A boutique BI practice
built for small businesses
We started Data Driven Intel because most BI shops either quote small business owners like they're a Fortune 500 — or sell them a dashboard without a data model. We do the whole stack, small-shop-sized and small-shop-priced.
Fifteen years working inside businesses across manufacturing, retail, finance, healthcare, hospitality, and community non-profits — ten of them building the data and software those teams actually run on. We know what a small business's month-end feels like because we've lived it.
Our founding thesis is simple: the visual layer is the last 10% of a great dashboard. The other 90% is discovery, modelling, DAX discipline, and pipeline hygiene. It's where we invest — and where our clients' competitors don't.
We're Microsoft-first because Power BI has become the default. But that's where we start, not where we insist. We'll tell you when a Google Sheet is fine for now, when Postgres is a better warehouse than Fabric, and when Fabric isn't worth the bill.
We believe in NDAs before we see your data, contracts before we see your invoice, and one weekly demo of real running code — not a slideware retrospective.
Everything above becomes concrete in our promises — what we do with your data and how we spend your time.
How we treat your data
- NDA-first, contract-second — before we see a byte
- GDPR / HIPAA / SOC 2 aware from day one
- Least-privilege access; audit trail on everything
- PII masked at the source, never in flight
Small-shop speed. Grown-up rigour.
We're not the cheapest option and we don't pretend to be. We're the option you call after a bigger firm quoted you six figures for a report you needed last week.
No offshoring, no handoffs
The person you meet is the person writing the measures. Every call, every commit, same hands.
Documentation that lasts
Deliverables ship with documentation sized to the engagement — often a metric tree, lineage diagram, or rollback plan.
Skin in the game
Fixed-fee options on every tier and a written performance target for every KPI on the dashboard.
Handover you can defend
Your internal team owns the workspace after we leave. That's the mandate, not the exception.
Consulting principles we actually apply
Data work fails in the same handful of ways every time: unclear scope, unowned metrics, and mystery data. Our operating principles exist to eliminate those failure modes before they compound.
Advice first, dashboards second
A dashboard shows numbers. Insight recommends a way forward. We treat the recommendation as the deliverable — the dashboard is the evidence.
Predict the future, then track the past
Dashboards serve two purposes: help diagnose recent problems, and alert you to problems coming. Predictive metrics come first, retrospective ones second.
Discovery is the work
Small and medium companies rarely have a warehouse, KPI definitions, or reporting automation. Half of a good dashboard project is data engineering and stakeholder education.
NDA before data
Our standard engagement starts with a mutual NDA — signed or unsigned — before we look at a byte. Bespoke MSAs and DPAs available for regulated clients.
Ask about their data anxieties
Location of customers, jurisdictions, PII captured, GDPR posture. We surface the questions clients are afraid to be asked so their compliance team can breathe.
Free follow-ups earn work later
Fifteen-minute answers for prior clients are free. That's how a boutique practice sustains a network — not by upselling every ticket.
“A dashboard is only worth building if it changes a decision. Everything else is wallpaper.”