Ep. 84: Jason Krantz - Data and Analytics | Driving Business Strategy

Contact Jason Krantz:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/jasonkrantz/


Strategy Titan:


www.strategytitan.com

https://www.linkedin.com/company/strategytitan/about/

"Data & Analytics in the Boardroom: Raising Your Digital
Quotient" Video Series:
https://www.strategytitan.com/blog/data-analytics-in-the-boardroom-raising-your-digital-quotient-video-series

Build out your “business and finance” centric data and
analytical skills with our practice dataset. Perfect for
accounting and finance pros looking to develop their data skills:
https://www.strategytitan.com/blog/titanized-real-world-dataset-to-develop-your-analytics-muscle



Podcast: https://anchor.fm/transformationnation


Additional Work: Using data and analytics to
make business decisions with confidence during times of
uncertainty:
https://www.forbes.com/sites/brentdykes/2020/04/29/why-your-business-must-double-down-on-data/#6e180f597a68



FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPTAdam: (00:05)
 Welcome back to Count Me In, IMA's podcast about all things
affecting the accounting and finance world. I'm your host, Adam
Larson. I'm here to bring you episode 84 of our series. Today's
feature presenter is Founder and CEO of Strategy Titan, Jason
Krantz. Strategy Titan is a strategic management data and
analytics advisory firm, and Jason is a business professional
with over 10 years of business analytics, data science, and
strategic leadership experience. In this episode, he shares his
perspective on data, analytics and strategy and explains how
these functions of the organization need to ultimately drive your
overall business strategy. Jason talks about the products that
have great opportunity to increase your firm's revenue by
connecting these strategies, and how aligning your businesses
strategies helps mitigate risk. Keep listening and will now head
over to a very insightful and analytical conversation.
 
 Mitch: (01:05)
 Alright, so Jason we just were having a brief conversation
before we started here and, you know, we were talking a lot about
the importance and the value of this conversation. So to start us
off, why is a data and analytics strategy so important for
innovation today?
 
 Jason: (01:21)
 Yeah, in my mind, really what it does is it gets down to
identifying opportunities. They're going to move the needle
strategically and financially ever. All of us have financial
goals, revenue, goals, growth goals, whatever it may be. I'll
just give a real example. I like to use examples to illustrate
these concepts, to move them from fuzzy to concrete. I used to
work for a company $2 billion company. We are an industry
consolidators. We acquired numerous companies. We had everybody
on different ERP platforms, something I'm sure a lot of people
can relate to. Each company really had a different behavior
profile on the way that they did things. So, me being in
analytics for practicing this company, one of my first jobs was
to consolidate all this information and start looking at it, look
for opportunities. Now we had pretty big, EBITDA growth goals. We
were tightly focused on EBITDA growth as, our strategic
objectives. And so as we're looking through this, we find out
that we have well over $10 million in uncollected freight. Now
this was freight that we're owed. You know, we just had not gone
out and collected it. And as we looked at it, started asking
questions saying, Hey, why is it that we do this? Like, Oh, well,
you know, it's in our contract that we can do this, but we
typically let it go. Or, you know, it's just, we we've done it
this way for so long. So every company was doing it a different
way, but the common theme was this freight recovery. So as we
looked at it, we're like, you know, we can actually make about
$14 million if we just collect the freight that we're owed. Not
only, let's not even account for freight increases for gas,
whatever it may be surcharges. And as we brought to some
management team, they're like, how could this be? And this is, we
got everybody aligned behind it, they said, this was a serious
opportunity. This is a process improvement opportunity. This is
real money that will impact the bottom line and help us meet our
objectives. Now, the reason I share that story is analytics by
itself didn't do anything. We didn't actually collect that money
or drive that force forward. But what it did is it served as a
tool to identify the opportunity that if we never went, I would
have gone through that process. We never would have identified
that opportunity. We would not have socialized it and gotten
everybody to see, wow, this is something...