Member Profile: Plan Rocket Consulting

Meet SPACE’s big-business analytics software gurus

By SPACE staff

This series started because we realized we didn’t know that much about what the people working down the hall did. For some businesses, it’s obvious. (Like, “make and sell some great jerky.”) For others, not so much. Maybe you have the same experience at your office.

As we get to know the people around us, we’re hoping you can get to know them, too. With this week’s subjects, their business seems like the future of most business: running itself.

At that, Evan Ransome, of Plan Rocket Consulting — laughs a gut laugh. “Almost!” he says. “But people still have to make decisions.”

Ransome and his friend Aamer Patel joined forces to start a business helping companies use a particular business analytics tool, called Anaplan.

“This tool provides businesspeople with the information they need to make well-informed decisions,” Patel says.

Anaplan is a little like a mashup of Excel, Access, Wizard (a slick data viz tool), and collaboration tools like Basecamp or Slack. Usually only large companies can afford it — those with tens of millions in annual sales. But there are, in fact, a lot of large companies out there.

You use this instead of Excel (a “fancy calculator,” it’s been called) because “you can allow your employees to actually do their jobs,” Ransome says. Employees “can actually contribute to your company what they’re good at, and spend their time making decisions and growing the company — rather than spending all their time crunching numbers.”

Plan Rocket has eight employees, most of whom are headquartered at SPACE. They’re on the second floor in the colorful office near the kitchen, or you can reach them on Twitter at @planrocket.

“We’ve solved all kinds of problems that working in other ways just wouldn’t have solved,” Patel says. “With one client that’s a fast food restaurant … we told them, you better have four cooks at your Boston location next Thursday or else you’re gonna be swamped, line out the door.” And it was true.

They’ve also helped spot high potential sales in certain geographic areas, helping companies re-assign more salespeople to cover them. “We identify opportunities, bottlenecks and efficiencies,” Ransome says.

A side benefit is that computer programs like Anaplan tend to make far fewer mistakes than people would when making similar calculations. At billion-dollar companies, little human errors can eat up the profits of entire divisions, going unnoticed until it’s too late — or maybe it’s never noticed.

Another popular use of the software: “What-if scenarios,” Patel says. That is, knowing the consequences of some of your decisions before you make them. It seems like every businessperson’s dream, and serious number-crunching has started to make it a reality.

Plan Rocket’s clients are all over the industry map, Ransome says: health care and medical device manufacturing; hardware and software; those that provide information security and networking; a hedge fund; a cloud services company.

It seems like a rather simple thing for a startup to do: help businesses use a piece of software. But they aren’t bashful about it. The tool itself can get pretty complicated, they say.

And some of the most successful consulting and analytics firms got their start by just “helping people use Excel.” Maybe Anaplan — and Plan Rocket — is next.

Until next time, SPACE out.