About data mining:  Data mining used to be the realm of the super-large, super-rich companies. No more. Any business can benefit from analysis of their data. You might be surprised (or, maybe not!) at what you don’t know about your customers, your staff, your compensation program, etc. The standard functionality of Microsoft Access can provide you with a lot of one-time reports that tell you what you don’t know, or that support your intuition about what is going on in your business. Some of those one-time reports will inevitably end up on your list of required monthly reports, or even get promoted to your dashboard.

What it takes: Even still, many businesses have large databases that have never been mined! Perhaps because the database wasn’t correctly designed in the first place – making database inquiries difficult, if not impossible. Perhaps because analyses can be tricky – a good analysis provides a true summary of the underlying data. In business (as well as politics!), misleading summaries can be dangerous. To provide a true representation of the data, a formal education in mathematics and statistics and business are essential. If you work with Megalo, you can draw upon Melissa’s bachelor’s degree in math (UCLA), her masters degree in statistics (CU), her 30 years of experience as a business owner and her 5 years of experience teaching Finance classes at the Boulder SBDC. She loves a challenge, so call Megalo when you want The Real Numbers.

Sample #1: Here’s an example from the Megalo archives:

Let’s say you have a business with a fairly large sales force and your consultants are suggesting a new compensation program, do you want to implement the plan and THEN find out how it affects your sales force? Or, would you rather run a simulation on that new compensation plan, throwing in data from past years, to see the effect on each of your sales people? You can rest assured that each of your sales people will be running a simulation on their own numbers as soon as the new plan is announced, so you might want to be informed ahead of time. Plus, the information gleaned from such a study might well inspire changes to your new compensation plan.

Sample #2: Another simple, but very effective, example:

If you have a practice that is dependent on referrals, you might want to monitor the number of referrals coming in for each of your professional staff. As a business owner, it is easy to miss these trends, once you graduate to a position where you are no longer answering the phones yourself. Your database can easily mine that data for you:

What Megalo customers say about the results from data mining:

“You are a true asset to our business.”
“I got it! I love you!”

If you want to learn more about your business, call Megalo to start mining your data: 720-480-3682.