Data-Driven Work Cultures: Brad Wells of BryteBox Consulting On How To Effectively Leverage Data To Take Your Company To The Next Level

An Interview With Pierre Brunelle

Data-based Decision Making is the Way of Life: Every initiative should be ideated, planned, executed and reviewed as if it’s an experiment with the goal of improving based on data. Create a culture that expects to examine data, not as success or failure, but as progress towards improving the result.

As part of our series about “How To Effectively Leverage Data To Take Your Company To The Next Level”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Brad Wells BryteBox Consulting.

From a young age, Brad Wells has always had an entrepreneurial spirit. Picking up a knack for problem solving and foresight into viable opportunities, his interest in business began as a child while reading his favorite book, Better Than A Lemonade Stand: Small Business Ideas for Kids. His first taste of entrepreneurial success occurred as a teenager, manufacturing and selling surfboards in his parent’s garage.

With a background in both corporate business and fast growing start-ups in his native New York and later in Miami, Brad is a highly adaptable manager with an exceptional aptitude for identifying and capitalizing on opportunities.

He excels at project management, planning and executing marketing strategy, creating partnerships and business development that have helped grow scalable businesses by recognizing areas of potential growth and gaining buy-in by those who can help. A disciplined problem solver, Brad uses data analysis to drive decision making. He has excellent communication and interpersonal skills, a highly collaborative approach and the ability to work in a fast-paced environment.

His experience in successful business development led him to start Alpha Current, a consulting firm, growing a steady client list. Soon after, a partnership with Bryte-Box began, building a successful synergetic client-to-consultation network between both firms.

An avid traveler and surfer, Brad has developed a pragmatic global viewpoint through extensive world travel and has united his passions through various community building projects. Brad has a Bachelor’s of Business Administration from the University of Miami with a Major in Entrepreneurship. He earned his MBA from the University of Miami, School of Business in December 2012.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive in, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you tell us a bit about your ‘backstory’ and how you got started?

I grew up on Long Island New York surrounded by a big, loving family. I was encouraged and supported in all that I set out to do. From a very early age, I was given the opportunity to build and create, whether it be woodworking in my grandfather’s basement or setting up a lemonade stand in my front yard, or starting a band in the basement. Later, as I chose a path in my academic career, the choice to major in entrepreneurship came very naturally. My father owned his own business and so the idea that you could build a company out of nothing wasn’t foreign to me. In fact, it felt more normal to go out on my own, than to work in another person‘s organization. During my university years, I split my time between internships, working in a deli, and starting a surfboard manufacturing business in my parent’s garage with my brother. Upon graduation, I immediately set out to earn my real estate license and started a real estate practice, eventually convincing my mom to join me. Sometime later, despite our success, I decided it would be a good idea to try out working in the corporate world. Lo and behold, a few months later a friend called and asked me to join a startup and that’s been my profession ever since! I’ve been involved with numerous startups, volunteered for responsibilities beyond my experience, raised money, managed people, brought products to market and scaled businesses. Looking back, it all seems so logical and like such a smooth path. But, the reality was a lot more tenuous than meets the eye. I guess the reality is that I always had a vision for what I could achieve and had a Northstar to guide me but the path to get there wasn’t always easy, wasn’t always obvious, and sometimes it was downright miserable. But here I am with a successful business, a track record of helping people, and I’m still pushing further down that path, still following that North Star.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lessons or ‘take aways’ you learned from that?

During my time at one start up, early in my career, my colleague and I were doing research. Suddenly, I stumbled across another venture that had our exact same business model, exact same value proposition, and they had beaten us to the market. This came as a devastating blow, as we all believed that we were the first! After the initial shock, we realized that it’s nearly impossible to have a completely new and unique idea. And, that’s ok. To everyone’s Coca-Cola there’s going to be a Pepsi Cola. So, with this in mind we set out to do exactly what we’ve been doing, but with the knowledge and learnings we were able to glean from another firm that had set out to do it before us. Essentially, we were able to avoid their mistakes and move faster and more efficiently to a product/market fit that made the most sense. What I learned from this is that ideas are great but the real value comes in the execution.

Is there a particular book, podcast, or film that made a significant impact on you? Can you share a story or explain why it resonated with you so much?

I’ve been very fortunate to have mentors provide support at critical stages of my development as a professional. One of those pivotal moments occurred at the beginning of a job interview. The owner of a digital marketing agency, Andrew Hazen, sat me down and abruptly told me I wasn’t getting the job that I applied for. No interview questions, no chit chat- just nope that’s not the job for you. But, what he did after that, was what was so surprising and impactful. He asked me to return the next day to talk to him about an entrepreneurial venture that he wanted me to lead. During that conversation, he expressed to me his beliefs on how a business could be started and grown. He explained how he had done the exact same thing with his business, and clearly, it had worked because this was a very successful agency. At the crux of this advice was a book called the E-myth. This book sets out to describe how to create a business that works for you using systems and processes. It stressed the idea of delegating work (not abdicating it) so that your team is empowered and your outcome is consistent. I say this is a pivotal moment because It shaped the way I thought about how to grow a business and how to manage people. Create a recipe for your business and give people everything they need to follow that recipe.

Are you working on any new, exciting projects now? How do you think that might help people?

Right now, I’m working towards scaling BryteBox. One of the most important projects is creating replicable work processes (the recipe) that our team can follow to deliver consistent results to our clients. I believe that if we can create a system that translates our companies intellectual property and know-how into a recipe that can be followed by our staff, we will create the opportunity to help more clients and hire more staff. In the end, we’re just people helping people. I’m very motivated to provide opportunities for our team to grow professionally and personally, and for businesses to achieve their missions. This project is our best chance to achieve both of those goals.

Thank you for all that. Let’s now turn to the main focus of our discussion about empowering organizations to be more “data-driven.” My work centers on the value of data visualization and data collaboration at all levels of an organization, so I’m particularly passionate about this topic. For the benefit of our readers, can you help explain what exactly it means to be data-driven? On a practical level, what does it look like to use data to make decisions?

My first year at the University of Miami, I was enrolled in the school of arts and sciences to study atmospheric science. During this time, we were taught the basics, including the scientific method. Later, as I entered the business school, a similar concept was taught in my entrepreneurship class but it had a different name. They called it the iterative process.

At the core of both of these is the idea that you set out to prove or disprove an idea using data gained from experience and then use the information you gain to retest and improve the result.

So to be data driven, means that you create a hypothesis and then determine what information will allow you to prove or disprove the hypothesis. The entire business experiment needs to be set up in advance with the ability to collect information that will allow you to make this determination later. Essentially, data collection is built into how you go about operating so that when the time comes to iterate/improve you have concrete information upon which you can rely. Collecting data and analysis isn’t an afterthought, it is integral to the process.

We’d love to hear about your experiences using data to drive decisions. In your experience, how has data analytics and data collaboration helped improve operations, processes, and customer experiences? We’d love to hear some stories if possible.

Data is super important to improve operations, processes and customer experiences. This importance is heightened in situations that are highly emotionally charged. It’s very difficult for the human mind to separate facts from feelings when under stress. Relying on feelings alone can often create the situation when you are trying to solve the wrong problem. Using data, you can identify more clearly the root cause of what’s wrong and identify solutions that will be effective in solving what’s really wrong.

For example, as a manager, you’re often faced with staff members that deliver subpar work products. In a situation like this, it’s easy to point out the mistakes and try to remedy each of them. The team member admits fault, and the manager corrects the mistakes.

However, by looking at the staff members’ work habits via data (in their time logs), a different problem to solve may become evident. Maybe they are working in very short bursts that don’t allow deep concentration. Or, conversely, they could be logging long hours that cause a lack of focus. The data tells the real story!

Has the shift towards becoming more data-driven been challenging for some teams or organizations from your vantage point? What are the challenges? How can organizations solve these challenges?

It will always be challenging to implement data driven decision making. It’s part of being human. We like to believe that our own intuition is sufficient to get things right. That’s a big misstep, however. Our goal as an organization is to empower our team to ask for data and create their own analysis. We stress the importance of improving over being “right.”

Ok. Thank you. Here is the primary question of our discussion. Based on your experience and success, what are “Five Ways a Company Can Effectively Leverage Data to Take It To The Next Level”? Please share a story or an example for each.

1. Data-based Decision Making is the Way of Life: Every initiative should be ideated, planned, executed and reviewed as if it’s an experiment with the goal of improving based on data. Create a culture that expects to examine data, not as success or failure, but as progress towards improving the result.
2. Make Data Collection Part of the Plan, not an Afterthought: Every initiative should include a plan for collecting data as part of executing. We may not know what results we will receive, but we should create a method for collecting and analyzing data before we set out to do anything.
3. Tell Me a Story: Great narratives of the data create decision making and action. What happened and why? What should happen next?
4. A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words: Spreadsheets aren’t the best way to communicate something. Shocking, I know. Use visuals to make it easy to understand what the data is holding.
5. See the Forest Through the Trees: Context for the data puts things into perspective. A narrow focus can obscure reality, which is why a broader view of what’s occurred is critical.

The name of this series is “Data-Driven Work Cultures”. Changing a culture is hard. What would you suggest is needed to change a work culture to become more Data Driven?

Culture is all about values and principles. So, it all boils down to leadership’s ability to successfully impart the importance of all stakeholders’ contributions to being data-driven. From the CEO to the newest hire, everyone needs to be pulling in the same direction. Data isn’t something that can be abdicated to one individual or department. It needs to be baked-in from the beginning to end, top to bottom.

The future of work has recently become very fluid. Based on your experience, how do you think the needs for data will evolve and change over the next five years?

As technology evolves, it will be cheaper and easier to analyze vast amounts of data. And, we’ll collect incredible amounts of it. The challenge will be to prioritize goals for data collection, analysis and reporting. We’ll be able to do vast amounts of it- but what is actually necessary to drive the business forward?

Does your organization have any exciting goals for the near future? What challenges will you need to tackle to reach them? How do you think data analytics can best help you to achieve these goals?

Our goal is to better understand and anticipate our client’s needs. If we can do this, we can better ensure that our capabilities are aligned with their needs. Data about our client needs is being captured, along with how our team is able to meet the demand. Our next step is to use our knowledge to create a strategy that meets client needs and our goals for growth.

How can our readers further follow your work?

Website: www.bryte-box.com

Instagram: @brytebox

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/brytebox-consulting/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BryteBox/