the decision maker yeah no i totally get that um and i had a very similar experience and and i i completely agree with you i think you have a little bit more um a little bit more influence a little bit more say uh things and it's uh it can be definitely a good feeling and you learn a ton at small companies because uh they give you a lot more tasks and a lot more um uh a lot more leeway on the kind of work you do it's not as set and narrow it's kind of a little bit more broad so that is awesome um and you mentioned that you had a unit an mba it sounds like you had a very interesting experience with the internships um you know something that a lot of people ask me is you know what kind of degree should i get should i go get a master's degree do i need a master's degree in your experience would you say that your mba was extremely beneficial or you kind of wish you had gone a different route with your education um that's a really tough call because i feel like the classes i took on analytics did not really provide me any skills like i did not come out of those i think i took four or five sk like uh topics or classes on analytics or kind of data sciencey and it's taught by an academic who's far removed from the field and what they're teaching might be like 20 to 30 years outdated so like i i don't think that in terms of hard skills that really was a home run although that being said i did learn the business vernacular i learned about you know i mean the mba program we focused on marketing and technology and supply chain and all the various different so it was a good education and i went to uncg so it was um relatively cheap it was a 24 000 mba so i i don't have that name brand recognition of like a harvard or stanford but that being said if you're going the south consulting route you don't really need an mba i i don't think a client has ever asked me where i went to school or even if i had it they're just concerned can you do this or can you not right so my portfolio speaks volumes volumes volumes louder than any accolade that being said if you want to go the big company route i think it does matter yeah yeah i i i definitely um can understand that viewpoint i think the larger companies definitely look at the education um a little bit closer because they want people who kind of as have those proven smarts uh you know they have the education from the name brand school and so that's you know extremely interesting and and pulling that into your business you now own your own business your own consulting company i would love um if you would go a little bit more into that um you know you started it yourself you you run it um and and you bring in your own clients which just seems you know it's very different than a traditional what i would consider a traditional data analyst job but i know that there's a large uh demand maybe not as much demand but um there's a lot of people wanting to do what you're doing and they want to know how to get into that business um and and everything that pertains that so could you walk through a little bit about your consulting business kind of how you started it how you get clients and the kind of work that you do with your clients okay so the way that i started well i kind of gave you the highlight reel uh i turned my last internship into my first consulting client and i've been paid on retainers since then for the past four years so at least have a base level of income which it's not a lot and this could be a whole another topic too of i started as an intern and now i'm negotiating up from like 10 an hour so like going from 10 to where i charge 175 an hour now right for that specific client i do not charge nearly that rate it's hard to make that leap right um so yeah i started with that one client and for about two months i worked from my kitchen got super lonely and then i moved to a co-working space in downtown greensboro and i worked there probably for three to six months and what the benefit of working at one of these co-working space is that i was surrounded by entrepreneurs and i was also the only person that was kind of an analytics ex expert although at that time i was like not i didn't even know what etl was you know i was like very green but i had the sales skills to like kind of convince people um what happened after maybe three to six months of working there i ran into a guy who was a fractional cxo do you know what that means no so gary fly was a former business partner he's actually now one of my clients it's funny that relationship didn't pay out until like our partnership dissolved and then he took over the presidency of a pretty large company in greensboro now i'm consulting for them um so uh cxo is he's basically hired as a c-suite executive so either cmo ceo um see anything but cfo so he's not a finance guy so he'll come in if a company's struggling and basically you can kind of think of it like flipping a house like you buy a foreclosed house fix it up and then sell it so he would be kind of the person fixing up the company and then he would come out interesting okay so that one relationship opened up my network like an incredible amount and what actually happened was him he introduced me to ryan forrest who's one of my closest friends and he's actually like a we do a lot of work together he he runs this marketing agency called fungi marketing the three of us actually um rolled up an llp so limit liability partnership and for about two years we were kind of sourcing just that network and coming in and bringing clients so the number one way that i find clients is through referrals just through being known as the analytics expert in greensboro which i mean it's 350 000 people i think in greensboro so it's i'm kind of a big fish in a little pond right so that would be the number one way yeah you would say you'd say you kind of found a niche in your area exactly it's mostly networking it sounds like um i also got into public speaking so there was a non-profit before covet hit that was um they were doing these thursday gatherings so it's called venture cafe and you'd come in and talk about a specific topic and i and i would i went maybe i started going there every week just to kind of network but then i started getting into talking about analytics and different aspects and i would bring clients in that way and i also started getting got into kind of doing seminars as well so within my co-working space one of their revenue models that kind of experimented with and was having the experts that were there do like hour-long seminars on their area of expertise and it turns out that the cfo of a relatively large waste disposal company showed up to my seminar to learn tableau and then went home tried to implement some of the things i was like i don't have time for this i'm just going to hire him right so now i've worked with that client for probably a year year and a half now that's awesome so it really is i mean just kind of putting yourself out there going to events networking getting to know people and then you know it may not pay off immediately but it did pay off um i guess for because my question is because if i were to start doing this today if i were to you know say hey i'm going to start a competing company against you call it you know alex good luck or whatever it is it is the exact same business right and i'm trying to get you know i come to your area i'm trying to get your clients i would find it extremely hard to enter that market i couldn't imagine how i would enter that market without knowing people how would i go about meeting people like that i mean yours was a little bit different it was a different time you know you had that you you kind of put yourself out with with seminars and with all these things you know i'm a nobody nobody wants to hear alex talk they you know i might meet him on like linkedin or something is you know how would i go about meeting people to grow a business in consulting oh man that's a tough question especially right now yeah so like now there's like this new online conference thing which i think is a really strange concept um one way that you might actually want to try to approach this so you're thinking of it kind of like getting established in a local smaller market right i think that may not be the right approach okay um i think that so so ryan forest actually just mentioned he's the cfo or cmo of that company um that runs his own marketing agency he is now starting his own youtube channel talking about his area of expertise so i think that concept of teaching you got to figure out okay what's my niche so he's his thing is using google analytics to drive more sales so what he did was he kind of empathize with his client or his potential client that he might bring in through youtube kind of come up with a list run them through like a tubebuddy or some type of seo tool to figure out are people actually searching for this and then put the content out there so basically it's you you would get them teach them the basics then they'd realize oh this is much more complex than i wanted or thought it was i don't want to do this i'm just going to hire this person who's taught me these skills so i think that's one strategy to really get yourself established um because i i don't know if i have any good advice of like now that we're in lockdown like how do you organically meet people i don't know if that that you know maybe in a year and a half or whenever you know 2050 whenever this stops and it almost sounds to me like it almost sounds to me like instead of the traditional networking you're almost becoming somewhat of a teacher someone who people can trust and then when they come to you then you're like hey you know i have this i can work for you i can help you with this or just being through teaching them they might want you to work for them instead of the traditional going in person shaking hands um you know all that stuff that typically goes along with networking right it's like bringing it back to kind of the sales marketing thing it's the difference between cold calling and cold outreach like hey you've never met me but i want to charge 175 to fix your analytics here are you versus oh here i can help you i can help you with this one aspect right and then they come in and if they get value out of it you've kind of created some good will right and i mean i don't want to sound overly machiavellian but if you build up enough of that goodwill you can eventually eventually cash in on it right well you know i mean you have to make a living somehow no one's no one's uh sitting at home you know listening to this and being like man that guy's over here trying to make money i don't like it everyone you know we got to respect the grind that you know you are putting a lot of time in upfront time because you could be doing all these trainings and nobody could buy your services and you are just helping people and in the end you know sometimes that's all you get out of it and maybe later on down the road somebody signs up or wants your services so you know it's not always a guaranteed thing um and that's actually that is one aspect that i was kind of interested in because i have a paycheck i get a paycheck every two weeks right um and i have a budget based around that that paycheck it's very consistent and i know exactly what i'm gonna make right how are those paychecks different um you know how is the salary coming in different than when you have a traditional nine-to-five job oh it's extremely volatile but i will say this because like i think kind of you're talking about the paycheck but what i'm kind of hearing underneath the surface there is this concept of security so income security right so i would say that on the front end if you're if you're kind of at point one i want my next opportunity you could go the employee route and you have that guarantee but that being said you leave a lot of earning potential on the table you could go the consulting route which is very high risk on the front end but you can make a multiple more if you can get kind of that critical mass developed to where kind of what i what i tell people is it's kind of flip-flopped short-term i would say being an employee is a secure bet that being said you have one revenue source so if your job goes out if your business goes out of um out of work or it's like you if if it goes under that's gone to where where i'm at now i have probably six different revenues like pretty solid revenue sources so if i lose one of those clients which that actually happened with covet i lost two pretty solid consulting engagements that being said like i'm actually making more money now than i was before the lockdown because my online course sales have just skyr i've had 160 000 people take my courses so far this year wow so that has been a massive just i'd say multiplier there so you kind of get to a point where you have it's almost like being polyamorous too like you have multiple people who paid you money it's like being monogamous versus polyamorous right where like those relationships might have might come back to where like that cfo from that company had that project and then six months down the road they're gonna say oh well we actually could mine this data or do or visualize this so as the years go on you have a growing pool of people who who you've done good work for you've executed they trust you they've already spent money on you i think that's a pretty big one too so like just getting someone to already say yes it's easier to get them to say yes again right but it's you're kind of like building the stable of potential revenue sources so now it's funny because like i have i have more consulting work than i can realistically get to right now because i'm teaching two courses and running the podcast um which is it's interesting to see because i'm what i'm stressed about is that i i don't want to say no because i don't want to hurt that relationship because it might lead to even more work yeah and that's everything you said is just gold i mean i i try i try to think about that because you know i thought about it i'm like you know i'm a smart guy i could go into consulting i just i don't know where to go i don't know what to do but i could figure it out right but realistically i mean you and i are we're different because i have a family of three i have i have responses you know i have not now that you don't have responsibilities i have obligations to my family and i can't i don't really have the opportunity right now financially to take a risk especially during you know code and everything that's going on um and so you know to me consulting would be very scary and very scary for my family i think that that level of um unknown with that paycheck like you were saying that sense of security would be very big for me um you know i do you you know you don't have to talk about it but do you have a family do you have a girlfriend you have something that you know that you would kind of compare with my three kids um or you kind of like more on your own where you have the time to to do all the consulting and all these other revenue streams as you said i would say i'm aggressively single right now aggressively no now when you say aggressively single what does that mean i i gotta know um you know i was talking with my friend about uh this of like you know how you get into a new relationship you kind of have like this honeymoon phase yes i feel that way towards like my business right now which i don't know if that's healthy or weird but like now i've just monetized on youtube i just got a sponsorship deal and i'm like i've created this this life for myself right and it's like very fulfilling i feel like also the teaching is actually really meaningful because i i get to like actually impact young people's lives and like yeah for sure it's like ego fulfillment of like i'm the professor i'm smart listen to me i'm molding you but right i'm i'm in a really good place to where like i don't know if i have time or bandwidth for another like a like a serious committed relationship right to where like i mean i i do date casually but like i'm not looking currently for like you know i actually had to turn a girl down recently i met on bumble who was looking for like well i want to have kids soon or i want i want a commitment hey hey look i'm bringing in a lot of money right now say right right so that's that's where i'm at and i realized that well i'm 31 so like if um i may have kids a little bit later if i do decide to go down that route um which are pros and cons to that but you're right i am privileged in a certain aspect based on the past decisions i've made because like i was editing videos until like 10 p.m on saturday night you know like i i maybe should have a little bit better of a work-life balance but i feel like i'm just there's so much opportunity on the table i feel like i owe my past self like look you've sacrificed for four years now like barely holding on and now there's all this opportunity coming into your life you owe it to yourself to make sure that you capitalize on it absolutely absolutely i mean and i think that is a really good um a really good way to put it because uh you know i know what it's like to be flat broke and and it's hard for me to turn down things too um and so you know i could imagine you know once you start going down the path there will be things that you have to sacrifice in order to make a relationship kids et cetera work um and so you know i totally get that and it definitely sounds like if somebody wants to get into this field they really need to consider you know do they want to go if they want to do consulting do they have do they have family do they have responsibilities um you know do they have kids things like that before they start really diving into it because it is a large time commitment up front i'm sure okay i do want to caveat this though so if you already are working in so the traditional advice is that i should not have started my consulting agency essentially know nothing and having no explanation having three experiences as an intern like you shouldn't no that's and i i'm like lucky and that i'm hard-headed enough to not listen to people when they're telling me what to do which is also i'm unlucky because i don't listen when people tell me what to do sometimes i think that if you are maybe 10 years into your career as an analyst and you have a lot of people in your network who could be potential clients and you have a kid and you have a family and you i think this is the kicker though if you have capital if you have money to invest in building a website and building out a maybe higher marketing person building out a marketing campaign you the essentially what i put in over the past three to four years was sweat equity so i was yeah had zero income stability uh i mean i did actually go further into debt you know i don't think american express is the best creditor to take out but i i for that being said i've paid down like a massive chunk of it over the last few months um so it's paid off but if you have if you have some like money stashed away that you can invest you could approach this from a much i guess less all-in i basically what i did was i burned the bridges like i don't know what general that was but you know they got their army to the the other continent and they burned all their bridges so they had no option to go back so i just pushed forward and it was a huge gamble and it's i mean it's it's paid off like i'm i'm i'm i'm here now um you know i mean definitely like you know i could be like where you're at where i have you know a family and kids and stuff but i think that i'm pretty happy and i feel pretty fulfilled right now yeah um so i think it paid off but yeah i don't i don't want the audience to get the takeaway that you have to be single and you have to be like insanely driven to start consulting because i don't think that's true you can actually kind of split it too like you could start um actually i know somebody who works for a major bank that was one of the founding i guess architects of their analytics infrastructure he scaled back to working two days a week and consulting three so there are other paths i cannot tell you what that that's like because that's not like my lived personal experience i don't know viscerally like what that entails because i've it's funny that my my podcast has had to get another shot i've never had one yeah yeah no that's a i'm glad you said that because i was not trying to say you have to choose kids in a family right or consulting i wasn't trying to say that but i'm glad you said it because i could listening to myself play that back i may have alluded to that i was not trying to mean that but yeah that's that's a great point um and something you mentioned a little bit earlier was work-life balance uh you know my work-life balance is i don't have one because i'm i stay up till about one am every night doing work that i should have done during the day and i wake up at six o'clock to help with the kids i mean it's it's it's terrible but it's it's more family integrated with my work because of kovit and everything that's going on so it's a little bit different because but you're in a different situation you know you're mostly but business focused how does your work-life balance work with just the business side of things and everything that you do um i will say this i am very very unbalanced right now and i'm because i'm probably going on three or four weeks of working like seven seven days a week um i part of that is this is my it's it's funny because like right now i'm in a position where i don't have to work so my my passive revenue sources from um all my courses so have nine courses across linkedin linda and udemy i have i've had 160 000 people sign up so i don't really have to work right now right but what's weird is that now i'm working harder than ever because it's like well i had a sponsorship come out yeah i you know we just monetized let's how far can we like can i develop this you know well another thing i'm doing too is i pitch high point universities of building my own learning platform so i've already sold that course i'm going to be teaching this case studies and business analytics using this software that uh or platform that i have to develop myself i had to do that by january so i basically just i don't know you keep adding you keep adding things right so maybe six months from now i will have completely had a crash and i'm like you know what i'm in a mini retirement i'm not doing any work hopefully i'm not gonna burn out because it it almost feels like a car battery that's like charging itself to where like yeah there are things that kind of drain my battery but like we we're doing this really cool thing with uh the greensburg college students where we're actually using my data to in my money to come out with like ad campaigns so i i actually just i helped they they wrote a first iteration of a subscribe to our youtube channel script we studied the youtube analytics the audience tab to pick out who should we target here's the demographic and we built out like a data driven buyer persona so the students actually like got to create that um and i have spent so much time just like cutting that and editing that and now it just it was like christmas morning we hit the play button on the um google ads last night so today is the first day that i get to see the results right and we've already seen a huge uptick in awesome and subscribers so it's i mean that that's like i i literally felt like a little giddy kid being like oh what's what what did santa bring me today right right yeah awesome um i want to trans maybe not completely transition topics but um go to the kind of a separate question which is a lot of people don't want to go out there and just start their own business but they want to kind of dip their toe into the consulting into freelance work um and there are some websites that you can do that two of the most popular being fiverr and upwork i personally have zero experience with these um and i've told people that i'm like look that's not my thing i don't i don't know about this but i was hoping maybe you would since you're kind of more in that domain than i am do you have any experience with those websites and would you recommend them to people um yes i do actually have a video on my channel about my success case of i i have successfully used upwork to source a client so as a client that was out i'm in greensboro north carolina they're out in san francisco and they do some type of medical sales device so i essentially they i post i responded to their job posting and said here's my portfolio i can take this data and i can build out it was survey data and they basically wanted basically like a data app where i would pivot the data put it into a liquid scale and then we could filter on male female what what position were they in the hospital blah blah blah and they could use that to mine you know how many 150 survey responses to build out marketing copy so that that was maybe a year and a half ago i just had her reach out six months ago or i guess right before covet hit for another project so i would say absolutely upwork is a great way to find work and and i don't know if this is unfair or inconsiderate but they do have this new feature so when i first signed up anybody and everybody could post but now there's an option to toggle on us only or everyone in the entire world so i think what happened was back three or four years ago people from india or maybe some other country were just super underbiding everyone from the us and at first the people with looking to get their projects finished like oh we won but then there was like a there's time difference there's probably communication issues english the second language so now there's an option to just bid on or just accept applications from us only i don't know if your specific youtube demographic so if you guys sorry audience if you don't fall within that um it's a little bit tougher on upwork but if you do fall in the os definitely go check that out that's really interesting now was it very lucrative were you earning a lot of money would you know is that like full-time job money that you were talking about is it just like side hustle a little bit of money here and there oh yeah it was it was basically like just a consulting engagement so we agreed to a set price and i worked on it for like a week but i mean it was very lucrative in that week you know i mean i brought in a few thousand dollars off of just a little bit of work um but what you could do if you wanted to is you could like really focus um actually one of our podcast guests on the how to get english shot podcast i think he is like a superstar status on upwork and i think he's made over a hundred thousand dollars on it wow that's awesome and is that over the course of like a year two years three years um you know i i can't speak to the specifics on that this is like a conversation i had like a year ago when he joined the podcast um but he i know that i mean he's he's got like a he's got a whole agency with like subconscious or employees and they're doing a bunch of work so that might be a little bit different because his bandwidth like he can just say hey i found this new this new project you know susie go work on this and then he's just kind of the middle man but i know that if you can get enough projects and what's cool about it is there's the rating system so if you if you get a a project with someone and they leave a good review and a five-star rating that's going to help you get your next job right so it kind of comes back to that same concept of like starting your own consulting agency getting over that first critical mass or that first bump is the hardest part but then once you get there you actually have i think more security and higher income but it's like there's there's kind of that like no man's gap where you are like shh should i be doing this should i just take the safe route right and then because because i you know i took a really high risk kind of approaching my career the way i did i could have just i mean i guess worst case scenarios that i would have filed bankruptcy and my credit would have been ruined for five years worse i don't know if that's like a i don't know if that's like a rich person's mentality i don't know if i'm like donald trump here being like oh yeah bankruptcy fine that's perfectly normal everyone's doing it right like yeah like i'm all in okay the gamble didn't pay off yeah awesome um you know with all the work that you do you know it's i something that i'm really interested in is you know are you using the same tools that i'm using because i feel like the tools that i'm using are i'm using a lot of etl tools a lot of sql um you know i'm starting to get into cloud platforms um you know we use tableau power bi those kind of things those staples you know in the consulting era or arena what tools are you like primarily using um and could you i guess give a little bit about how you use those tools for your actual work okay so this is probably gonna surprise you because i am not very technically savvy like i i do not believe that you make you you make youtube you have youtube videos you create courses you have a podcast i mean look look at your setup by the way you're better than i am oh this setup i mean you're glowing i mean look at what i got going on here it's night and day i feel like you're much more technical savvy than i am no well i don't even know how to code in sql i might know how to copy and paste a couple things but yeah so like essentially what i do is i i am stronger on the sales side less so on the technical acumen side so if i do need to like bring in a data scientist i can subcontract that work so like for example um i i've got a new client proposal on the on my desk right now where the client is working with some crm so customer relationship management tool and we need to automate that so i'm just going to subcontract that out so i mean i can my strong suit is that i can close deals and then i can you know i actually had this conversation with my students yesterday about like we were talking about a case study and one of the ma one of the students is a math major and just took this to kind of like round out their their senior year um and he went like super into like the mathematics he was like we were looking at total sales and deal size across industry and he was like well we if we did this calculation blah blah blah blah and i was like look a ceo is not going to care what like about your math they're going to basically what i tell people if i'm being a little cutesy here is um i make picture books for very influential adults like this box is bigger than this box so we should do this i mean it's like and the thing is like it's um i'm watching this the show designated survivor and it's like i think i'm pretty good at the typical game yeah yeah you know like um he was he was like talking about this response and a press meeting or something and and the uh the head of press or whatever was like look you're going into your professor tone just give them very basic simple answers and then that that's how you handle that and then so there is a caveat to that in that if i'm telling a ceo or cmo like this is the recommendation i have or here's the analysis they're like well this doesn't look quite right then you go in and you show in the math or you go in and show them the data so i totally am not answering your questions the tools that i use are excellent tableau also power bi too okay okay so well you know what you said is super interesting though i mean it's more decision maker stuff um rather than the super technical getting in you know consulting you know it is a business you have to have that business side whereas i don't need to have that business side as much so i get much more into the technicals um rather than the business aspect that you have to do in order to be successful um so you mentioned excel tableau power bi so you're more on the visual the visual side of things yeah so when i first started at like the first six months after my mba i branded myself as a data visualization specialist sure then i realized that's too narrow and now i kind of brand myself as an analytics expert which is um a little little vague and a little questionable maybe i don't know how to code expert can mean a lot of things right yeah that i mean but um i think a lot of people are really interested in that because i think i would say a lot of people have the misconception that a data analyst does a lot of visualizations which which we do i'm not saying we don't but it's a lot heavier on the technical side of cleaning the data etl stuff to get the data in getting it set up for the visualizations and then visualizations are maybe 10 15 sometimes 20 of your job it sounds like yours is a lot more when you're actually doing technical stuff instead of the business side it's a lot heavier on the visualization side of things right exactly yeah so essentially what i do is i build interactive dashboards and so i'm working with companies 150 million or less so they're not they're not huge companies where there's kind of like legacy systems and there's like this whole nested like you know you had the original system and this was tacked on and this was and these don't communicate right you've got to have one of those architects yeah i don't have that it's like oh um we want to look at our google analytics data which is pretty much collected perfectly unless they didn't set up one of the tracking things right which you know i and that's definitely a critique i've had on my courses is that i don't have enough dirty data that i should i'm a little off base with data analysts to where i guess i kind of i kind of see myself as a business analyst but really what you could see me as a management consultant with a little bit of technical analytics acumen yeah i could totally see that because you know i work with the messiest data you've ever seen in your life and a lot of my job is cleaning that up and doing a lot of that work where you know you're getting clean data and i'm extremely jealous because that sounds like a dream come true um right but you get to use that data to make impactful business decisions for a company um yeah it really is i wouldn't say i would not say that what you're doing is like data analyst it definitely is analytics right but so you know there it's it's just a different path of the analytics you can go the more technical route or the little bit more business side of things right which you know you got to keep your options open maybe you want to do both and and find some niche in there uh that to really capitalize on but you know it's not just if i'm a data analyst i could go and do what you do you know yeah so i think that's like coming back to the do i regret my mba or not i did learn a lot about business from kind of the corporate jargon perspective although you could argue like this is like my third or fourth business like i i i know new business you know like like these these like huge companies like they don't understand youtube what's fascinating to me is that i have made my niche off the failures of tableau and power bi to market on youtube so the way that my channel is blown up is that two years ago tableau put out a new desktop specialist certification i simply made a review of that certification of my experience passing it and then that blew up got picked up by search algorithm the search algorithm and now i've made a bunch of videos on that and now i've capitalized on this kind of i don't know what you call that like digital real estate sure so now i'm making money off of explaining i've done the same concept with um power bi just came out with the exam da100 so i've done the same concept only this time i've executed a whole lot more effectively on it right you you've learned how to play the system a little bit better you're a little bit more prepared and so this time around you're doing a little bit better yeah i'm a little bit more effective at leaching there you go that's a good way to do it no i mean i it's wide open i don't think it's like unethical or predatory in any way it's just fascinating to me that these big companies have these bill like i don't know million dollar budgets and they're not putting content on on youtube although maybe it's just a shifting marketplace in that people on youtube want to hear from you know you and i who are this is my experience so real people i think i mean you know databricks and um tableau and some they do have their own youtube channels and i've watched their videos they're they're not um very personal they're very much um they're very much here's what a dashboard is and it's very boring i've watched them and i hated it i went and took a udemy course because i like hearing someone talk of like like a real person um and they kind of have that personal touch that's just that's just me um so uh another something else uh you know that you kind of touched on was you know courses and trainings and and all of these things that you know that you're able to capitalize and make and make money off of i would love to um hear a little bit of more about your trainings you know what you teach in them um as well as where do you think the best places to learn are especially for people who are just starting out you know is it udemy coursera x udacity there's just so many options i would say i think linkedin learning is probably if you're brand new because linkedin does two things well actually it does a lot of things so i've got five courses on linkedin and they actually flew they flew me out this is an awesome sorry maybe i've told you this so i'm sorry if i board you but the audience i'm interested i'm here uh they so i i there's a startup called madecraft that's from one of the former marketing i guess higher ups for linda because linda got bought by linkedin so they're kind of the same platform he started a startup boy that's redundant he founded a startup sure that um does content creation so i got flown out to santa barbara to record in their studio so those five courses and what was amazing to me is that my product manager or like my production manager had worked with like oprah winfrey and like some of these big name brand people and i was i was pretty shocked at the the like the quality of the content so like they're sitting down with you to scr script this out and i think what linkedin does which is i think the future of education is it's entertaining and it's educational and it's banned at the same time right there's also a secondary benefit that i think is hugely valuable is that when you pass one of the linkedin learning courses that badge goes on your page right and it's backed by linkedin right so i think that it hits like not only are you learning skills but you're also broadcasting right absolutely those are the bane of my existence i got to be honest though because i've taken like i've taken some of these and i'm like i know this skill i use this in my job why can't i pass this course why can't i pass this badge uh and and that's just my personal experience wait what do you what do you mean so i think we're talking about two different things so when you just like watch the lectures right they give you a badge there's no see see we're talking about something different because there there are skill badges that you can go on your profile go to the bottom you have like i i can advertise that i know t sql and then i can go and i can take like this mini test and then it gives me a badge on my profile as well oh so maybe yeah we're talking about two different things i haven't done any of them but yeah i would say that from like an economic signaling theory perspective though those tests signal much stronger than just oh well you could have just like hit play and then gone off to the kitchen and cooked and then oh i'm done with my linkedin learning time to put it on but i i do think like the way that i've structured my greensboro college case studies and business analytics course um this month i think that these badges are kind of a good way to fill the gaps so i have two courses on power bi and then also an analytics introduction so within the first month they took those got those badges then what we're doing is we're also having a student practicum and then a tableau portfolio so you can show that you actually know how to use tableau you've applied it to a real use case tab uh power bi doesn't really have a great public server or a public way to broadcast what you've done or build out like free dashboards that's where i think those badges can kind of show that oh well you know data visualization and you know it across two different platforms wow that's awesome you know for everyone watching um i'm gonna put the links to his courses and his channel and everything in the description so everything that he's talking about that's gonna be down below if you want to check that out i personally have not used a ton of linkedin learning i use mostly udemy and coursero i have so many people ask me what do i think of linkedin learning and i'm like like to be honest i just don't have much experience in it so for those people who are curious you know check out his videos because i'm sure you know they're going to be really good and i had no idea that they flew you out to make those videos how do i get on this train where do i go where do i sign up because i'm trying to fly out somewhere so uh i think what you should probably get in the course creation game i got it i have to i need to yeah we talked about this like six months to a year ago we have and i i don't see any results i'm saying that with love as your friend and i'm holding you accountable give me give me one more year and then i'll get that okay sounds very suspiciously similar to what i heard a year ago i'll say that next year too but uh i mean honestly though linkedin learning is a really interesting platform i do recommend people just check it out because that is where i am inexperienced in and i am always telling people if i don't know it go check it out yourself um because it might be perfect for you um is there any other skills that you find that linkedin learning is really good at because so far i've heard mostly tableau power bi was there anything else data analytics related that you thought was good on that platform as well well i know they have like a whole data science library interesting i can't speak to actually i can speak to one of um my podcast guest michael gallarnock is a fantastic data scientist like he well he's also got a blog that's getting like 150 000 views a month and he's getting more offers for consulting work than he could ever take on but i know that um he recorded through madecraft and has published up there he also teaches online at stanford so so i